Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages--with sixteenth-century folktales about a golem made of clay and summoned to life, through ritual incantation, to defend Prague's Jewish community --its modern form was set in motion by a play called "R.U.R.," by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Its 1921 première, also in Prague, set the agenda for the next century, and it has remained an apparently ironclad convention that all critical writing about the genre begin there. The drama gave us the word "robot," a derivative of an Old Slavic root related to "serfdom," and its narrative, of a rebellion among artificial workers, provided a metaphorical template--stories about robots are stories about labor and freedom. The word "robot" is still with us, and the underlying metaphor has a generous flexibility, encompassing two related but distinct ideas. One is that the first thing we would obviously do with artificial people is enslave them--as in, say, "Westworld."

Humanity has migrated to subaquatic domes to escape the lethal consequences of a vastly deteriorated ozone layer. Tremendous advances in solar power have made this shift possible, and an android underclass provides maintenance labor. Sentient but without rights, they are manufactured with organs that can be harvested by humans. Gradually, Momo grows enlightened to the oppression of androids, connecting the dots between a surgery she had as a child and the disappearance of her childhood best friend. There's an awful lot going on in this short work: new religions form in this future world, the Pacific Ocean territories are divided between countries like the United States and corporations like Toyota, and then there are the peculiar skin treatments at Momo's salon.

At the 2018 Worldcon, fantasy author N.K. Jemisin became the first person to ever win three consecutive Hugo awards for Best Novel. Given that level of success, science fiction editor John Joseph Adams felt she'd be the perfect guest editor for the latest edition of his anthology series The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. "Given that she's clearly the face of the genre at the moment, I thought it would be wonderful to have her as guest editor," Adams says in Episode 342 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "And thankfully she said yes." Caroline M. Yoachim, whose short story "Carnival Nine" appears in the book, says the 20 stories selected by Jemisin reflect the growing diversity of the fantasy and science fiction field. "One of the things I loved about the book was just the sheer variety of it," Yoachim says.

The Hugo Awards, widely considered the most prestigious science fiction and fantasy prizes, were announced Friday, with female authors dominating and N.K. Jemisin winning the award for novel for the second year in a row. Jemisin, who became the first black author to win the Hugo's novel award last year (for "The Fifth Season"), won again with the book's sequel, "The Obelisk Gate." The third and final book in Jemisin's trilogy, "The Stone Sky," will be released Tuesday. The awards were announced at a ceremony at Worldcon 75, a science fiction festival held this year in Helsinki, Finland. Female authors also took home the awards for novella ("Every Heart a Doorway" by Seanan McGuire), novelette ("The Tomato Thief" by Ursula Vernon) and short story ("Seasons of Glass and Iron" by Amal El-Mohtar).

If your resolution for the coming year is to spend less time on your commute scrolling through Twitter or playing "Puzzler on the Roof," there's no shortage of fantastic and fantastical new books you can use to take a break from mindless screen time. Curating this year's new arrivals was tough, but we managed to narrow the list down to our top-ten favorites. Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich There's a certain poetic intrigue to the story of Henry Molaison, the most important neuroscience subject of the 20th-century, as told through the eyes of science writer Luke Dittrich. In the 1950s, it was Dittrich's grandfather, William Scoville, who tried to cure Molaison of his epileptic seizures by removing signifiant portions of his brain. Instead, the lobotomy turned Molaison into a profound amnesiac, living the rest of his life in a series of 30-second increments.

The winners of the Hugo Awards were announced at a gala ceremony in Kansas City, Mo., on Saturday, marking a good night for women and authors of color, and a very bad one for the "Puppies." Writers N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, both of whom are African American women, won the novel and novella awards, respectively. It was a defeat for the groups the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, who for two years have semi-successfully gamed the nominations for the Hugos -- which along with the Nebula Awards are generally considered the preeminent awards in science fiction and fantasy -- in an attempt to advance their anti-diversity agendas. Jemisin, who won for her novel "The Fifth Season," referenced the Puppies in her acceptance speech, io9 reports. "Only a small number of ideologues have attempted to game the Hugo Awards," Jemisin said.

They sound cute, but for the second year in a row, politically motivated groups calling themselves the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies have more or less successfully gamed the Hugo Award nominations, some of the most prestigious prizes in science fiction and fantasy. The Chuck Tingle book is one of their recommendations. The puppies oppose diversity initiatives and support lists that are dominated by white men. Their targets, which they call SJW for "social justice warriors," are women, people of color, LGBT writers, editors and artists and the people who support them, including L.A. Times Critic at Large John Scalzi. Rabid Puppies leader Vox Day, a self-described libertarian, has criticized best-selling science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin, who is black, as an "ignorant half-savage," writing, "Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males."