Science fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin is honoured with a new collection out this month, and sci-fi fans can also look forward to fiction from astronaut Chris Hadfield and award-winning authors Ken Liu and Mary Robinette Kowal Like many of you, no doubt, Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favourite sci-fi writers. So I am really excited about a collection out this month that brings together the maps she would draw when starting a story, and also celebrates her brilliant and wise writing. Not least because we've just read with the New Scientist Book Club: do come and join us and share your thoughts on this classic novel with fellow fans! The sci-fi out this month looks forward as well as back, though. Ken Liu brings us a thriller set in the near future, and I'm keen to read Megha Majumdar's tale of a flooded Kolkata and a desperate mother.

In Mason Coile's Exiles, a human crew arrive on Mars There are some sci-fi heavy hitters with new novels out this month, from Cixin Liu and Stephen Baxter to John Scalzi. I'm keen to check out Ian McEwan's venture to a flooded version of 2119 – a drowned-world trope also taken up by Yume Kitasei in the intriguing-sounding Saltcrop. The late Mason Coile's tale of disaster in a new Martian colony, Exiles, is also tempting me, as is more time travelling noir from the excellent Nicholas Binge. Come read along with us and see how it compares to the best of today's science fiction. The literary writer turns to science fiction – and not for the first time (who read 2010's Solar?).

The Book Club gives their verdict on Larry Niven's Ringworld It was quite an experience, moving from the technicolour magical realism of Michel Nieva's wild dystopia, Dengue Boy, to Larry Niven's slice of classic science fiction, Ringworld, first published in 1970 and very much redolent of the sci-fi writing of that era. I was a teenager when I last read Ringworld, and a hugely uncritical sort of teenager at that, so I was keen to return to a novel I remembered fondly and see how it stood up to the test of time – and my somewhat more critical eye. The first thing to say is that many of the things I loved about Ringworld were very much still there. This is, for me, a novel that inspires awe – with the vastness of its imagination, the size of its megastructures, the distance it travels in space. I was reminded of that awe early on, when our protagonist Louis Wu (more on him later) recalls standing at the edge of Mount Lookitthat on a distant planet.

Is your favourite sci-fi novel included here, or have we forgotten it? Almost exactly a year ago, I asked our team of expert science writers here at New Scientist to name their favourite science fiction novels. Personal tastes meant we ended up with a wonderfully eclectic list, ranging from classics by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler to titles I'd not previously read (Jon Bois's 17776 was a particularly wild suggestion, from our US editor Chelsea Whyte – but it's well worth your time). We New Scientist staffers tend to be sci-fi nerds, and we realised we hadn't quite got all the greats yet. So here, for your reading pleasure, is our second take on our favourite sci-fi novels of all time, otherwise known as the ones we forgot. Again, we're not claiming this is a definitive list. It's just our top sci-fi reads, in no particular order, and we hope you'll discover some new favourites of your own in this line-up. We asked New Scientist staff to pick their favourite science fiction books. Here are the results, ranging from 19th-century classics to modern day offerings, and from Octavia E. Butler to Iain M. Banks And if we still haven't got them all, then come and tell us about it on Facebook.

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 novel The Dispossessed depicts a society with no laws or government, an experiment in "nonviolent anarchism." Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was impressed by the book's thoughtful exploration of politics and economics. "After reading The Dispossessed, I was just blown away," Kressel says in Episode 460 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It was just such an intellectual book. It's so philosophical, and it was so different from a lot of the science fiction I had read before that. It made me want to read more of Le Guin's work."

I never met Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight, in Portland, Oregon, her home for many years. And yet we became good friends during the last two months of her life, entirely by way of e-mail. I inaugurated the correspondence on November 21, 2017, and she replied on November 24th. One of the things I like least about being very old is the unreliability of my energy. Working at poetry or a story is, always has been, the job I want to be doing, the work that keeps me steady and content.

In his recently published book "Astounding," the author Alec Nevala-Lee brings American science fiction's Golden Age back into focus by following four key figures: John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard -- and Isaac Asimov, who officially turned 100 today (his exact birth date was unknown). Nevala-Lee's warts-and-all portrait paints Asimov -- known to his fans as the Good Doctor -- far more sympathetically than the genre's other founding fathers. But Nevala-Lee is clear about another aspect of Asimov's story: He was someone who unapologetically groped women. As recounted in "Astounding," Judith Merrill said Asimov was known in his younger days as "the man with a hundred hands." Harlan Ellison wrote, "Whenever we walked up the stairs with a young woman, I made sure to walk behind her so Isaac wouldn't grab her tush."

Vandana Singh knows the universe is strange--she's a physics professor. She's also a science fiction author who uses the knowledge gleaned from her day job to write stories as bizarre as the universe itself. "I have a one-line ad for a modern physics course I teach which is that'The universe is much more like a hippie's pipe dream than it is like an accountant's ledger,'" Singh says in Episode 299 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "And that's really true, I think. Fourteen of her stories are collected in the new book Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, including "Peripeteia," in which a young woman becomes convinced that the universe is a constantly-shifting ad hoc illusion created by aliens. "She's thinking about this idea that perhaps the world is not finished, the universe is not finished," Singh says. "So the more you observe, and the more consistent your theory is, the more reality will mold or mutate to be that way.

Laura Miller, Jacob Brogan, and Charlie Jane Anders discuss Ursula K. Le Guin's classic science-fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness, about an emissary to an alien world where ideas about gender and sexuality are challenged by their way of life.

Given her incredible skill at narrative economy, Ursula K. Le Guin could probably do a much better job of summing up her own achievements as a writer than I could. Then again, Le Guin could do most things better than most writers. An undisputed master of science fiction and fantasy, she also successfully dabbled in alternative history, metafictional gambits, and even straightforward realism. Her essays reveal an astute and acerbic commentator on our world, whether writing about adopting a cat or the rapaciousness of capitalism. The galaxy of Le Guin's fiction is vast, filled with habitable worlds in which any reader could get lost.