From Mickey 17 and M3gan 2.0 to a musical about the end of the world, this was an eclectic year for science-fiction films. Some ideas are so compelling, so intuitive, one would sooner recycle them than take them apart to explore. So, in 1950, Isaac Asimov fixed up some puzzle stories into a fiendish, Agatha Christie-in-space sci-fi novel, I, Robot, while in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey set a high bar for films about (or at least containing) artificial intelligence. There, ideas-wise, the story of robots in cinema pretty much starts to repeat on an endless loop. This year, The Electric State spun a yarn about a robot rebellion, M3gan 2.0 showed you can't keep a good killerbot down and Companion took the femmebot's point of view to give us a decent adult-themed Asimov pastiche. All three toyed with the usual notions around free will and indulged in handwringing about when to treat a machine like a person.

From Claire North's new novel to a 10th anniversary edition of a brilliant Adrian Tchaikovsky book, there's lots to watch out for in November's science fiction Claire North's Slow Gods follows a deep-space pilot We'll need to get our skates on if we're to keep up with all the new science fiction published in November. And I am creeped out by the idea at the heart of Grace Walker's . Everything feels frightening this month - perhaps the sci-fi world is still in Halloween mode. It sounds poignant, moving and beautiful, and without any supernatural scares. Emily H. Wilson is wild for this sci-fi novel: I've not heard our sci-fi columnist recommend a book so wholeheartedly in all the time she's written for us.

Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time was (largely) a hit with the New Scientist Book Club One of the wonderful things about science fiction is the broadness of its church, and this was really brought home to me by our two most recent reads. The New Scientist Book Club moved from the hard science fiction spacefaring of Larry Niven's classic Ringworld in May to the near-future-set time travel of Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time for our June read. The former takes its science seriously, diving into the maths and physics of its set-up with gusto; the latter – not so much. Culture editor Alison Flood rounds up the New Scientist Book Club's thoughts on our latest read, the science fiction classic Ringworld by Larry Niven The story of an unnamed civil servant who is given the job of supporting an "expat" from history – Commander Graham Gore, a (real) Victorian polar explorer from 1847 – The Ministry of Time is many things in one: a thriller, a romance, a piece of climate fiction (apparently), a science fiction novel about time. I couldn't put it down and loved all of it – apart, perhaps, from the ending.

A few months before COVID shut the world down in 2020, I published a book called The Future of Another Timeline. Set in 2022, it's about a group of time travelers who live in an alternate United States where abortion was never legalized. Working in secret, they travel 130 years back to the 19th century to foment protests against the anti-abortion crusader Anthony Comstock. Their goal is to change the course of history. When they return to 2022, abortion is legal in a few states, though it remains illegal in the majority of them.

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. In "His Master's Voice," a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space. They manage to translate a fragment of the signal's information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project's senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. The intention behind the message remains elusive, but why would an advanced life-form have broadcast instructions that could be so dangerous? Late one night, a philosopher on the team named Saul Rappaport, who emigrated from Europe in the last year of the Second World War, tells the mathematician about a time--"the year was 1942, I think"--when he nearly died in a mass execution.

Do you find artificial intelligence and its capabilities fascinating? Then you'll want to check out these sci-fi novels with stories about robots and AI bots. The novels in this list include anti-hero tales about robot uprising and stories about AI bots co-existing with humans and falling in love with them too. Sci-fi AI novels offer an innovative and imaginative insight into this disruptive technology that we see around in our day-to-day lives. Every recommendation in this list is unique, which raises many questions in curious minds.

Partly cloudy early followed by scattered thunderstorms this afternoon. Partly to mostly cloudy skies with scattered thunderstorms during the evening.

You already get a Star Wars movie every year. Star Trek is coming at you from at least two directions. A good chunk of the Marvel movies are basically space opera. Bigscreen fascination with science fiction and fantasy is nothing new--but now you can add the many flavors of TV network, from legacy broadcast to basic cable to streamers. Forget comic books; somehow, SF/F novels have become Hollywood's hottest IP.