In The End of the World As We Know It, other writers are telling stories set in the post-apocalyptic world of Stephen King's The Stand One of my most anticipated books of the year is out this month: a collection of short stories set in the post-apocalyptic devastation of Stephen King's The Stand. I love a good end-times story, and King did it so well in this doorstopper of a book, first published in 1978. How will the writers he has invited to develop his "world" fare? Suitably depressed by these visions of the future, I'm then planning to pick myself up with New Scientist columnist Annalee Newitz's cosier take, Automatic Noodle, which comes complete with jolly robots and cooking. From thrillers (Artificial Wisdom) to more literary takes (Helm), Star Wars to the latest from the prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky, let's get reading!

The Hugo Awards are some of the most important prizes in genre fiction, including science fiction and fantasy. Among past winners we see Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Neil Gaiman, and most recently, N.K. Jemisin, who made history for winning Best Novel three years in a row for every book in her Broken Earth series. This year, nestled among nominees for novels, short stories, and even individual episodes of The Good Place and Doctor Who, is an unexpected contender for the Best Related Work category: the primarily women-run fan fiction website Archive of Our Own. Archive of Our Own (often known as "AO3" for short) is an online platform for fan works-- creative work based on existing media like novels, books, and video games, produced by fans of the originals. The nearly 5 million works archived there--4,690,000 as of this writing--represent almost 2 million registered users and countless more who visit the site every day, consuming content and leaving comments.

'The Stone Sky' by N.K. Jemison won the 2018 Locus Award for the best fantasy novel. The 2018 Locus Awards were announced this past weekend. Unlike the Hugo and Nebula Awards, voting for the Locus Awards is open to everyone. Membership in an organization or even a subscription to Locus is not required. Subscribers do have an advantage, however, because their votes count double.

Talking about their hasty retreat from the planet Tattoine are Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd, and Jedi Apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), as droid R2-D2 listens in Star Wars:Episode I The Phantom Menace. Why are most Star Wars fans so vehemently opposed to the idea of midichlorians? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. The more time the narrative spends on those holes, they don't close, they actually widen. If X-Men spent air-time explaining why Storm could magically move the air molecules around to form storms, the more you'd think about how utterly impossible it is or how she must really be the most powerful mutant on Earth because the ability to move air molecules means that she can move any molecule, which means she could probably rearrange matter. But we don't do that.

China Miéville has long had spiders on the brain. In his breakthrough novel, 2000's "Perdido Street Station," a mysterious, spiderlike being called the Weaver assists a scientist named Isaac who's trying to save the fantastical city of Bas-Lag from a catastrophic infestation. In Miéville's new novella, "The Last Days of New Paris," the streets of Paris in 1950 have gone haywire after the detonation of a reality-altering bomb that brings various Surrealist works to frightening life, including an arachnoid manifestation reminiscent of Odilon Redon's painting "The Smiling Spider." "There's something about the arachnid," Miéville told me recently, on the phone from his home in London. Bataille writes about the spider as an avatar of formlessness, this very, very powerful thing.

Most fantasy and science fiction books are published by houses--Tor, DAW, Orbit, etc.--that specialize in genre titles. Larger publishers have tended to shun the genre, especially when it comes to particular subgenres like space opera. But Bruce Nichols, a senior vice president and publisher at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, says that's changing fast. "It's no longer the case that the world is split between a sort of pulp ghetto and the literary world," Nichols says in Episode 195 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "The entire genre has gone so mainstream, and some absolutely terrific writers are contributing to it, more than ever before."