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M John Harrison, 81, has won the Booker Prize for his novel The End of Everything, a 198-page postapocalyptic story set on the Kent coast. He becomes the oldest-ever Booker winner, surpassing Margaret Atwood, and received the award at a London ceremony along with the 50,000-pound prize.
A film critique revisits Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 adaptation of P.D. James's novel 'The Children of Men,' noting the movie departed significantly from its source material with Cuarón's blessing and James's approval. The piece argues the film, about a near-future Britain where humanity has become infertile, uses its dystopian premise to comment on contemporary political and social anxieties rather than simply predicting the future.
Jules Verne wrote a futuristic novel in 1863 imagining Paris in 1960, depicting a society shaped entirely by science, machinery and commerce. His publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel rejected the manuscript as implausible and too pessimistic, and Verne shelved it. The book stayed hidden until it was found in a family safe and finally published in France in 1994.
Actor Walter Koenig, best known for playing Pavel Chekov on the original 'Star Trek' television series, has died at age 90. His death marks the loss of one of the last surviving members of the show's original cast.
The short story 'The Bursar' depicts a school administrator giving a mother named Cerise a tour of a facility where children are kept in sleep-like cubicles and educated entirely through virtual environments rather than physical classrooms. The Bursar presents this as an upgrade over traditional schooling, citing reduced disease spread and consistently updated virtual facilities as key benefits.
Nature's Futures section has published a short science-fiction story about an android pianist who is replaced before ever performing, after a shipping delay leads her owner to buy a newer model. Left in a storage shed, she is given books by the household butler and discovers reading as an alternative to the music she was built to play. The story explores themes of obsolescence, purpose and self-discovery through the android's shift from music to literature.
The piece is a short science-fiction story in Nature Futures depicting a walled human village visited monthly by an unnervingly perfect artificial figure. The figure questions the old man and child about mortality, decay, and a dead knife-grinder, while the humans discuss rotting peaches and the meaning of impermanence. The story contrasts the artificial being's flawless, static existence with the lived, decaying world of the humans.
A new essay draws on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel 'Roadside Picnic,' in which humans scavenge incomprehensible alien technology left behind after an extraterrestrial visit, as a metaphor for how AI systems are reshaping scientific work. The author argues this framing is especially relevant to mathematics, where AI-generated outputs are increasingly used even when their underlying workings are not fully understood.
Nature's science fiction feature carries a short story titled 'Von Neumann's Party,' depicting a narrator trapped in an endless queue being repeatedly asked whether they attended a historical gathering linked to John von Neumann at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies in the 1940s-50s. The narrative blends recollections of real figures like Einstein, Gödel and Oppenheimer with surreal, loop-like questioning and imagery of vast server farms, leaving the narrator's situation ambiguous.
io9 has republished 'The Raspberry Manifesto of Professor Warana,' a short story by Adam-Troy Castro, in partnership with Lightspeed Magazine. The surreal narrative follows an artist who finds fulfillment after transforming into an orange.
A 2004 Q&A featuring author Neal Stephenson is being recirculated, in which he responds to reader questions with characteristic humor. The exchange covers his writing habits and views on technology and fiction, delivered in a wry, self-deprecating tone.
A dedicated fan page catalogs details about the 1970 British sci-fi television series UFO, created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and starring Ed Bishop as Commander Straker. The site serves as an archival resource for fans of the show, which depicted a secret organization defending Earth from alien incursions.