By now, the apocalypse story – which goes back at least as far as the ancient Hebrews – has fractured into numerous sub-genres. Our favorite, these days, is the soft apocalypse, where the end has come but life goes on.

An old trope of science fiction, from Asimov to the Teminator series, is the robot uprising. But robots have already started taking over - at least in the US military, where robots now carry out 33,000 missions per year.

A classic population explosion novel, Robert Silverberg's The World Inside, with a contrarian point of view and lots of sex, will soon return to print — and could be the subject of an upcoming HBO series.

This week an intriguing new film, Utopia in Four Movements, screened at Sundance. It explores the way people in the past imagined the future. We can't wait for it to bust out of the festival circuit.

A new film based on Philip K. Dick's posthumous, roughly autobiographical novel, Radio Free Albemuth, has begun some informal screenings around Los Angeles. We saw the film, and spoke to writer/director John Alan Simon about representing the author's ambivalent life.

Any theories on why science-fiction theater tends to be so lame? Does the naturalism of the stage thwart suspension of disbelief? In any case, a good one, called The Assember Dilator, seems to've just finished brewing in the East Village.

Was this giant glowing aerial presence just a satellite — or a sign of intelligent life in the universe? That's what scientists are asking when a strange, eerily familiar shape showed up in a photo of Norway's Northern Lights.

We've seen it in science-fiction books and movies before — the urban dystopia where living space has shrunk to almost nothing to house a teeming humanity. Now it seems to be here... or at least scheduled for 2011.

Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, Galileo's Dream, takes the titanic astronomer-mathematician from Renaissance Italy to the moons of Jupiter in the 31st century to assist in a political battle pitting science against religion. We talked to him about creating worlds.

The long rise of Philip K. Dick's reputation, from out-of-print obscurity during much of the '70s and '80s to celebrated film projects and literary respectability, is well known to io9 readers. But the author has just taken another step uptown.