It's our second annual science fiction power list, featuring the 20 most powerful people and teams in the world of science fiction. Yes, science fiction can wield great power. These are the people who take responsibility for that.

The biggest superhero cliche is the origin-story. Watchmen flouts that convention, by starting in the middle, then provides the origin-story of an alternate world. We asked Zack Snyder and Dave Gibbons about world-building via superhero origins.

It is time to celebrate the complete revolution of our planet around the sun by assigning to it an arbitrary number based on a Western belief system. Happy New Year, humans!

As we bid farewell to 2008, it’s time to find out what the new year will hold. Amazing technologies? Alien lifeforms? Giant monsters? We look at science fiction’s predictions for the year 2009.

Freddie Highmore of Willy Wonka fame will be lending his voice to the upcoming animated version of Astro Boy set to arrive in theaters next year, and we wonder why they chose a 16-year-old with an English accent to play the titular hero. In the manga, Astro is only nine years old... will audiences buy Highmore as a…