When we try to imagine the world after an apocalypse, we often end up thinking of a particular era from history. It's not surprising — because the end of the world as we know it often means we'll lose a lot of the fruits of progress. People often talk about bombing someone "back to the Stone Age," for example.

New Scientist asked ten scientists and fiction writers, including William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, to name their favorite "lost scifi classics." And to celebrate, New Scientist's having a fiction contest, judged by Neil Gaiman.

Most of us would have no problem being seen in public reading a science-fiction novel... unless it had a cover so hideous, or so wrong, that you might get arrested. Here are the cheesiest and most disturbing science-fiction book covers.

It's one of those literary friendships that seems unlikely on the surface, but then makes endless sense once you dig deeper: Virginia Woolf had a correspondence with Olaf Stapledon, and he inspired her to write more science fiction.

Sex and science fiction have not always been the most obvious partners; combining the two has occasionally defeated even the genre's greatest luminaries. But here are ten authors who successfully brought sex into the future.