Welcome to the future; welcome to the ever-present now. Sci-fi is evergreen – perhaps because, unlike other fictional forms, its primary focus is not one style or historic period. It is constantly holding a slightly warped mirror up to our present concerns and extrapolating, asking "is this what you want?", or "could we go here?" or even "this is what you really are."

Acclaimed British jazz singer Georgia Mancio celebrates five years of ReVoice!, her festival of jazz song, with an expanded event – now twice its original length – beginning next week. Mancio’s programming combines some of the most charismatic and original performers worldwide to create ten concerts (some with several performances) that display the art of jazz singing at its cosmopolitan best.

A pair of Oscar hopefuls that take wildly divergent perspectives on World War II were confirmed today as the opening and closing night films of the 58^th annual BFI London Film Festival, running 8-19 October at a range of venues across the capital.

The audience comment I most want to hear during next week's Unlimited Festival is: this show has transformed my perception of disability. We got that over and over and over during the first Unlimited Festival, which ran as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012. And I want that again. It’s all about making people understand that disability isn’t a negative, awful experience, just a facet of life that can give you as much as it apparently appears to take away. In fact, it just gives you more.

Shakespeare's ubiquitous “planetary influence” is well-documented. As Stephen Marche points out in How Shakespeare Changed Everything, not much from our sex lives to the assassination of Lincoln remains untouched. And, of course, there's the language. You may think that what you are reading has more rhyme than reason, be madness (though there is method in it) or amount to nothing more than a wild goose chase. It may be Greek to you, make your hair stand on end or set your teeth on edge.

As an 11-year-old, I used to love writing my address as My Bedroom, 50 Ridsdale Rd, Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, England, Great Britain, The World, The Universe. 

The idea for Day to Go – the show takes its name from a bus ticket – sprang from my own bus journeys around Barry and from a desire to make a piece of theatre specific and relevant to the town. I persuaded a local company to lend me a bus for a few days so I could start to plan the route and, at the same time, I began a series of conversations with bus drivers, bus users, café owners, choir leaders, librarians, hairdressers and even the local undertakers in a bid to find out what matters most to people in Barry.

On Sunday night, you can hear Martin Amis sound off about Englishness. An advance selection of extracts from the interview were published in the Radio Times on Tuesday. The reaction from the press was instantaneous: Amis is always good copy. The writer’s reflections – out of the context of the film, which none of the journalists appeared to have seen – excited a series of predictable responses, constrained by the ideological straightjacket of both right and left – and, no doubt, the patriotic sensitivities of this island nation.

When a book is published, there are broadly speaking three alternative fates which lie in wait. It goes global, it sinks without trace, or it sells modestly and steadily to the readership for whom it was intended. There is, however, another potential option, which is that it catches a thermal and veers off in an unforeseen direction.

Immersive theatre is a wonderful thing. It has closed up the cosy distancing of actors appearing on stage, the silent, passive audience below in the darkness; it has shaken up the way classic stories can be told – rebooting time-worn plays; and it has delivered some truly magical, mysterious experiences. But there's a problem. At the heart of most of the larger immersive theatre experiences such as Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man there's a passivity – the audience is still just an audience.