Earlier tonight, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America handed out the Nebula Award in Chicago, and this year women have swept one of science fiction’s biggest awards.

Take this as a warning: Post-graduation life is one brutal wasteland.

There was a brief moment during the Oscars where it looked like Mad Max: Fury Road might be on the way to getting the recognition it deserved as a truly groundbreaking, visually stunning film. Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

Mad Max may seem like the action-movie outlier among this year’s Academy Awards nominees, but it’s more than deserving of earnest consideration. In particular, I hope Fury Road wins Oscars for Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing.

Counter-Strike plus drivable cars, customizable bases, and lots and lots of sand? This is no ordinary custom map.

This has been a tough year. Pop culture let us down in many ways, even as our political system and our social institutions revealed a deeper seam of ugliness. But speculative fiction still offers us hope: not just optimism about human ingenuity, but actual reasons to look forward and keep our heads up.

You know that moment. The moment in a movie that you geek out over as soon as you walk out of the theater. The one that gives you goosebumps, or makes you whisper “Holy crap” as it’s happening. Those are the “wow” moments, and we’ve collected the best ones from 2015.

First, the good news: 2015 was a fantastic year at the movies. There were great original stories, sequels done right, adaptations that match their source material and more. But for every great movie, there’s a ton of bad ones too. Here’s our picks for the best and worst science fiction and fantasy films of 2015.

Besides a 1990 NES game and Outlander, there wasn’t really a Mad Max video game back in the day that was just as good as the first three movies. If anything, the second movie’s plot had potential for a super arcade game.

One of the most striking things about Mad Max: Fury Road is the insane palette, full of rich, bright primary colors. But director George Miller said if he’d had his way, the movie would have been in black and white. Now you can see what that would look like.

Summer movie season is based on the premise that filmmakers know what the public wants. Big production budgets feed into big marketing campaigns feed into blockbuster success—unless they don’t, through some failure of hit-movie theory or practice. The 2015 season produced some notable surprises (Mad Max) along with…

Japanese artist Takumi recreated everything from Mad Max: Fury Road in an ancient Egyptian style, and while the movie has nothing to do with ancient Egypt, it still fits and looks really awesome with this art style.

Mad Max: Fury Road opened in Japan a few days ago and it means one thing: Japanese fans are now ready to create crazy fan-art. One of the bests so far —made by noted manga artist Takumi—is heavily influenced by One Piece and creator Eiichiro Oda’s style.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a brilliant, miraculous action movie—and part of that is because it’s not really about Max, instead spotlighting Charlize Theron’s excellent Imperator Furiosa. So a brand new comic exploring the origins of this fascinating female character should be great, right? WRONG.

The flamethrower guitar was definitely one of the coolest bits of tech in Mad Max: Fury Road. But why should Doof Warriors on the post-apocalyptic warpath have all the fun? With an afternoon to spare and a good life insurance policy, you can be the proud owner of a fire-breathing instrument, too.

One of the things that really grabs you about Mad Max: Fury Road is just how much of the action is made up of practical effects. Those are real cars exploding and rolling around, which always looks cooler than the floaty vehicles CGI puts on the screen. That doesn’t mean the movie was free of digital effects, though.…

I’m serious. Mad Max: Fury Road should not exist. It should never have gotten made. It certainly shouldn’t be as awesome as it is. And yet somehow, against all odds, this impossible cinematic masterpiece is in theaters right now, in defiance of reality itself.

It’d take one hell of a video game to live up to the brilliant, relentless action of Mad Max: Fury Road. This does not appear to be that video game.