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With two mysteries-cum-morality tales featured in this month’s science fiction and fantasy selections, the themes for our New Year’s picks are clear—even though the characters and their actions may be questionable.

Mike Resnick’s Starship series has taken Captain Wilson Cole and his crew from mutineers to a navy capable of fighting the Republic’s multi-million-ship Navy. Throughout, Resnick has kept the story narrowly focused on the behavior and morality of the crew: the level of weapons are described only by numbers, the power of starships by letters. The previous novel in the series considerably raised the consequences and the seriousness of Resnick’s plot as the captain’s best friend was tortured to death. Now, in Starship: Flagship, Resnick directly confronts the issue of whether torture is ever morally acceptable and concludes that indeed it is (provided that the victim is not seriously physically harmed), psychological damage be damned. While the novels are enjoyable and Resnick should be lauded for bringing cold logic to a genre that sometimes emphasizes force over diplomacy, this last novel suffers slightly from a lack of perspective (Wilson Cole is clearly a mouthpiece). However, the series and this novel are highly recommended, developing a hero that is the antithesis of most heroes and a Republic that is in stark contrast to most utopian federations, and confronting a moral issue in a manner that should nonetheless generate a serious, thoughtful response worthy of Wilson Cole’s hard logic.

The weaknesses of man
Many fantasy novels portray magic as an unquestioned fact of life for the characters, but Carol Berg’s The Spirit Lens builds a medieval world where magic is indeed real, even as natural science and its practitioners successfully argue that magic is nothing more than, well, smoke and mirrors. The king is a proponent of natural science, but the queen, who has lost a child, employs sorcerers to explore the possibility of bridging the gap between her world and the afterworld. When a murder is committed that potentially involves blood magic and implicates the queen, the king employs failed magician Portier de Savin-Duplais to solve the crime and exonerate his wife, failing to realize that unmasking the murder may unleash an even greater evil. Aiding Portier are a Shakespearean fop and a brilliant but unsophisticated sorcerer. In an ever-shifting landscape of alliances and betrayals, half-truths, lies, violence, cruelty and evil magic, Berg builds a unique world of science, magic and divinity, cumulating in a disturbing conspiracy. This is a unique world in the fantasy genre, an excellent story and a morality play that bases the threat to order not on the embodiment of evil, but on the familiar weaknesses of women and men.

Science fiction pick of the month
In the fourth installment of Timothy Zahn’s detective series, Frank Compton and his partner Bayta are aboard a galactic train, the Quadrail, continuing their search for the mind-controlling alien known as the Modhri. They are sidetracked when, despite the supposed impossibility of bringing weapons or poisons aboard, passengers are inexplicably turning up dead. The Domino Pattern is a pitch-perfect blend of mystery and technology that owes as much to Agatha Christie as Larry Niven. Borrowing from the English mystery genre, the novel is populated with numerous fully developed characters harboring believable secrets. Full of red herrings, false leads and dead ends, the complex novel is driven by terse dialogue. While the set-piece climax is a little too long and elaborate, Zahn redeems himself with an ending that uses the carefully drawn backstory to propel his characters into the next novel—all the while raising the stakes from the relatively slow Modhri to a much more immediate and inhuman danger. This is an exceptionally enjoyable series that will appeal to both science fiction and mystery fans.

In alphabetical order, Sean Melican is a chemist, father, husband and writer.

This month, our selections illustrate the triumph in overcoming our prejudices. We meet wizards with learning disabilities, heroes with human weaknesses and fantasy that refuses to be confined and limited to a single genre.

Most readers (myself included) have probably taken for granted that sorcerers are fluent in whichever magical language they speak. Thankfully, there are readers—and writers—like Blake Charleton, who might not have the same assumptions. Charleton is dyslexic, and his debut novel Spellwright features frustrated hero Nicodemus Weal, whose own dyslexia is a serious setback—even dangerous—when performing magic, which is literally bound by the written word. Even the simplest of spells are corrupted by his touch. As if things weren’t tough enough for Nicodemus, a keloid on his back possibly marks him as the Halcyon, a prophesied hero—but then again, its imperfect shape suggests he may be the Storm Petrel, destroyer of language and magic. Believing himself to be neither, and protected by his mentor Agwu Shannon, Nicodemus struggles to earn the right to be a lesser, more ordinary wizard. But when another wizard is murdered by a misspell, Nicodemus and Shannon top the suspect list and find themselves embroiled in banal politics and religious fervor and facing down true evil. Following a fairly traditional plot, the novel is well worth reading for its thorough imagining of the effect of language on magic, as well as its insight into the nature of dyslexia.

A hero’s greatest enemy
Robert McCammon’s Mister Slaughter, the third book in the well-researched Matthew Corbett series set 70 years prior to the American Revolution, finds our hero and his mentor hired to transfer a vicious prisoner named Slaughter from an asylum to a ship bound for England, where Slaughter will be tried for murder. But when a lapse in Matthew’s judgment allows Slaughter to escape, it is up to Matthew to track down the killer. Soon he finds help in the form of a tortured, outcast Indian, but time is running short before Slaughter escapes for good—and continues his violent crimes of rape and murder. In previous novels, Matthew found himself a hero, but in Mister Slaughter, he discovers that he is weak and fallible, allowing him to humbly come into his own as both character and hero. There’s an added bonus for fans of the series: Although this initially appears to be an isolated assignment, by the novel’s end, McCammon has reintroduced the series’ supervillain, Professor Fell. Combining the best elements of detective, historical, horror and conspiracy fiction, this is a book and a series that deserves a wide readership.

Fantasy pick of the month
When you first open Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy, Volume 3, the first thing you need to do is abandon your preconceived notions of fantasy. These stories feature nary a dragon, wizard or orphan-savior found in an obscure inn, but instead insert the fantastic into the ordinary, examining with wild creativity both the mundane world and the very assumptions that define it. Standout story “The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children” takes the wry and amusing concept of a promiscuous superhero, but then turns a very dark corner to question the Christian underpinnings of our society. “Is” examines the psychological explanations for the escapist fantasies of Narnia and its brethren, but when the questioning voice is cynical, can we trust the conclusion? “Couple of Lovers On a Red Background” takes the common notion of an icon transplanted to the present (Bach, in this case) but infuses it with sexuality and love. The brilliant “Pride and Prometheus” posits that Jane Austen’s Mary Bennett will assume the pseudonym Mary Shelley and write Frankenstein after meeting the eponymous doctor. This is not typical fantasy; instead it is full-bodied storytelling, making up a collection of writing that repeatedly demonstrates that fantasy and reality are not strictly separate. If that is not enough to convince a reader to pick up the book, then consider that half the stories are from sources not typically associated with the genre. This is fantasy, yes, but more importantly, this is literature.