The Demi-Monde: Winter is the type of book that both inspires and discourages. On one hand, as an ambitious amalgam of punk (both steam- and cyber-) and of alternate history, Rod Rees’ novel serves as a reminder that one doesn’t need to be a cutting-edge futurist or esoteric polymath to produce compelling science fiction. The Demi-Monde: Winter also provides a good example of how one doesn’t need original ingredients to create a refreshing, satisfying dish.

On the other hand, the world-building mastery exhibited by Rees in his debut novel may cause many an aspiring writer of Tolkien-inspired fantasies and space operas to toss his or her once-treasured manuscript into the nearest bin in despair.

The first book in a planned tetralogy, The Demi-Monde: Winter follows Ella Thomas, a young jazz singer, as she is recruited to venture into a simulated environment, the Demi-Monde, to rescue the president’s daughter. Thomas is a capable, appealing protagonist, but the world she’s sent into—and its inhabitants—are the stars of Rees’ book. The Demi-Monde is a self-contained, virtual world created by the military to serve as a training ground for its soldiers in the asymmetric warfare experienced in urban environments. Much in the style of the Matrix films, once you plug in, you are there, and as the president’s daughter has discovered in the opening pages and Ella soon finds out, the Demi-Monde is a very, very nasty place. (Think Sim City: Hell on Earth edition.)

With its blend of beloved sci-fi genres, it’s fair to say that The Demi-Monde: Winter “has something for everyone,” but the cliché in itself doesn’t do justice to the caliber of Rees’ work.

In the effort to create a world of unrelenting tension, stress and struggle, no hot button has been left unpressed—religion, race, gender and population density have all been tuned to generate maximum conflict. Then, among the 32 million or so in-game characters (or “dupes”), there have been seeded a sprinkling of history’s greatest charismatic psychopaths, types given to commanding, conquering and getting people jailed, tortured and killed. Rees introduces the reader to the likes of Reinhard Heydrich, Lavrentii Beria and Archie Clement—figures less known to non-history buffs than the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Jesse James, but whose credentials as murderous psychopaths are nonetheless impeccable.

If it sounds complicated, it is. For that reason, the most impressive achievement of Rees’ freshman effort may well be in how deftly he avoids the plot-choking, mind-pummeling info dump that the unveiling of such a complex world usually entails, while nonetheless feeding the reader tons of information. Some of this is achieved structurally—each chapter has faux excerpts describing some aspect of one or more of the competing factions in the Demi-Monde. For the rest, Rees lets his protagonist’s learning curve mirror the reader’s own.

With its blend of beloved sci-fi genres, it’s fair to say that The Demi-Monde: Winter “has something for everyone,” but the cliché in itself doesn’t do justice to the caliber of Rees’ work. After all, if those somethings aren’t sufficiently interwoven, the reading experience can be chaotic and disjointed, less of an immersion than a sporadic dipping. Thankfully, that’s not the case here. Much like the characters who endure the often-harrowing events within its pages, readers will exit The Demi-Monde: Winter looking forward to what The Demi-Monde: Spring will bring.

Over the past few decades, Neal Stephenson has secured his place as a deep thinker among the speculative elite. He’s done so most notably with works that are set anywhere but the here-and-now: the dystopian future of 1992’s Snow Crash, the less dystopian, nano-technology-dominated future of 1996’s The Diamond Age and the late 17th-century milieu of The Baroque Cycle trilogy.

With his latest book, Reamde, Stephenson goes contemporary, and though this is by no means his first foray into the plausibly current, the result will likely win him plenty of new fans, even if some of his old ones find cause to grumble.

Reamde starts with protagonist Richard Forthrast, a man whose fortune began with drug smuggling and has grown to absurd proportions due to his role in creating a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game called T’Rain. (Think World of Warcraft, the next iteration.) By novel’s end, a veritable United Nations of engaging characters has been introduced. Foremost of these is Richard’s niece, Zula, an Eritrean orphan adopted into the Forthrast clan, but plenty of others have their time to shine, including a Russian “security expert,” a Hungarian IT expert for shady enterprises, an MI-6 spy, and the Chinese hacker responsible for the titular virus. (The antagonists, led by a Welsh terrorist bomber, aren’t too shabby, either.)

At times, Reamde feels like a seminar in “Advanced MMO Theory and Execution,” and indeed, this is probably the most speculative aspect of Reamde. Some of the explication is needed, especially for readers unfamiliar with MMOs, but mostly, these sections are more page-slogging than page-turning. Fortunately, the pages do turn, and the expertly paced thriller reasserts itself.

Therein may lie the problem for diehard fans of Stephenson’s early efforts. Reamde is a well-wrought, conventional thriller that has much more in common with Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (or with Tom Clancy, minus the technophilia) than with most of Stephenson’s previous fare. Reamde is Stephenson, minus the big questions and “then” or “there” settings. For some, that will be a problem. Regardless, Reamde is a mostly riveting read, guaranteed to harvest a crop of new readers for its author. And, grumbling or not, the old ones aren’t going anywhere, either.

Early 2011 has seen a slew of releases from the elder guard of grandmasters of fantasy and science fiction. January brought Home Fires by Gene Wolfe, March the return of Richard Matheson with Other Kingdoms, and now in April we have All the Lives He Led by Frederik Pohl. At the venerable age of 91, Pohl out-elders both Matheson (85) and Wolfe (79), though his latest book shows little slackening of the legendary editor and writer’s creative powers.

In All the Lives He Led, Pohl introduces the reader to a dystopic future where the eruption of a super volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park has rendered much of North America a wasteland and many of its inhabitant no better than second-class citizens of a Third World country.

Worse, the global community itself is plagued by what might best be described as pandemic terrorism. No cause is too small, no slight too ancient and no splinter group too splintery to prevent the blowing up of monuments and infrastructure, and the indiscriminate slaying of civilians.

Though the Yellowstone eruption would be fertile enough ground for a novel, it’s actually just a distant backdrop for the main story. The action centers around narrator Brad Sheridan—an American-born indentured servant/emigree—and his employment at the ancient site of Pompeii as it approaches Il Giubileo, the bimillennial celebration of the eruption that destroyed the original city. Thanks to a combination of holographic technology and good old-fashioned quasi-slave labor (proving some aspects of seasonal employment will never change), Pompeii has become a theme park of Disney-ing proportions.

During the course of All the Lives He Led, Sheridan works to pay off his debt, support his destitute (and somewhat freeloading) parents back in the refugee slums of the United States, and build a relationship with Gerda Fleming, a fellow Il Giubileo employee—a romance that brings with it an ever-expanding ring of repercussions for Sheridan. All the while, he strives to stay clear of an intrusive international and local security apparatus—a task made more difficult by his past connections and present company.

Like any good dystopic tale, the decisions and actions of the protagonist trigger not so much judgment as introspection, and the unanswered questions concerning Sheridan become self-directed questions for the reader. If positions were reversed, would I behave differently? And what decisions would I make going forward?

Pohl leaves the reader alone to wrestle with those questions.