Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel is a tomorrow’s-headlines-today technothriller with enough ideas packed aboard to rise out of its small subcategory and into the stratosphere of speculative fiction.

The Travis family is the focus as a nuclear bomb goes off at RAF Leuchars in Scotland. James Travis has been working as a programmer for defense and energy companies and has long expected the world to go down the tubes. When his daughter, Roisin, who has been in a peace camp outside the air force base, calls him at 4:00 a.m. to tell him she saw the bomb but is unharmed, he doesn’t hesitate to act on his emergency survivalist plans. Alec, Roisin’s brother, is in the army in Kazakhstan, and it is he, the most uncompromised of the three, who takes the brunt of the government’s investigation into his family. After bombs blow up oil refineries and freeways, the U.K. goes into defensive mode. Rumors fly around the world about who is responsible and governments make ready to go to war. In this world, where Al Gore is the U.S. president and France is at the center of geopolitical peacekeeping attempts, little else has gone differently from the last half dozen years in the real world.

MacLeod uses the Travis family, among others, to demonstrate the inhuman uses of some recent Western laws on extraordinary rendition, torture and holding terrorism suspects without trial, as well as how quickly difference can be translated into otherness. At the end of many chapters there is a list of the most recent victims on the titular execution channel, an Internet and cable TV idea that MacLeod’s glib description belies the horror of and the potential for its actuality.

MacLeod keeps the action moving swiftly along, all the while throwing out red herrings amid real clues as to where the book is unexpectedly heading: into a future imaginable only in physics labs and fever-dream science fiction novels. Gavin J. Grant runs Small Beer Press in Northampton, Massachusetts.

In Mappa Mundi, the latest science ficiton novel by British writer Justina Robson to be published in the U.S., the author offers an engaging pyrotechnic slice of a near future in which computer software for humans is the next big research front.

Robson begins with six short legends, tantalizing childhood stories of the main characters with subtle hints of the action to come. At the center of the story is Natalie Armstrong, a psychologist, computer scientist and daughter of one of the most famous men in computing. All her life she has fought for control of herself, her world and her future. Natalie’s tenuous link to reality broke when her mother died and she spent a couple of years in a mental facility. She has often felt that she is fighting her father and now suspects they are working on different aspects of the same brain mapping project, Mappa Mundi. Natalie slowly comes to see her father’s sacrifices and recognizes that his project goals, though grand in scope, originated in his desire to help her maintain her mental balance.

Another legend, Mikhail Guskov, has been funding the project, but he has also been working on it from other angles, including a collaboration with a beautiful but psychopathic CIA officer. When Natalie is contacted in an unconventional way by another CIA agent, she realizes her small research project has attracted some very powerful players. Even when an experiment goes wrong and seems to kill a test subject, it does not stop government interest in using the Mappa Mundi project to control people.

The novel is set in the English city of York, in Washington, D.C., and on a reservation in Montana, and each place is economically portrayed with a few spare touches. Robson delves into how the aphrodisiac of power can affect individual and social identities. She is a romantic, but the stakes here are high and she pulls no punches. Gavin J. Grant is the co-editor of The Year’s Best Fantasy &andamp; Horror: 2006 (St. Martin’s).

M. John Harrison’s latest novel, Light, arrives from the U.K. having already won the Tiptree Award and follows the critical and sales success of his short fiction collection, Things That Never Happen. Light is a genre-bending novel, part space opera, part murder mystery, maybe something entirely new.

Harrison is an immensely confident writer: confident in his writing, the power of his narrative and in his readers. He quickly introduces us to three narratives that eventually intertwine in an unexpected and marvelous manner. Michael Kearney is a physicist on the cusp of transforming his field. Seria Mau Genlicher is a 24th-century woman who has fused her body and mind to an ancient and little-understood alien spaceship. Ed Chianese is the most stable of the three, but perhaps only because he spends most of his time immersed in virtual realities he can’t really afford. Chianese has to flee the local mob when he reaches his credit limit and ends up working at a backwater circus.

None of these characters are particularly sympathetic, but neither are they the cardboard cutouts of old science fiction. These are believable people in a believable 24th century where there are areas of space in which the laws of physics don’t work, there is fascinatingly weird and shiny alien technology, and people are scraping by on the edges of mainstream society.

Harrison’s writing is top-notch and involving. He takes old ideas and mechanisms from early science fiction (abandoned alien technology, wars that occur in the blink of an eye) and invigorates them with a sense of possibility and even, strange within this dark and foreboding book, transcendence and hope. Gavin J. Grant writes from Northampton, Massachusetts.