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.

Canadian writer Sean Russell spent years purposefully and successfully avoiding the Tolkien-type of grand fantasy that has ongoing characters and plot elements. He had two persistent ideas, however, that eventually led him to attempt a fantasy on a large scale. The first idea derived from Huckleberry Finn was of a group of characters traveling down a river by raft. The second was of two families fighting for power, somewhat akin to the Montagues and the Capulets. When Russell realized these two ideas could be linked, he found himself with the basis for a traditional fantasy, one that would have a motley group of characters traveling through strange and distant lands on a quest to save their homeland. The Swans’ War series was launched last year with The One Kingdom. The second entry, newly released, is The Isle of Battle, and it includes a dense four-page section, “What Went Before,” to help new readers to catch up.

As befits the mid-book in a trilogy, The Isle of Battle is a dark book. The land between the mountains is on the brink of war as the two ruling families (the Rennes and the Wills) use politics, games and marriage to try to take the throne. At the start, Elise Wills has thrown herself in the River Wynnd rather than give herself up to a political marriage. But she has not died, as her broken-hearted father and friends suppose; she has made a deal with Sianon, a nagar or dark river spirit, to live on and share her body and mind.

The Isle of Battle is mostly questing and chasing, as various groups of warriors hunt the three nagar: Sianon; Hafydd, Sianon’s murderous brother; and Sainth, their half-brother, who inhabits the body of a wanderer named Alaan. The chase leads into lands that exist side by side with the land between the mountains, where the only hope of exit is Sainth and Sainth is very much in danger from Hafydd and his men.

Russell keeps the characters moving, the tension high and the quest arduous. The politics are complicated, the relationships even more so. When one young lord swears he will spy for his enemies in the hope of future peace (and familial gain), it is difficult to remember who he can safely talk to, and who he can’t.

The Isle of Battle will please Russell’s earlier readers and bring him many more. He has taken up the mantle of a traditional fantasy writer and is producing strong, highly readable tales. Gavin J. Grant reads, writes and publishes science fiction in Brooklyn.