Patrick O’Leary often wanders around his office at a large Michigan advertising firm humming to himself. His co-workers might think he’s a bit weird, but if they read his books they would discover that while humming (somewhat tunefully) he’s probably considering parallel worlds, our place in the universe and the hard choices we sometimes must make in our daily lives.

In his third science fiction novel, The Impossible Bird, O’Leary has crafted a page-turning story about "alien invasion, resurrection and brotherly love." But he also uses the book to delve into serious and timely issues. When we talked to O’Leary recently at the World Fantasy Convention in Montreal, he had this to say about the question at the heart of his new novel: "It comes down to this for me individuals facing facts and making a difference." Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to talk about The Impossible Bird without giving away the huge secrets at the heart of the novel. There are conspiracies within conspiracies, so that what starts off as a relatively simple chase novel quickly becomes a multi-level tale where reality may not be all it’s cracked up to be. The novel begins in 1962 when two brothers witness a Roswell-type event. We follow the brothers through their divergent lives: one goes on to a successful career making commercials, while the other becomes a college professor. Having lost their parents at an early age, the brothers were very close as children, but now they’ve grown apart. How and why they are brought back together is only the beginning of this exciting and thought-provoking book.

O’Leary began the novel in 1995 with one line that "moved and haunted" him. It was to be the last line of the book: "I’m watching my brother’s heart. I’m watching my brother’s beating heart." Although this image sustained him through the "first 50 drafts," in the end he did not include it in the book. "In hindsight," said O’Leary, "I see it was a controlling metaphor," and that the brothers’ relationship was "the focus of the story." After studying journalism in college, O’Leary began to publish poetry in literary magazines. He later published a couple of short stories and then made the decision to write a novel. At the time he didn’t realize what a major commitment this was: his first novel, The Gift, took 22 years to write, his next, Door Number Three, took seven, and The Impossible Bird took six. His first two novels were well received and, after years of slogging away on his own, O’Leary suddenly found himself receiving validation and acclaim from science fiction readers and writers. For The Impossible Bird, O’Leary says he used his experience in advertising to consider how a small group of people might go about trying to secretly control the public’s perception of events. Before I can ask how much behind-the-scenes work at controlling society goes on at advertising agencies, O’Leary says his job led him to conclude that "it’s nearly impossible to get 12 competent and intelligent people to agree on and implement anything much less keep it a secret. But it is such a comfort to believe someone is in charge, someone has the answers." O’Leary’s novels, despite their twists into alternate realities, conspiracies and alien invasions, come down to one thing, "a personal struggle in each of our lives for consciousness, for truth." Therefore in The Impossible Bird, reality and the fate of the players are "essentially in the hands of two ordinary guys stuck in an extraordinary plot. Their choices are messy and hurtful and well-meant." It is O’Leary’s belief in ordinary people making the right choices in difficult situations that continue to make his books so appealing.

Gavin Grant lives in Brooklyn, where he writes and publishes speculative fiction.

British writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood, author of eight novels, is just beginning to make a splash in the U.S. His reputation will be enhanced by the appearance here of Effendi, a smart, exciting thriller that marks the second entry in his Arabesk series.

Effendi will appeal not only to science fiction and fantasy readers but also to fans of mysteries and police procedurals, as the series takes place in a very recognizable world of police corruption, dirty politics and the clash of Eastern and Western cultures. However, the 21st-century city at the heart of these multifaceted tales isn’t a noir favorite such as New York, London or Berlin; it is Iskandryia, the center of the still-extant Ottoman Empire, which rules the world.

Ashraf Bey, a young man with a troubled past, has been dropped into the job of police chief. Bey is an outsider in the city and so is somewhat immune to the web of deceit and polite lies the city’s rulers live by. But Bey is drawn into the city by (supposed) family ties: he has to take custody of his computer genius niece, Hani. Soon, the tabloids declare him fair game after he refuses to marry the daughter of one of the city’s most powerful industrialists. Add German assassins, a pirate radio station, a summer power failure and the burgeoning fallout from a Children’s Crusade in Africa and you begin to get a taste for the addictive world of the Arabesk.

Grimwood keeps readers on their toes by starting with a grand jury proceeding, then cutting back to the days leading up to the trial. The back and forth is superbly handled, and readers willing to be caught up in the intrigue will be well rewarded with this highly original tale of an alternative universe. Gavin J. Grant runs Small Beer Press in Northampton, Massachusetts.

This month, fans of acclaimed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury receive a long-awaited treat: more than 50 years after he created the Elliots, a novel about this very peculiar family is being published by Avon Books. From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance is like many of Bradbury’s books actually a collection of short stories disguised as a novel. The first story, Homecoming, was published in Mademoiselle in 1946. The editors liked the story so much they used it as the centerpiece of a special Halloween issue and commissioned Charles Addams (of The Addams Family) to illustrate it. Bradbury and Addams hoped to produce a book about the family, but (amazingly) no one was interested at the time.

There’s been nothing quite like the Elliot family then or since. Perhaps because, as Bradbury says, They’re all related to my family. There’s Uncle Einar who can fly; Great Grandmere, the mummy; Cecy, who lies in the attic and travels all over the world; and Tim, the foundling child, who grows up among them and whose job it is to keep the family records. Bradbury is the author of many acclaimed novels (such as Fahrenheit 451) and short story collections (The Illustrated Man). Among his many awards, last year the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Even though he is recognized as the dean of American science fiction writers, Bradbury isn’t sitting still. He’s working on screenplays for two of his books and has a collection of stories coming out next spring.

Sheri S. Tepper returns to her favorite themes human overpopulation and man’s inhumanity to man and all other creatures in her latest novel, The Companions. Tepper has rung similar warning bells in previous novels, including the wonderful The Gate to Women’s Country, where men and women live separately, and The Family Tree, where humanity pays a horrible price for exerting dominion over animals. Here, Tepper puts us into a future where the Earth is so overpopulated that the few remaining animal species are being killed off to provide more space for people. Paul Delis is one of the top linguists on Earth. Despite personality quirks for which he would probably be jailed in our time, he is well regarded and often hired for prestigious jobs far from Earth. His sister, Jewel, whom he regards as hardly more than his personal maid, is an “arkist” part of a secretive group attempting to ship the remaining Earth species to other planets. Jewel travels widely with Paul, and her natural empathy with animals and aliens enables her to become the conduit for a number of interstellar diplomatic treaties. The best parts of The Companions focus on the eons-old relationship between dogs and humans. Tepper looks at the widely held supposition that dogs adapted to living with humanity and, in a lovely fictive twist, turns that theory on its head.

The Companions is packed with challenging ideas, strong and strange characters, and enough alien diplomacy, treachery and war to keep the reader intensely interested in the future world Tepper creates. Gavin J. Grant writes from Northampton, Massachusetts.