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.

The London Natural History museum houses a God, and Billy Harrow is its keeper. Of course, Billy has no idea about any of this until the day the God—a preserved giant squid—vanishes without a trace. Suddenly a London Billy never knew emerges as growing furor and concern swell around the inexplicable disappearance. Was it the Church of the Kraken? Was it Tattoo and his army of anatomically impossible goons? Did it have anything to do with the secret division of the London police devoted to cults and magic?

As the list of occurrences that Billy’s scientific mind knows are impossible in a world without magic (or “knack” as those in the know refer to it) grows longer, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery surrounding the first thing that all the prophets and portents have been able to agree on since time immemorial: The ends, plural, are near. Very near, in fact; and something or someone is threatening to end things in a way that no one foresaw. And at the center of all this—pursued by ageless goons Goss and Subby, whose reputation for brutality and raw power is the stuff of legends—a hapless Billy is quickly learning that some very powerful people are very interested in what is inside his head.

Within Kraken, China Miéville manages to weave a story that seems to touch many genres without ever settling on one, and includes nods to many of the pop-culture sci-fi and fantasy memes that permeate our culture and inform our perspective on the subject of the fantastic. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he manages to write a book that defies easy categorization and keeps even the most well-read appreciator of the fantastic on their toes. Add a dash of Jasper Fforde’s inspired punning and wordplay, Philip K. Dick’s taste for altered states, theology and conspiracy, and you begin to come close to what reading this book is like. While Miéville’s writing is evocative, it is by no means derivative—and it’s easy to say that these titans of non-traditional fiction are in very good company indeed.

Shen Tai is troubled by ghosts. Ghosts of fallen comrades, ancestors, enemies, strangers and memories all cry out in their dark kingdom of the night, plying his ears with their moans. After the death of his father, the honored Left Side Commander of the Pacified West, Shen has the arduous task of honoring his father by burying the bodies that remain from the Left Side Commander’s most glorious battle. With every body Shen lays to rest over the next two years, a voice in the night is silenced—until the day Shen awakens to the news that his empire’s former enemy has bestowed upon him a gift that proves “no good deed goes unpunished.” The gift of 250 Heavenly Horses not only makes Shen one of the wealthiest men in the Empire, but also essentially guarantees his demise at the hands of those who lust after the steeds—nearly every person Shen is likely to encounter in his life.

Only deft political maneuvering and trusted allies can save Shen from the onus of this gift, and two years among the dead have left him unaccustomed to the subtleties of the world he is suddenly a part of once more. As the empire plunges into a new age of political turmoil and civil unrest, the tremendous value of the horses, as both a trophy and a vital cog in the machine of war, proves itself a burden that Shen can only bear for so long.

Guy Gavriel Kay’s fictional rendition of the Tang dynasty of ancient China in Under Heaven reads almost as a historical document, provided the reader is willing to suspend disbelief in Shamen, wolf men, powerful ghosts and astrological mysticism. The prose has an almost lyrical quality, bowing to the strong influence of poetry over Chinese culture, and often offers contemplative turns of phrase that hint at larger truths. Despite some minor foibles, such as some instances of transparent literary devices that attempt to artificially create suspense, Kay’s sense of mythology and scale of story are strong enough to forgive any minor stumbling along the way. For anyone who enjoys a smart political thriller, a historical recreation or a good ghost story, this novel offers all three in an immensely readable union.

Tony Kuehn writes from Nashville.

How valuable would you be if you had the talent to reshape planetary ecosystems to make them suitable for human colonization? Edie Sha’nim, the heroine of Sara Creasy’s assured debut novel Song of Scarabaeus, quickly discovers how far people will go to control her talent when she is kidnapped by a group of criminals and forced to aid their illegal schemes. 

Edie is skilled at manipulating “biocyph,” a combination of bio- and information technology that can rewrite biology on any scale ranging from a few cells to a whole planet. This makes her a valuable commodity to both the “Crib”—the governing bureaucracy which has controlled her life since childhood—and the rebel “Fringe” worlds. A recent civil war has given the Fringe worlds nominal independence from the Crib, but their dependence on expensive Crib technology to keep their planets habitable keeps them economically subservient. With Edie on their team, the criminals can scavenge abandoned Crib technology and sell it to the Fringe at a greatly reduced cost. 

Edie makes an appealing heroine: flawed, willful and determined to make her own destiny apart from the groups that want to control her. Parts of her tragic backstory come back to haunt her when she is paired with a bodyguard. The two are forced into symbiotic cooperation, chained together by a trick of technology and a shared need to escape; a complicated relationship quickly emerges. Fans of the romance genre will appreciate the smoldering looks and barely suppressed yearnings between these two attractive, strong-willed characters. 

The forces competing for Edie come to a head on and around the titular planet Scarabaeus, a convincingly drawn biological nightmare for which Edie holds herself responsible. The finale is tense and exciting; enough plot strands are tied up to be satisfying, while leaving plenty open for another entry in this universe. 

Song of Scarabaeus is an enjoyable, fast-paced slice of adventure science fiction, infused with a measured dose of romance. The technological and political background is revealed with a deft hand, never getting in the way of the action. 

Tom Warin lives in New England with his wife and two cats.

Connie Willis, perhaps best known for her tour-de-force time-travel novels such as Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, is back with another story that skips merrily from point to point on the time-space continuum. Blackout and its sequel, All Clear (to be released this fall), follow several characters from their homes in mid-21st-century Oxford to various destinations in World War II-era England—where they may be in more danger than they know.

As Blackout begins, the time-travel lab in 2060 Oxford, which is mostly used by historians doing research into past events, is experiencing some trouble. “Drops” are being pushed back, moved forward and pushed back again; the lab is in a chronic state of disorganization, the costume department is hopelessly behind schedule and nobody is very happy about all the chaos and confusion. Mike Davies, who has been preparing to go to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (and has had an American accent implanted for the occasion), is suddenly being sent to the evacuation of British forces at Dunkirk instead, while Polly Churchill learns that she is being sent off to the London Blitz with barely enough time to find out where the bombs are going to fall. Just why the lab technicians can’t manage to stick to a schedule is unclear, but it could perhaps have something to do with a new and disturbing theory that means time travel may not be as innocuous as believed.

Mike, Polly and a third historian, Eileen, are the novel’s protagonists, though they spend most of the book separated from one another and trying, often in vain, to figure out where they are and how to get somewhere else. Missed connections, mistaken assumptions and other such comedy-of-errors scenarios are Willis’ forte, and they are abundant here—although with each new novel set in the future, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that none of her characters use cell phones! Still, Willis’ fans will be excited to meet and travel with characters both familiar and new, and the complex plot—which unfolds slowly but steadily, as our protagonists draw closer to each other both geographically and chronologically—and cliffhanger ending promise a major payoff in All Clear.

The distant future finds humanity scattered over hundreds of worlds, enslaved to an alien race, laboring in mines and building fortresses for their spider-like masters, the Archon. Earth has been transformed into a mass grave, and all that remains of human culture is the daily fare of pubs and churches. And also, as luck would have it, the plays of William Shakespeare.

Wilbr, the narrator of the tale, is by his own admission not the most talented of actors. His Rosencrantz is fine, but he knows he'll never have a shot at Hamlet. Meanwhile Aglaé, "the best and most attractive Juliet and Rosalind," hardly acknowledges his existence. They and the rest of the crew of The Muse of Fire tour the galaxy, offering residents of the planets they're allowed to visit a moment's respite from lives of drudgery. When a group of Archons join the audience to observe one otherwise routine production, the players find themselves conscripted into a series of shows put on for the benefit of ever more strange and powerful alien races. Naturally, the survival of the human race hangs in the balance.

Muse of Fire is a short novel (it originally appeared in the New Space Opera anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan), but it feels expansive. As the crew travels from one stage to another, each more grand and bewildering than the last, the member of their troupe who usually plays Iago plots to overthrow their cruel masters, while Wilbr and Aglaé prepare for a final performance on which everything depends: a rendition of Romeo and Juliet unlike any other.

This is not the first time Dan Simmons has yoked the classics of the Western canon to space opera science fiction. The novels of his Hugo Award-winning Hyperion Cantos bore the influences of Keats and The Canterbury Tales (for starters) and Ilium featured a re-creation of the Trojan War on Mars. Fans of those masterly works will adore Muse of Fire for its layered symbology, intertextual wit and deep humanism. But Muse of Fire also shows Simmons at his best as a storyteller, and readers will be delighted by a tale so expertly told.

Jedediah Berry is the author of The Manual of Detection, forthcoming from Penguin Press. 

When Carmen Dula leaves Earth with her younger brother and their scientist parents, she is not entirely at ease with the notion of a six-year sojourn on Mars. The change of address requires a 50,000-mile ride on a Space Elevator, and then six months aboard a cramped shuttle. And like many 18-year-olds, Carmen is concerned about beginning her college studies, making friends and maybe even conducting a love life. All this in a new hometown, partway across the solar system.

The first section of Marsbound is science fiction with an emphasis on the science. Joe Haldeman lays out a fascinating course for one potential future of space travel, complete with an orbiting Hilton hotel. The reader is treated to an in-depth tour of the Space Elevator, with insights into the technical as well as the human challenges. Carmen’s narration of the trip, charming and often wry, keeps the story fun and the science accessible.

Once on Mars, Carmen quickly earns the enmity of the colony’s chief administrator. Their mounting antagonism results in an act of transgression with unexpected and far-reaching results. When Carmen strikes out across the surface of the planet in a stolen Mars suit, she falls and injures herself; rescue does not come from the human colony, but from members of another species already inhabiting the planet.

Marsbound then becomes an intriguing story of first contact. The tale’s inventiveness lies in the fact that the aliens are a mystery not only to the earthlings who encounter them, but also to themselves. They have only a limited sense of their own history, origins and purpose—and only a vague, half-remembered notion of the forebears who left them on Mars millennia before. As the consequences of the encounter take on global, and then intergalactic significance, Carmen must gather what allies she has in order to avert a catastrophe of horrific proportions. The stakes are high, but at its heart Marsbound is a thought-provoking meditation on time, history and the potential for human evolution.

Jedediah Berry is the author of a novel, The Manual of Detection, forthcoming from Penguin Press in February 2009. He is an assistant editor of Small Beer Press.