House of Suns Alastair Reynolds
Gollancz; £18.99; 512 pp. Buy the book

The Host Stephenie Meyer
Sphere; £14.99; 617 pp. Buy the book

Omega Christopher Evans
PS Publishing; £20; 346 pp. Buy the book

Deep space is a customary venue for science fiction; deep time, equally vast and aweinspiring, doesn't feature quite so often. In House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds weaves both concepts together in a thrilling, mind-boggling adventure.

Campion and Purslane are “shatterlings”, cloned from a single human being six million years before. Along with others of their line, they've snapped the bonds tying them to planetary life and spend their immortality exploring the Universe. Just as Einstein predicted, the speed of light remains a constant limitation, so a circuit of the galaxy takes them hundreds of thousands of years.

Most writers of space opera rely on some magical, hypothetical way around this barrier, but Reynolds understands and uses hard science, which gives an aura of plausibility to his wildest flights of fancy. As well as visionary brilliance, Reynolds also supplies a knock-your-socks-off ending.

For her first science-fiction novel, The Host, Stephenie Meyer (author of a bestselling series of teen vampire romances) gives us a post-invasion world. Apart from a few hunted survivors, human beings have been dispossessed, their bodies taken over as hosts for a race of space-faring parasitical “souls”. The one known as Wanderer is shocked to find the consciousness of the teenaged Melanie Stryder still lingering in her brain. It's not supposed to be possible for a human to survive implantation. After a struggle they communicate, and the alien realises she's never cared for anyone in her many lives as much as Melanie loves her little brother and boyfriend, and goes in search of them.

She finds a small band of humans hiding out in caves and is taken prisoner. Misunderstandings and frustration ensue as Melanie, still in love with Jared, gets violently jealous when he touches the body she no longer controls, while Wanderer can't respond to another man's desire because Melanie's body doesn't want him.

The aliens are depicted as so passive and easily fooled that their conquest of the Earth is hard to credit, and I found the author's view of adult relationships easily the creepiest aspect of this novel take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

A more sophisticated and psychologically compelling vision of two minds sharing a single body shines through Christopher Evans's Omega. Owen Meredith, caught in a bomb blast in Regent Street - or was he struck by a car? - can't quite remember his real life. Sometimes he's recovering in hospital in this England, but at others he's inside the head of Owain Maredudd, a battle-hardened soldier in a war that's consumed the world for the past 70 years. The alternate history is brilliantly conceived. Character-driven SF at its best, with a terrific concept - a super-weapon with shocking potential - at its core.

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