Spirit by Gwyneth Jones
Gollancz, £14.99; 472pp Buy the book here

Twelve by Jasper Kent
Bantam, £12.99; 480pp Buy the book here

With Spirit, Gwyneth Jones has returned to the universe she created in her “Aleutian” trilogy of the 1990s. The story takes place some centuries after the arrival on Earth of the aliens known as the Aleutians; by now, five races of “numinally intelligent bipeds” from six worlds have joined in the Hegemony, maintaining a fragile accord through a combination of diplomacy and misunderstanding.

A war of the worlds has been avoided, but local conflicts continue in the name of tradition or reform. When the last stronghold of rebels is wiped out by General Yu's army, a child called Bibi is the only survivor. The general's wife, Lady Nef, takes an interest in the little girl, and thus, when grown, Bibi becomes a pawn in a political game that leads to her forced marriage to a prince of the bat-like, blood-drinking Myot, and solitary confinement for many years before she returns to Earth, unrecognisable as the rich and powerful Princess of Bois Dormant, to take her revenge.

The bones of this story are familiar from The Count of Monte Cristo - not the vampire-bat people, of course, nor the weird pregnancies or futuristic technology - yet it is very effective, re-imagined as a fantastic space opera.

But this is a strangely internal space opera, taking place almost entirely in confined spaces (on various worlds) and almost bereft of space ships. Although a zippy “boy-racer” called “The Spirit of Eighty-Nine” plays an important role, most travel between the inhabited worlds is accomplished not by boarding a ship but by lying on a couch to enter the uncanny, dreamlike experience of a Buonarroti transit, a sort of matter-as-information transmission.

Spirit is a memorable combination of cutting-edge science with old-fashioned, swash-buckling romance from one of the most intelligent and unsettling of modern science-fiction writers.

Sometimes I get the feeling that vampires are taking over popular culture. Once confined to horror fiction, now they are everywhere. In Twelve by Jasper Kent, they turn up on the Russian front in 1812, as Napoleon Bonaparte's army, seemingly invincible, marches on Moscow. These vampires are not the aristo-cratic smoothies beloved of romantic novelists, but rather the brutish voordalak of Russian legend, and their creepy presence adds a dash of difference to this debut novel. Readers may find the book's narrator, Captain Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to figuring out the true nature of the mercenary band presented to him as Russia's secret weapon against the French, but over all this is an accomplished, entertaining blend of historical fiction and dark fantasy.

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