Ken MacLeod has an enviable track record of extrapolating from current trends to produce mind-bending novels of ideas, and in the excellent The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (Orbit, £12.99) he turns his attention to information technology and artificial intelligence. Carlos the Terrorist died in a near-future war, only to find himself brought back to virtual life to fight on the human side against the rise of sentient AIs in the far future. A virtual construct with an artificial body, he soon begins to question where his loyalties lie. On a moon in a far-flung solar system, Seba is an AI that has gained sentience and is fighting for its rights. What follows is part space opera thriller, part philosophical treatise on the nature of consciousness, free will and self-determination.

Another novel that explores ideas of consciousness and the nature of perceived reality is Emma Geen’s ambitious debut, The Many Selves of Katherine North (Bloomsbury Circus, £14.99). Kit North is a phenomenaut working for the ShenCorp organisation: she projects her consciousness into lab‑created animals in order to better understand the effect of human interference on the natural world. But ShenCorp is pushing its research into more lucrative areas – virtual “tourism” into the minds of wild animals, and human-to-human transference – and Kit finds herself drawn into the shady world of corporate intrigue. The novel succeeds as a literary thriller, as Kit’s paranoia increases, and as a fascinating comparison of human/animal behaviour. Geen’s descriptions of what it might be like to inhabit the bodies of, variously, foxes, spiders and octopuses are worth the price of the book alone.

George Mann is a master of the New Pulp, a subgenre whose raison d’etre is unabashed entertainment and whose medium is the mashup. In the case of Ghosts of Karnak (Titan, £7.99), we get a zesty amalgam of steampunk, alternate history, crime fiction and superhero fable. By day, Gabriel Cross is a debonair playboy, haunted by his experiences in the first world war; by night he is the Ghost, the rocket-propelled scourge of the 1920s New York underworld. This third outing for the Ghost sees him searching for the love of his life, Ginny Gray, who has mysteriously vanished in Egypt; tracking down the killer of a young woman whose corpse has been carved with Egyptian hieroglyphs; and fighting off the attentions of a horde of cyborg zombies. Mann grounds this heady mix with a satisfyingly intricate plot and engaging characters.

In James Everington’s novel The Quarantined City (Infinity Plus, £7.99), there’s a hint of Robert Aickman in the slow accretion of off-kilter detail and shades of Christopher Priest’s enigmatic Dream Archipelago stories in the depiction of the nameless city, while protagonist Fellows’s obsessive quest to track down and comprehend the short stories of the elusive writer Boursier suggests the metafictional conceits of Jorge Luis Borges. The book starts weirdly, with Fellows fleeing the attention of a ghost child that haunts his house, and grows steadily more surreal as he reads Boursier’s stories one by one, with each reading of the text seeming to subtly transform the eponymous city. The triumph of Everington’s first novel is that, while hinting at lofty literary precedents, it cumulatively takes on an unsettling voice all of its own.

Christina Henry’s Alice (Titan, £7.99) takes the darker elements of Lewis Carroll’s original, amplifies Tim Burton’s cinematic reimagining of the story, and adds a layer of grotesquery from her own alarmingly fecund imagination to produce a novel that reads like a Jacobean revenge drama crossed with a slasher movie. For 10 years since her return from Wonderland, a traumatised Alice has been incarcerated in an asylum. When a fire destroys the institution, Alice flees with her friend Hatcher and, her memory incomplete, roams the warren of Old City in search of the Rabbit, who raped her, pursued by the evil Jabberwock. It’s a deeply unsettling vision that works – despite a rushed finale – thanks to Henry’s complex characterisation of Alice.

South (Corvus, £12.99) by Frank Owen ploughs the well-worn furrow of post-apocalyptic picaresque set in environmentally ravaged, Balkanised near-future America. This time the world has been visited by multiple plagues and the US is in the grip of a savage civil war. Dyce Jackson and his brother Garrett, on the run from vengeful, self-styled law enforcers, meet the enigmatic Vida, form an alliance and travel through a vividly rendered landscape of disease and dereliction. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Stephen King’s The Stand, plus graphic violence and heart-stopping action set pieces, but what lifts South above many recent examples of the subgenre is Owen’s pared-down prose, slick narrative and the sensitive depiction of Dyce and Vida’s relationship.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Jani and the Great Pursuit (Solaris).