In the rough-and-tumble Weird West of Maurice Broaddus’s BUFFALO SOLDIER (Tom Doherty, paper, $14.99), an ex-spy battles hunters determined to capture the terrifying weapon he’s stolen. It’s an exciting, if familiar, plot — but Broaddus shows little interest in predictable adventure narratives. Instead he packs this slim novella with alternate American history, fantastic technology and father-son bonding, for a far more surprising and satisfying result.

The setting is an America divided into three nations: Albion, where the Revolutionary War never happened and the slave trade never ended; the lands of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” where American and Canadian First Nations have fortified to hold the West; and Tejas (basically, Texas). The ex-spy is Desmond Coke, a dapper gentleman from a free Jamaica. His stolen prize is a boy named Lij, the genetically engineered clone of the Rastafarian messiah Haile Selassie. Arrayed against him are the dehumanizing forces of laissez-faire capitalism, including the deadly telepathic Pinkerton agent known as Cayt Siringo. Cayt is a sympathetic antagonist, having been cruelly weaponized through applied racist pseudoscience, but she is utterly relentless, and she means to weaponize Lij in the same manner. It’s the latest salvo in a Victorian-era technological cold war in which inhumane human experimentation is the bleeding edge. Shades of Henrietta Lacks and Tuskegee loom between every paragraph.

Desmond’s goal is simple yet poignant: to reach the Five Civilized Tribes, where he hopes to claim asylum and raise Lij as a son. Lij is one of the novella’s few weak points; while his quasi-autistic presentation and relationship with Desmond are beautifully rendered, he has little agency in the story, and effectively functions as its damsel in distress. The story’s prose is likewise awkward, sometimes slipping into didacticism and repetition. Possibly the editor got distracted by all the robot wolves, armored pistol-wielding cyborgs and Obeah-based science — the reader certainly will, anyway. A wild, satisfying ride awaits.

In a future of nightmarish climate change and rampant oligarchy, a small group of people live and work in an underground lab facility called the Needle, hoping to master something akin to faster-than-light travel: This is the concept behind PROOF OF CONCEPT (Tom Doherty, paper, $14.99), by Gwyneth Jones. Should they succeed, humankind has a chance of colonizing exoplanets too far to reach by means of conventional space travel. For one year, the Needle is to be sealed off to test the new technology. Then, however, members of the group begin mysteriously dying. It’s left to Kir, a young girl with a quantum artificial intelligence implanted in her brain, to muddle through what’s happening.