Nina Allan excels at creating subtle, shifting narratives straddling the mundane and the bizarre, the real and the unreal. In her second novel, The Rift (Titan, £7.99), she has produced a lyrical, moving story beautifully balanced between the reality of contemporary England and the ethereal otherness of the alien world of Tristane. Selena and Julie were not only sisters but best friends, and when Julie vanishes aged 17 – the victim of a killer? – Selena’s life and that of her family changes forever. Two decades later, Julie reappears, claiming to have spent the intervening years in an alien world, supporting her story with a highly detailed account of her life there. The Rift is what Allan does best, exploring contemporary society, and what it means to be human, through the tropes of the SF genre. Selena’s survivor’s guilt, her grief and that of her parents, are harrowingly rendered, perfectly counterpointed by the otherworldly depiction of an alien culture that might be just the fantasy of a damaged narrator.

Another unreliable narrator drives the pulsing heart of Ada Palmer’s incredibly ambitious and groundbreaking first novel, Too Like the Lightning, (Head of Zeus, £18.99). Palmer, a professor of Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, writes gloriously lush prose stuffed with asides, allusions and nods to the reader. The year is 2454: Earth is a technological utopia where national identities have been replaced by modes of philosophical thought called “Hives”; families have been supplanted by “bashes”, groupings of like-minded souls; and gender differentiation has been eliminated. Mycroft Canner is a convict whose punishment is to wander the land performing public services. His first-person narrative charts his quest for the purloined “Seven-Ten list”, a record of the planet’s most powerful individuals. Canner’s convoluted peregrinations allow Palmer to examine this dubious utopia and explore ideas as diverse as the efficacy of social engineering, the place of religion in society, and the role of censorship. This is the dizzyingly inventive, if daunting, first book in what will become Terra Ignota quartet.

Following on from his well received debut novel, Lament of the Fallen, Gavin Chait’s Our Memory Like Dust (Doubleday, £14.99) proves that the best science fiction can be not only socially relevant and thought-provoking, but entertaining. Chait follows three main characters through a brilliantly imagined near-future Africa ravaged by war, climate change, jihadi cults and multinational companies. The thrust of the narrative concerns Shakiso Collard, an aid worker who comes to realise that her job with Senegalese refugees is problematic; Simon Adaro, a billionaire software tycoon working to bring sustainable technology to the region; and Farinata Uberti, the cynical boss of an energy company. In lesser hands, the antagonists might be one-dimensional, but Chait portrays corrupt businessmen, politicians and even jihadists as rounded characters with their own seemingly justifiable motivations. He interweaves ecological and political intrigue with Senegalese folk myths to tell the ultimately uplifting story of a continent sadly neglected in SF.

Never a writer to repeat himself, Adam Roberts yet again rings the changes with his 17th novel, The Real-Town Murders (Gollancz, £16.99), a fast-paced murder mystery set in a radically altered near-future Britain. With the majority of the population spending their lives in Shine, an immersive virtual reality, the country is a depopulated wasteland inhabited by exoskeletal exercise machines carrying comatose citizens. When a body is discovered in the boot of a car on an automated production line, private eye Alma is tricked into investigating the murder, soon finding herself mired in shady political shenanigans. As ever, Roberts’s use of the genre to explicate ideas – the allure of virtual reality and the consequent affectless society – is done with grace and economy, and what might have been a grim read is leavened by moments of irreverent black humour.

Following a series of historical steampunk adventures and alternate-history superhero novels, Wychwood (Titan, £7.99) is George Mann’s welcome foray into contemporary horror-crime. After the catastrophic breakup of her life in London, losing her lover and job in short order, Elspeth Reeves retreats to recuperate in her home village deep in rural Oxfordshire. There, far from the peaceful recovery she was expecting, she finds herself drawn into investigating a series of brutal slayings that might be linked to the ancient legend of the Carrion King, a malign Saxon wizard. Journalist Reeves is sensitively portrayed, by turns vulnerable and resourceful, and the narrative pace is relentless. Mann is a master at imbuing his stories with macabre atmosphere, and in Wychwood he has achieved the perfect blend of crime thriller and supernatural horror.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Binary System (Solaris).