There’s a lot of fascinating world-building here and, despite the problems, a delightful ­espionage-inflected adventure.

All the usual accouterments of a William Gibson novel are visible in his posthuman high-­concept time-travel caper, THE PERIPHERAL (Putnam, $28.95), except for the fact that it’s a time-travel caper. Not that this is immediately apparent, as Gibson lavishes space on describing the book’s world before delving into the plot or lingering on the key players. Granted, that world is a glory to behold, mixing the baroquely unfamiliar with the mundane made absurd: murderous plastics-recycling mutants with a twisted aesthetic; a futuristic version of the Westboro Baptist Church; “Michikoids,” cute anime-inspired fembots that sprout additional eyes and limbs to commit assassinations, then go back to cleaning house; and more — all the conceptual razzle-dazzle that Gibson fans have come to expect.

The difficulty this poses for newcomers, who might wish for a little less gosh wow and a little more get on with the story, is academic. The story starts in medias res; readers must adapt on their own or fall by the wayside. Gibson’s prose is as powerful as ever, packing a shovelful of world-building into each sentence, and eventually — like, 20-something chapters in eventually — the reader will be rewarded with an engaging narrative. The story, when it arrives, concerns a young woman named Flynne, who lives somewhere in the American South, sometime in the foreseeable future. Life is pretty much the same for the rural poor in this future as it is now, and the only real economy in Flynne’s small town is centered on the drug trade. Flynne scrapes out a living by hunting down bugs in virtual software, so she’s happy to get another possible gig from her brother, a former Marine with a lingering disability from his time in haptic recon (think drone surveillance, futurized). The job is supposed to be simple; in true caper fashion, it isn’t. Soon Flynne finds herself embroiled in an utterly bizarre plot involving a future timeline and the peripherals of the title, which are exactly what they sound like: tools meant to facilitate human-computer interaction. These just happen to be human-based (but drastically modified) biomechanoids that can be interfaced with and run remotely.

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Flynne isn’t an engaging enough protagonist to keep readers’ attention, but the world she discovers and the events swirling around her are more than enough to make up for this. Gibson fans will be absolutely thrilled. Other readers might wish to visit some of his earlier works instead of onboarding with this one.

“Ancillary Justice,” the first novel in Ann Leckie’s far-future posthuman space opera series, recently became the first novel to win the “triple crown” of the genre (the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards), but not without controversy. The central question is whether the story’s structural gimmick — the protagonist’s tendency to refer to all people as “she” regardless of actual gender or even humanity — is sufficiently mind-blowing as to merit all the accolades. It isn’t a gimmick, though; it’s a coup. Rather than seriously entertain the endless, if stupid, debate on whether women have a place in stories of the future, Leckie’s book does the literary equivalent of rolling its eyes and walking out of the room. Her refusal to waste energy on stupidity forces her audience to do the same: A few pages into the first novel, the reader gives up trying to guess each character’s actual gender, and just accepts that this will be a story full of interesting women doing awesome things.

The second book of the series, ANCILLARY SWORD (Orbit, paper, $16), continues this assumption-altering tradition. Breq, the vengeful artificial intelligence who spent the first novel hunting down her maker, Lord of the Radch Anaander Mianaai, has now become Breq Mianaai, after forging an alliance with part of her old enemy to help fight the other parts. To that end, Anaander gives her a ship and crew of her own, and sends her to the Athoek system, one of many worlds “civilized” by the Radchaai at the point of a gun. Breq immediately realizes something is wrong in the system, though all looks well on the surface. She must gain a greater understanding of the Athoeki in order to root out the revolutionaries, spies and alien vanguards among them — which is difficult, as the quintessentially inhuman Breq has trouble understanding even the most basic aspects of how human beings think and function.

This is the most powerful element of the story. Where the first novel explored the consequences of a human transcending individuality (namely Anaander Mianaai, whose thousands of minds have split and brought the Radchaai to civil war), here we see the consequences of a many-minded entity being reduced to simple humanity. Throughout the novel, even as she struggles to unify her crew and the Athoeki, Breq shows the strain of her tremendous loss. In the process, Leckie thumbs her nose again at science fiction tradition, which abounds with disabled people being made whole by technology, and with nonhumans inexplicably yearning for humanity. The technology of the Radchaai is miraculous, but it cannot repair identity. And why would any entity with a truly nonhuman identity ever crave humanity? Where Leckie poked holes in sexist thought in the last book, here she attacks the self-absorption of science fiction itself. After all, is the genre truly meant to explore new ways of thinking? Or should it just endlessly stroke the egos of its assumed audience? Leckie once again makes it delightfully clear that one of these questions is just too stupid to be worth her time.