Ann Leckie’s first four novels were award-winning space operas, which brought something refreshingly different to the genre with her examination of gender, politics and power – not to mention narrative technique. Her debut fantasy novel, The Raven Tower (Orbit, £16.99), is similarly groundbreaking. It may seem familiar, with its dispossessed lords, vengeful gods and soldier heroes, but Leckie’s central character is a transgender warrior, and the complex narrative is told partly in the second person. The warrior is Eolo, a loyal servant of Mawat, heir to the throne of Iraden. On returning from battle, the pair discover that Mawat’s father has vanished and his uncle has usurped the throne. It falls on Eolo to investigate the disappearance. A god in the form of a rock called Strength and Patience of the Hill recounts the fraught history of the Iraden kingdom as Leckie again examines the role of power in society – this time, that of manipulative gods – and spins a gripping tale of intrigue and politics.

Tade Thompson’s critically acclaimed Rosewater centred on psychic government agent Kaaro and his work investigating the emergence of an alien life form in Nigeria: it was set in the eponymous shanty town formed around the alien’s vast dome. His follow-up, The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, £8.99), tells the complex story of how humanity reacts to, and interacts with, an alien invasion. Kaaro takes a minor role this time, as we follow his lover Aminat working to locate Alyssa Sutcliffe, an amnesiac human who has become alien. Meanwhile, the mayor of Rosewater has declared independence, much to the ire of the Nigerian government. A fragmented, non-linear narrative constantly head-hops between no fewer than eight characters, but Thompson is an expert storyteller and ties up the multiple storylines in a mesmerising finale. Although this is a standalone, it’s best appreciated after reading Rosewater.

Following two award-winning short-story collections, Helen Marshall’s first novel The Migration (Titan, £8.99) fulfils her early promise in a moving study of love, family bonds, climate change and personal transformation. Against a frighteningly realistic backdrop of global warming and a pandemic that affects children, teenager Sophie Perella, her younger sister Kira and their mother move from Toronto to England following marital break-up and the diagnosis that Kira is affected by juvenile idiopathic immunodeficiency syndrome. The family moves in with Sophie’s aunt, an Oxford professor researching the black death who works with an organisation treating the afflicted children. Spectres of climate change and the plague haunt the novel, but what in lesser hands might have been a gloom-laden read is transformed by the author’s quiet optimism.

The Autist (Infinity Plus, £10.99), Stephen Palmer’s thematic sequel to his well received 2016 novel Beautiful Intelligence, is a long, discursive investigation into a world dominated by artificial intelligence. It’s 2100, and AIs have spawned Artificial General Intelligences, ubiquitous god-like entities that operate independently from human interference. The novel follows British data-detective Mary Vine and her investigations into an AGI that appears to be nudging the human race towards becoming a homogeneous, affectless collective. Aided by Nigerian Ulu and her autistic brother, whose condition enables him to communicate with AGIs, Mary travels to Thailand in search of the corporation responsible for the culpable AGI. What follows is a twisty exploration of the technological destiny of the human race and the lengths to which corporations and individuals will go to manipulate others, culminating in a bittersweet finale in which, perhaps inevitably, only one party achieves what they desire.

Temi Oh’s first novel, Do You Dream of Terra-Two? (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), combines a number of genre tropes – a planet Earth ravaged by global warming, a starship journey and stellar colonisation – to produce an ambitious 500-page coming-of-age blockbuster. It’s 2012 on an Earth very much like our own, except that Britain has a space exploration programme and ultra-fast space flight has been developed. Several nations are sending ships to an Earth-like extra-solar world: six British teenagers selected for their abilities, along with four adult astronauts, embark on a mission to Terra-Two that will take more than 20 years to complete. The narrative follows the viewpoint of each of the six, building up a comprehensive psychological profile of the teenagers as they experience the trauma of confinement, fraught interpersonal relationships and nostalgia for everything they have left behind. It’s a slow-burner, with psychodrama standing in for action for two thirds of the book, but Oh is excellent at portraying the aching sense of loss on a one-way trip to the stars.

• Murder Served Cold by Eric Brown is published by Severn House.