Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

It was the year that two science fiction giants, Jack Vance and Doris Lessing, died in the fullness of their age; and the year that robbed us of the myriad-minded Iain Banks, much too young. It was the year in which a number of old masters put out major books: Stephen King's Doctor Sleep (Hodder & Stoughton), his sequel to The Shining, marked a potent return to form – the best King novel for a long time. Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam (Bloomsbury) marvellously concludes the trilogy of apocalyptic near-future fables she began with Oryx and Crake. Christopher Priest's eerily resonant The Adjacent (Gollancz) is one of his best novels; Alastair Reynolds's On the Steel Breeze (Gollancz) moves his ambitious Poseidon's Children series into interstellar space; and Graham Joyce's The Year of the Ladybird (Gollancz) showed that he is one of the best writers of ghost stories we have.

Terra by Mitch Benn

It was a year, too, of exciting new voices. Mitch Benn's Terra (Gollancz) was properly charming, funny and memorable – and disproved the carpers who thought its author only got his book deal off the back of his amiable media celebrity. It took me a while to "get" Stephanie Saulter's first novel, Gemsigns (Jo Fletcher Books), but it has proved a grower. Sofia Samatar's debut fantasy A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press) is gloriously vivid and rich. James Smythe's pitiless The Machine (HarperCollins) is the work of a young writer with a preternaturally powerful and distinctive voice. And Hugh Howey brought his near-future dystopian Wool trilogy to a conclusion with Dust (Century). Reviewers have compared his series to The Hunger Games; it hasn't quite captured the market in the way those books did, but it's better written and more thought-provoking. Interestingly, Howey's novels began as Amazon Kindle self-published projects that caught fire, leading to print-book deals and film rights. This, or something like it, will probably be the future of publishing.

Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer

Some of this year's books were spacious, bright and hopeful (for those interested in creating fantastic fictions, Jeff Vandermeer's opulent Wonderbook (Abrams) – subtitled "The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction" – was full of ideas and inspiration). More were grim and dark and dystopian, continuing a trend that has dominated the genre for a while now.

But this year made plain what is becoming increasingly evident: after many decades, the domination of the genre by US and UK writers is starting to crumble. Much of 2013's most important fantastika came from elsewhere. For the first time in living memory, the Man Booker prize shortlist contained more "fantasy" novels than realist ones: not least the winner, New Zealander Eleanor Catton's powerful magic-history fable The Luminaries (Granta). Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (Canongate) used quantum physics and alt-reality to explore the complexity of life on both the Japanese and North American sides of the Pacific.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

South African writer Lauren Beukes, winner of the 2011 Arthur C Clarke award for her sharp-toothed Zoo City, parlayed her genre reputation into global celebrity with The Shining Girls (HarperCollins), an international bestseller completely at ease with the conventions both of time-travel fiction and the psycho-killer thriller. Ioanna Bourazopoulou, a prizewinner in her native Greece, had her first English translation: What Lot's Wife Saw (Black & White Publishing) is a beautifully weird novel about future environmental collapse and human estrangement.

Likewise, Shimon Adaf, famous in his native Israel, had his absorbing, magical Bildungsroman Sunburnt Faces (PS Publishing) translated into English. Another Israeli, Lavie Tidhar, is better known over here (his last novel, Osama, won the World Fantasy award), but his new book The Violent Century (Hodder & Stoughton) may be his best yet: a blistering alt-historical retelling of a 20th century lousy with superheroes. Crime-fighting superheroes are now as likely to wear the burqa as a spandex two-piece.

After a long period when the default for the genre was white, male and western, it looks as though SF is about to go properly global.

• Adam Roberts's Jack Glass is published by Gollancz.