Gavin Chait’s first novel, Lament for the Fallen (Doubleday, £14.99), is a refreshingly different take on the old “alien-falls-to-Earth-bearing-gifts” chestnut. Joshua Ossai lives in the West African village of Ewuru, blessed by a water turbine, up-to-the-minute technology, and an AI known as sphere. This farming existence, however, is frequently threatened by refugees from the war-torn north, and the vicious attacks of ravaging warlords. When Joshua and his fellow villagers see something fall from the sky, they investigate and discover a crashed starship and its pilot, a bizarre metal-skinned alien who can speak their language. Samara is from the world of Achenia, a near-immortal soldier on the run from a space prison known as Tartarus. What follows is an exhilarating story of mutual co‑operation as Joshua nurses Samara back to health so that he can return and destroy Tartarus, and Samara assists the villagers against the brutal warlords. It’s a compulsively readable, life-affirming tale told in direct, lambent prose, and Chait does a masterful job of juxtaposing a traditional African setting with a convincing depiction of a far-future alien society.

The second book in the duology that started with The Abyss Beyond Dreams, Peter F Hamilton’s Night Without Stars (Macmillan, £20) is set 250 years later on the benighted planet of Bienvenido. Invaded by the evil Fallers – hive-mind aliens who can take on human form – the planet and its settlers are facing annihilation. Tech-augmented Kysandra, a “warrior angel” and leader of the underground resistance, molecular physicist Laura Brandt, forest warden Florian and hyperspace theorist Joey Stein – as well as a complement of ANAdroids – find themselves up against both the Fallers and the PSR, the fascist government that rules Bienvenido. It’s a thrilling, multi-viewpoint ride, and while in lesser hands the vast dramatis personae might have become entangled and indistinguishable, Hamilton maintains the reader’s interest in the cast of varied characters and invests the various plot threads with equal significance. He even ties all the loose ends together in a satisfying denouement.

Tough, sardonic Hail Bristol is a gunrunner with her own ship who twenty years before the story opens left the matriarchal Indranan Empire on a quest to track down her father’s killer. She’s also the daughter of the empress who, when Hail’s sisters are killed, has Hail return home to take her place as heir. In Behind the Throne (Orbit, £8.99), debut novelist KB Wagers expertly charts Hail’s reluctant acceptance of her role, and the realisation that the Empire is crumbling and that forces behind the throne will stop at nothing to achieve its downfall. Interstellar empire space operas are 10-a-penny and easy to do badly, lending themselves to cliche and overplayed melodrama, but the first volume of the Indranan War series follows in the tradition of Anne Leckie’s Ancillary series to produce a fast-paced story of political intrigue and gender issues held together by a tight plot and a cast of sympathetic characters. Behind the Throne is thought-provoking entertainment and great fun.

Alastair Reynolds’s 14th novel Revenger (Gollancz, £18.99) hits the ground running with teenage sisters Arafura and Adrana Ness leaving the world of Mazarile aboard the sunjammer Monetta’s Mourn on a quest to discover technological treasures hidden amid the ruins of a long-vanished alien civilisation. Some of Reynolds’s past novels may have suffered problems of pacing, but it’s a charge that can’t be brought against Revenger, the opening book of a series. The intriguing far-future setting is presented to the reader piecemeal through Arafuma’s perceptions, a skilful ploy which not only heightens tension but builds a tantalising picture of a universe to be explored in subsequent volumes. It’s also something of a departure for Reynolds, a swashbuckling thriller – Pirates of the Caribbean meets Firefly – that nevertheless combines the author’s trademark hard SF with effective, coming-of-age characterisation.

Briddey is an executive for a mobile phone company, responsible for the development and deployment of cutting-edge products, and in the line of duty agrees to the suggestion of her co-worker boyfriend to have an EED – an neurological emotion-enhancer – installed. What should facilitate the communication of emotions instead bestows Briddey with telepathy, and we follow her as her new ability makes her hectic life, with her meddling Irish-American family and various suitors, almost unmanageable. In Crosstalk (Gollancz, £16.99), Connie Willis has crafted a lightweight, sci-fi romcom satire for the 21st century, firing broadsides at our dependency on hi‑tech gadgetry and social media. As with a few of her more recent novels, Crosstalk wears its research rather heavily and could have been shorn of a hundred pages. That said, Willis tells a fast-paced tale with well-observed dialogue and some gentle humour.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Jani and the Great Pursuit (Solaris).