Ann Leckie’s stunning debut novel, Ancillary Justice, deservedly won all the genre’s top awards. The sequel, Ancillary Sword (Orbit, £8.99), follows Fleet Captain Breq Mianaai on a posting to Athoek station where she confronts the corruption at the heart of the Radch empire while trying to stabilise a volatile political situation. In the first book Breq was a starship: “An AI controlling an enormous troop carrier and thousands of ancillaries, human bodies, part of myself. At the time I had not thought of myself as a slave, but I had been a weapon of conquest …” Leckie uses the idea of the empire’s utilisation of conquered citizens as ancillary bodies to explore concepts of slavery, empire, and post-colonialism, while covering issues as diverse as individual identity, gender roles, wealth and the abuse of privilege. The Ancillary series is mature, literate SF of a high calibre, written by someone with a thorough knowledge of the genre’s tropes and an ability to present complex ideas in a thought-provoking and entertaining way. Ancillary Sword is guaranteed to win the author another clutch of awards.

In The Abyss Beyond Dreams (Macmillan, £20), the first volume of a duology that will conclude with Night Without Stars, Peter F Hamilton skilfully fuses his Void and Commonwealth series, though prior reading isn’t necessary to appreciate this standalone story. The Void is a pocket universe within ours, a strange realm with its own warped physics. Over the centuries human colonists have been lured into this realm, and on the world of Bienvenido they are fighting a peculiar form of alien invasion known as the Fallers, egg-like objects that descend from the heavens, ingest individuals and turn them into flesh-eating zombies. When a man crash lands on Bienvenido, on a mission to investigate rumours of lost civilisations within the Void, he discovers that the Fallers threaten not only human settlers, but also the very existence of the universe. Hamilton expertly interleaves disparate storylines, introducing new characters and settings, and challenges the reader to work out their relevance to the greater picture.

Gary Gibson has been turning out highly readable, intriguing wide-screen space operas for almost a decade, action-adventure novels of ideas that bear comparison with the work of Peter Hamilton and Al Reynolds. With Extinction Game (Tor, £18.99) Gibson has changed tack and produced what might be his finest novel to date. It’s a great premise: lone survivors have been saved from multiple devastated alternate Earths and set to work for the “Authority”. Jerry Beche finds himself taken to Easter Island on another planet Earth: his mission, with a team of fellow Pathfinders, is to travel to parallel worlds in search of weapons and information. Beche is an impressive creation; suffering near-insanity when saved, and grieving for the loss of his wife, he becomes convinced that the mysterious Authority has ulterior motives. Extinction Game is a gripping mystery and can only increase Gibson’s growing reputation as a master of core SF.

Kim Newman’s An English Ghost Story (Titan Books, £7.99) opens conventionally enough with the Naremore family leaving the city for a quiet life in the West Country, and specifically the Hollow, an ancient house buried deep in the Somerset countryside. What starts as an idyll soon darkens as they discover that the house is haunted, and Newman manifests the ghosts with deft sleight-of-hand. Interleaved with the tale of the likable Naremore family is the backstory of the house and its inhabitants, presented in the form of stories and journal entries by other hands, adding depth and a change of pace. With touches of traditional MR James-style spookiness, and a dash of dysfunctional domesticity a la Joanna Trollope, the author ramps up the tension towards a wonderfully satisfying and haunting denouement.

What do you get when you shackle a popular TV actor to a New York Times bestselling author and instruct the latter to turn out a sub-Dan Brown doomsday SF adventure? The result is A Vision of Fire by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin (Simon & Schuster, £12.99), a slick, fast-paced page-turner replete with nuclear threat, occult cabals and an epidemic of apocalyptic visions suffered by children worldwide. Caitlin O’Hara is a child psychologist tasked with treating the Indian UN ambassador’s daughter, who is suffering violent fits and hallucinations. When these apocalyptic visions spread to other children across the globe, O’Hara hares off to all points of the compass to investigate. The authors handle O’Hara’s relationship with her deaf son and her Indian patient with touching sensitivity, but the novel never rises above the mediocre. Nevertheless, there will be further volumes of The Earthend Saga.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Jani and the Greater Game (Solaris). To order these titles go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.