From polar peril to fantasy futures — our pick of the best new sci-fi

Ally Wilkes follows her remarkable 2022 debut novel All The White Spaces with another tale of polar exploration disintegrating into supernatural-tinged disaster. That first novel was set in the Antarctic shortly after the first world war. Where the Dead Wait (Titan £9.99) takes us to the late 19th century and the opposite end of the planet. There, among the Arctic ice floes, Captain William Day is seeking Jesse Stevens, his former second-in-command who has gone missing along with his ship and crew.

Day’s last expedition to the same region 13 years earlier ended in a gruesome orgy of death and cannibalism, and he is looking both to restore his tainted reputation and repair a relationship with Stevens that was far more than comradely. The novel’s relentless unfurling of horrors is bracingly excruciating, as Wilkes again shows how, amid desperation and desolation, people succumb to their worst impulses and the ghosts of guilt and shame roam free.

There’s a different kind of quest in Aliya Whiteley’s Three Eight One (Solaris £18.99), in which young protagonist Fairly embarks on a rite of passage customarily undertaken by young people in her village. The account of her pilgrimage — a document floating among the vast data oceans of 2024 — is littered with references to “cha”, a word whose meaning shifts constantly. Likewise, verb tenses and pronouns are in flux, while triangles and instances of the number three recur, and there are plays on words and cryptic clues aplenty.

Helping to decipher all this is historian Rowena Savalas who, three centuries hence, provides comment and analysis on Fairly’s text in the form of copious footnotes. Everything Fairly has written could well be some piece of ephemeral online fiction, but Rowena finds parallels with her own life, and the narrative becomes a source of consolation as well as fascination. Three Eight One could not be more different from Whiteley’s much-lauded 2021 novel about alien immigrants, Skyward Inn; yet it’s a worthy successor, brilliant in its playful inventiveness.

From one numerically titled novel to another: Thirteen Ways To Kill Lulabelle Rock (Angry Robot £9.99), the debut novel from Maud Woolf. Its scenario: in the near future, celebrities can commission perfect living duplicates of themselves. These copies, known as Portraits, help defray the pressures of fame and can even realise the star’s dream of an alternative life out of the limelight.

Hugely popular actress Lulabelle Rock engages one of her own Portraits to assassinate all the others, in order to stoke publicity for her next movie. But as the replica Lulabelle goes about the task with ruthless precision, she begins to question her mission — a problem exacerbated when she falls in love with one of her targets. Chapters are themed after tarot cards, lending events a sense of occult mystique. There’s a lot to love about the decadent demi-monde that Woolf evokes and our heroine’s lethal, gun-toting progress.

If the ultra-rich are targets for Woolf, Andrew Hunter Murray’s The Sanctuary (Blackstone $26.99/Cornerstone £9.99) takes a satirical blowtorch to the egocentric madness exhibited by certain billionaires. Sir John Pemberley, one of the world’s wealthiest men, has built himself a perfect society on an offshore island. The place is not only Eden but Noah’s Ark — an attempt to preserve the best of humankind and ensure the survival of our race beyond the environmental catastrophe of the Anthropocene epoch.

Ben is a portrait painter whose fiancée Cara has left him to work on Pemberley’s project. Looking to win her back, Ben travels to the island. Predictably, paradise is morally polluted, its creator harbouring ambitions that veer into Bond villain territory. All of this makes for a sturdy, compelling exploration of the point where philanthropy crosses into megalomania.

Murray’s novel features someone at least purporting to save the planet. In the far-flung future of Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson’s The Principle Of Moments (Gollancz £18.99), Earth is long past rescue, its biosphere poisoned and dead. Time travel, however, enables a gifted few to visit it in the past — among them Obi Amadi, who has become the lover of Prince George, the future George IV, in Regency London.

While Obi wrestles with the suffocating strictures of imperial Britain, Asha Akindele rebels against servitude under a galactic emperor, Thracin, in the year 6066. Naturally, the paths of these two intersect, their meeting the springboard for a series of battles and adventures spanning time and space and involving the fulfilment of an ancient religious prophecy.

Jikiemi-Pearson wrote this novel, the first in a trilogy, between the ages of 16 and 18, and although it is an assured, mature piece of work, every page nonetheless shines with the vigour and passion of youth. And the foregrounding of black and LGBT characters adds further freshness.

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café