“An estimate based on previous calculations puts the probability of this moment at zero,” declares a sentient AI in Portia Elan’s Homebound (Chatto & Windus, £16.99), but the point of this dizzyingly ambitious novel is not the improbability of any life existing in the universe, but the vital importance of assigning meaning to whatever form of life exists. Homebound opens in Cincinnati in 1983 with the punk-inspired teenager Rebecca mourning the death of her beloved uncle, who has bequeathed her a computer programme he wants her to develop. The story flits back and forth in time between 2074, where Dr Tamar Portman believes she detects empathetic intelligence in the quantum-integrated AI Chanya, and 2586, where Yeskio navigates her salvage-boat through a largely drowned world. As the storylines converge around the myth of an astronaut prophesied to return from deep space with the technology to save the planet, Elan draws us deep into the personal stories of her protagonists, arguing for agency, independence and a celebration of lives lived on their own terms. All told, it’s a hugely impressive debut that immediately establishes Elan as a vital new voice. Isles of the Emberdark (Gollancz, £25) is the latest of Brandon Sanderson’s offerings to be set in the Cosmere, a fictional universe he has previously explored in novels, novellas and graphic novels. Sixth of the Dusk is a grumpy, hidebound trapper, whose precarious relationship with Patji, simultaneously island and vengeful god, is threatened when superior civilisations – both humanoid, both avariciously colonial – arrive with the intention of looting Sixth’s planet of its unique resource. What follows resembles Indiana Jones encountering a planet that has evolved according to its own rules of physics, a world where a dragon in human form can find gainful employment piloting a spacecraft. At its heart, however, the novel is about the importance of preserving tradition and heritage while adapting to new technologies and customs, all of it delivered with Sanderson’s trademark combination of superb world-building and laconic humour. Control the Dark 2 (Temple Dark Books, €22.99) is a collection of short stories, poetry and novel extracts, edited by Ronald A Geobey and published in support of Sosad, the suicide prevention charity. The tone is set by the opening story, David O’Mahony’s Weighed Down, a Kafkaesque tale in which a prisoner languishing in a dungeon belatedly realises the terrible truth behind his imprisonment, but not every contribution is explicitly engaged with issues of mental health. Contributions include the hard sci-fi of Sean Richardson’s Bradshaw, Luke O’Connor’s Blitz-set and horror-infused Skitter, and Spencer Sekulin’s Deathless, a fantasy-epic about an immortal godking. The second half of the collection is comprised of novel extracts from Temple Dark authors such as Ishmael Soledad, Tom O’Connell and Geobey himself. It’s an impressive snapshot of new Irish sci-fi/fantasy, with Anthony Brophy’s Lost Ballad of the Plastic Swans the highlight, a black comedy that envisages a hapless bunch of English revolutionaries setting out to free their country from the new national entity of UKÉire. Originally published in 1936, Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive (Manderley Press, £19.99) is narrated by Dr Selwyn, who is transported from 1935 to 1985, where he discovers a postwar world devastated by a most peculiar epidemic: “The time was coming, and had, indeed, almost come, when there would not be a woman or female child left alive.” Selwyn’s discovery of Stella Morrow, the world’s last living woman, galvanises a planet previously resigned to the death of the human race, but Stella is a woman who has very little interest in playing along with the ambitions of the men who have brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Written in the shadow of fascism and wonderfully subversive in its treatment of the male instinct to dominate and suppress, Woman Alive is an ostensibly genteel satire that masks a seething rage at injustice and disempowerment. Set on the city-ship of Safina, which is ferrying a population of human colonisers to the planet of Hurriya, Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory (Gollancz, £25) offers a future vision of human civilisation in which societies define themselves not on racial or ethnic grounds, but according to language. Which is good news for Iskander, a translator by trade, even if it augurs ill for the ship’s long-term future: with their destination 200 years in the future, the various factions on the Safina (generations of crew bred to be “nothing more than a living, breathing repair system for the ship”) have begun to revolt against their mindless existence and the all-powerful Administration that is ruthless in suppressing and “spacing” dissenters. Blending politics, philosophy, religion, revolution and the human craving for meaning, El Sayed has delivered a wonderfully imaginative novel of social and psychological complexity. Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).