The first Otherland was a towering achievement; this is even better. Williams's imagination and daring seem to know no bounds. All of our favourite characters are back - Renie, the resourceful black South African heroine, her diminutive bushman friend (and future lover?) !Xabbu, the sickly but oh-so-brave teenager Orlando Gardiner and his only friend Fredericks - a girl, of all things, in real life (RL). The present volume is set almost entirely in the virtual reality (VR) worlds of Otherland. Our heroines and heroes are trapped in VR and venture from one artificial world to the next, always dazed, confused and in mortal danger but somehow clinging to the faint hope of escape. I counted eleven separate VR worlds, from a terrifying simulation of an insect world - giant insects, unfortunately - to the dark intrigues of Renaissance Venice - run by a lady colloquially known as Cardinal Zen's mistress. Williams brings each VR world to life with a truly formidable attention to detail, without ever slowing the narrative's breathtaking pace. Williams's impressive structure keeps track of the individual pawns on the Otherland chessboard but never loses sight of the overall state of the game. We were hooked by the cliff-hanger ending of Volume 1 and, after another huge book, we're still dangling by a thread, desperately seeking the third instalment. Can the evil empire of the Grail Brotherhood be defeated? Will it ever end?
Corrupting Dr. Nice, by John Kessel (Gollancz, 287pp, £16.99 in UK)
A gentle time-travel romance, in the style of last year's Oracle, by Ian Watson (now out in Vista paperback). Gollancz seems to specialise in the whimsical, satirical brand of SF, leaving the major blockbusters to Voyager and Orbit. Kessel tells a light-hearted tale of a world where tourists can travel back in time to be present at critical junctures, such as Caesar's assassination and the slaughter of the Incas by Spanish troops. In more extreme cases, the tourists can join in, some even getting deservedly massacred along with the Incas. Kessel has fun with the strange world of 1st-century Galilee where local zealots rebel against the interlopers from the future with their conspicuous affluence and insatiable desire for souvenir trinkets. If the main plot, despite an unscrupulously sexy leading lady, is rather dull, there are many amusing interludes. I particularly liked Lex, the smug artificial intelligence judge, solemnly delivering its considered, crowd-pleasing verdict: "Guilty but innocent."
Inversions, by Iain M. Banks (Voyager, 345pp, £16.99 in UK)
Iain Banks, with or without his middle initial, writes well. This is an SF novel: the setting is an unknown land with two suns in the sky; one of its two component stories has an undercurrent of magic. Otherwise, however, it could be read as a mainstream fiction set in a dark period of kings, dukes, disease and war. Its two interwoven stories echo each other in an elegant symmetry without ever becoming entangled. One concerns a charismatic female doctor who has found a niche tending the king at the male-dominated royal court; the second tells the story of the bodyguard to the Prime Protector of a nearby kingdom. The women, in their different ways, profoundly affect the course of history in these obscure lands. Banks's style is spare and matter-of-fact; he uses two narrator eyewitnesses of imperfect reliability to tell the twin stories. The overall effect is one of great elegance and style with a depth of psychological insight not usually associated with the SF genre.
One of Us, by Michael Marshall Smith (HarperCollins, 307pp, £14.99 in UK)
SF can accommodate many styles. Here it's the hard-boiled crime thriller with harddrinking, hard-smoking, hard-done-by Hap Thompson telling his story. Hap's life is a mess but it gets a lot messier when he starts storing other people's dreams and memories in his addled brain. The story-telling is just as good, but the tone is a lot lighter than in Smith's brilliant and scary Spares, with its horrifying images of cloned humans stored for spare parts. Spares is earmarked as a future Spielberg movie and One of Us could make a great film, too. But we'd miss the deeply cynical humour which is a Smith trademark, and I don't know how they're going to do the scene where Hap's loyal domestic appliances (fridge, alarm clock, etc.) come to life to defend their master - a veritable deus-ex-washing-machine.
A Knight of the Word, by Terry Brooks (Orbit, 311pp, £16.99 in UK)
Sci-File enjoyed Running with the Demon (now out in paperback), the first of Brooks's modern-day fairy tales. Young Nest Freemark and her family fought the good fight against the incongruous evil forces nestling in Brooks's beautifully realised down-home America of Hopewell, Illinois. Nest and John Ross, the eponymous Knight, team up again five years on, this time in the big city of Seattle. In moving from the mysterious and atmospheric local park of Hopewell to the anonymous backdrop of Seattle's streets, Brooks loses much of the fairy-tale mood of the first book. The plot, with little tension, also suffers by comparison, and John Ross's crisis of identity is unconvincing - "Pull yourself together," the average reader is likely to think. His irritating miasma even extends to a failure to notice that one of his best friends (I can't give too much away) is, literally, a demon. However, we shouldn't judge by adult standards alone. Brooks is unfashionable enough to write fairy-tale books which children can enjoy, and the clarity and simplicity of his style is a feature of the Knight series.