The most dangerous alien in the universe, a charcoal-chewing telepathic hamster that can kill an elephant, watches as two lovers separate. Carroll is one of the few novelists who can write horror that relies not on gore or shock but on mental disquiet.Ī scientist broadcasts the Brandenburg Concertos to the stars while listening to a sentient computer with the voice of his lost love.

Except he's already dead - or is he? Timelines clash, unborn children materialise and somehow the memories of an elderly mistress of many great artists of the 1920s become the key to what is happening. The Marriage of Sticks (Indigo, £6.99) Buy it at BOL combines thriller, mystery and horror in an adulterous love story that sees a repressed dealer in rare books attend a school reunion hoping to see her first boyfriend. Jonathan Carroll, on the other hand, writes like a dream: the kind that grabs you in its cold grip and tries to strangle you.

Scientific jargon abounds, events are heavily signposted and characterisation is thin. Into this world is thrown teenager Zoe Fisher, who has been surgically modified to increase her chances of surviving the toxic conditions. Unfortunately it is utterly deadly to human life and inhabited by tunnel-dwelling aliens who look like a cross between turtles and millipedes and behave like cuddly extras from a George Lucas film (lots of campfires, flint-topped spears and grunting). The planet Isis is a paradise of blue skies, tall trees and clear rivers. Infinitely less plausible is Robert Charles Wilson's BIOS (Millennium, £5.99), Buy it at BOL which wants to answer the same questions but lacks the rigour and intelligence. Revelation Space has been nominated for this year's BSFA award it would make a worthy winner. Fermi's paradox asks: 'If they're out there, why aren't they here?' Reynolds supplies hard-science answers that are plausible, entertaining and clever he even manages to make different flavours of neutrino sound interesting. Keys to the answer are predatory moons and a sentient sea.

On a planet known only for its desolation and razor storms, an obsessed archaeologist is searching for clues as to what cataclysmic event wiped out the Amarantin, a long-extinct alien race. Mixing shades of Banks and Gibson with gigatons of originality, he has pulled off that most difficult of SF tropes, believable aliens. O n the evidence of Revelation Space (Gollancz, £10.99), Buy it at BOL Alastair Reynolds is a name to watch.

The revelation space