EDEN by Tim Lebbon (Titan, £7.99) imagines a near future where, amid climate and pollution emergencies, virgin zones have been established around the world to allow nature to recover.

Humans are banned from these reserves but some adventurers can’t resist illegally infiltrating the zones to set records for traversing them. One such group enters the so-far unconquered Eden, to discover that nature has indeed taken control and is ruthless in protecting itself.

You daren’t take your eyes off this story in case it lunges at you when you’re not looking. It’s a terrifying adventure from one of SF horror’s current masters.

Carter makes his living taking salvage from derelict spaceships in Re-Coil by JT Nicholas (Titan, £7.99) but his latest job goes badly wrong and results in his death.

Luckily, like all citizens, he has standard health insurance and therefore a back-up of his personality is automatically downloaded into a new body or “coil.”

Of course, he has no memories of what happened between making the back-up and dying, so has no idea why a hit-man tries to murder him as soon as he comes round.

This non-stop action thriller pits workers against corporations and knows which side it’s on.

Some readers will have mixed feelings about legendary British comic strip The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire (Rebellion, £19.99).

There was a time when ignorant educationalists banned comics from many schools, the only exemption being for a rather dull didactic weekly Look & Learn. It contained just one strip, which meant many children of the 1960s and 1970s followed Emperor Trigo's struggles only from lack of choice.

It’s set on a distant planet, where the visionary leader of a nomadic tribe decides to build a great city so his people can settle in safety from warmongering neighbours. Trigan society is a weird mixture of a Graeco-Roman lifestyle and futuristic technology.

Mike Butterworth's stories are enjoyable adventures about coups, revolutions, wars and extraterrestrial invasions. But it was always Don Lawrence’s art that caught critical attention. The painted panels, with their amazing detail, are still simply astonishing, especially when viewed on a backlit screen — the book is available in digital formats.

It’s hard to imagine illustration work of that quality and intensity being commissioned today, let alone for a children’s paper. This first volume of an intended complete collection is great value, with more than 300 full-colour pages.

High quality escapist fun is on offer in The Martian Menace (Titan, £7.99), where Eric Brown playfully pinches from the works of some favourite Edwardian authors, chiefly Arthur Conan Doyle and HG Wells.

It takes place some years after the invasion from Mars described in War of the Worlds, and the Martians have returned to Earth. This time, their methods are conciliatory and a prosperous peace exists between them and the humans.

But colonialism often hides its true purposes behind benign condescension, as Holmes and Watson discover when they are asked to solve the murder of a prominent Martian philosopher.