IN ONE WAY by SJ Morden (Gollancz, £7.99), Xenosystems corporation has won a NASA contract to build the first permanent base on Mars.

Of course, the eternal problem with contracting out government jobs is that the successful bidder must cut costs to the bone in order to simultaneously meet its customer's budget and shareholders' expectations of profit.

Luckily, Xenosystems also runs a prison in California, so there's a big saving straight away — instead of sending expensively trained professional astronauts and engineers to Mars, they recruit a bunch of murderers and sex offenders who are serving life without parole and therefore have nothing to lose except, as it turns out, their sanity and their lives.

This red-planet thriller belongs to one of the oldest SF traditions, in which near-future science is extrapolated from current knowledge and technology. It's tense, very involving and driven by the human need for hope, pride and meaningful work as well as by greed, prejudice and paranoia.

A farm boy with a slight talent for magic, a delight in learning and a willingness to work hard wins a place at the Academy in Cold Iron by Miles Cameron (Gollancz, £16.99).

On his way home for the winter holiday he stops at an inn, where a chance encounter enmeshes him in the desperate struggle against a reactionary conspiracy to restore absolutist rule of the aristocracy and put the racially impure back in their subservient place.

This opening part of a trilogy contains lots of swords and sorcery but lots more too. There's romance, comedy, politics and a lavishly detailed creation of a medieval city on the cusp between feudalism and capitalism and I await the second instalment with great impatience.

I'm equally eager for part two of the trilogy which begins with The Ember Blade by Chris Wooding (Gollancz, £20), one of the most enjoyable and well-thought-out heroic fantasies I've read in a while.

Thirty years before the book opens, the imperialistic Krodans conquered the rather more laid-back nation of Ossia. Teenager Aren is a son of the native elite and loyal to the empire — it has, after all, brought law and discipline to a land that lacked both.

But when a family tragedy utterly changes his material situation, he has no choice but to turn against his own comprador class and throw himself into the nationalist cause for death or freedom.

Davis and Chaz are cops sent into "snapshots" — exact recreations of their city on a particular date, in Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson (Gollancz, £10.99).

There they gather evidence about a crime known to have happened on that day, which prosecutors can then use in the real world. When they've finished, the replica is switched off, with its matter recycled for the next snapshot.

Of course, the people they're investigating consider themselves the real thing, unless the detectives have reason to tell them otherwise.

This ingenious crime story works very well as a novella, the perfect length for allowing the reader's mind to be enjoyably boggled and bent.