Andy Sawyer, from the Liverpool University Science Fiction Foundation, provides an insightful historical overview of SF, arguing that it is more a literature of ideas than a specific literary genre. Authors such as Jonathan Lethem, Michael Moorcock and China Miéville reaffirm, with their new books, that their writing straddles critical and popular boundaries.

Ray Bradbury was one who clearly fitted that category. Bradbury's death in 2012 prompted US President  Barack Obama to state that his "gift for storytelling reshaped our culture and expanded our world". Liverpool University Professor David Seed's Ray Bradbury (University of Illinois Press, $44.95), analyses Bradbury's huge output in books, magazines and media, ranging over his creative processes, background influences and personal philosophy. Seed's scholarly, yet accessible, appreciation, supplemented by a comprehensive bibliography, reaffirms the ongoing standing of Bradbury's work, especially in the context of his most famous books such as Fahrenheit 451.

Lethem's nine stories in Lucky Alan (Jonathan Cape, $45) range widely in content. Their Back Pages follows a bizarre group, including early American comic strip characters, the Dingbat family, stranded on a remote Pacific island after an air crash, their fate recounted in a graphic narrative sequence. In The King of Sentences, two young bookshop employees track down the reclusive King of Sentences, but their reward is decidedly stripped down. In Traveler​ Home, a man, in a seeming dreamlike sequence, finds a baby left by wolves on his doorstep. Lethem's stories blend SF and fantasy into a surreal reality.

Moorcock, in the first book of a trilogy, The Whispering Swarm (Gollancz, $29.99), has created a new hybrid – a fantasy/SF novel cum autobiography. Moorcock has combined his memories, from the Second World War to the 1960s, with fictional adventures in Alsacia, an alternate secret inner London, where he falls in love with the beautiful adventuress Moll Midnight. Here, we also find real and fictitious heroes, such as Buffalo Bill, the Three Musketeers and Dick Turpin. The two narrative strands, however, often sit uneasily. It might have been better for Moorcock to have written two separate books, an autobiography of his fascinating bohemian life and a separate novel on his alternate picaresque London.

Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion (Macmillan, $29.99) collects 28 short stories from the three-time Arthur C. Clarke Award winner. Miéville also ranges widely in subject content, but especially focuses on dystopian futures induced by climate change or global pandemics. The Keep portrays a world devastated by a deadly epidemic, which not only kills, but also opens up the earth around the victims. In Covehithe, a critique of oil capitalism, resurrected oil rigs march out of the sea, while, in Polynia, giant icebergs mysteriously appear over London highlighting, in more ways than one, climate change mismanagement.

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife (Orbit $29.99), describes a near-future drought-ridden southwestern US,  where access to Colorado River water is the battleground. Federal power over the states has been weakened by deregulation and privatisation. Power is largely exercised by powerful corporations who wish to retain water access for Nevada and California, leaving Arizona and Texas as the dust bowl epicentre. Bacigalupi's gripping, updated Chinatown, scenario dramatically follows the storyline of Angel Velasquez, a "water knife" fixer working for a female Las Vegas water mogul.

The books under review reaffirm that while SF is about the future, they also reflect contemporary fears for the future, as reaffirmed by Kim Stanley Robinson's 26th-century climate devastated Earth in Aurora (Orbit, $29.99). The first starship, with its multigenerational crew, is nearly 160 years into a 170-year voyage to the star Tau Ceti. Robinson underpins his narrative with scientific accuracy, documenting the problems that the ship's 2000 people, living in 24 different biomes, confront as the ship's technologies run down. Then come the traumatic biological issues faced by the first landing group on a Tau Ceti moon. Human disputes on Aurora erupt, ensuring its artificial intelligence must take control, noting, "Life is complex and entropy is real." Aurora is undoubtedly Robinson's best book since his groundbreaking Mars trilogy.

Colin Steele is a Canberra reviewer.