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Any book touted as the `adult Harry Potter' runs the risk of attracting critical parries from swords of the double-edged variety. If this wasn't enough, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell—the debut novel from Susanna Clarke—also invites comparisons with Jane Austen. Set in the early nineteenth-century, the action moves from genteel drawing rooms—albeit where a mischievous Faerie king sips tea with the wife of a very human government minister, to the bloody battleground of Waterloo, where giant hands of earth drag men to their doom. The juxtaposition of perfectly realised magical worlds and the everyday one with which JK Rowling and Philip Pullman so successfully captured our imaginations and the social comedy of Austen and Thackeray can easily be recognised. But less easy to pastiche is the ability of these writers to induce sheer narrative pleasure, and it is Clarke's great achievement that she succeeds with this hugely enjoyable read.

Gilbert Norrell is determined to single-handedly rehabilitate his sanitised and patriotic version of English magic, which has suffered a post-Enlightenment neglect after a richly dark history. He ruthlessly secures his place as England's only magician in two marvellously drawn feats. First, he brings the statutes of York Cathedral to life and then, to facilitate his entry into London society, he brings a young bride-to-be back from the dead—a feat with terrible consequences. However, another more naturally gifted magician—Jonathan Strange—emerges to become his pupil and later his rival. Strange becomes increasingly obsessed with the Raven King—the medieval lord-magician of the North of England and pursues his desire to recruit a fairy servant to the edge of madness. Whilst the differing characters of Norrell and Strange give the book a central human conflict, it is the tension between the dual natures of civilised and wilder magic that lends it a metaphysical texture that shades the narrative with wonderful and troubling descriptions of ships made of rain, paths between mirrors and faerie roads leading out of England to a bleak yet dazzling realm. Fortunately, the precision of her storytelling never reigns in Clarke's prodigious imagination.

Clarke's broad canvas of characters—including Wellington, Napoleon and Bryon, locations and tones are masterfully realised. However, sometimes her own enchantment with them leads her to drop her pace, although even at almost 800 pages, this is a book to which you'll muster up little resistance. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the perfect novel to take up residence in as the nights get longer. — Fiona Buckland

"Hard" SF based on real physics made huge demands on 1950's writers with no desktop computers. Perfectionists like Hal Clement did all their calculations of gravity, orbits and centrifugal forces using just a slide rule and book of log tables. Clement also worked hard to conceal this laborious effort: in Mission of Gravity (1953) there are no equations, but simply the convincing reality of the extraordinary planet Mesklin.

Mesklin is unusually massive and spins particularly fast: its "day" lasts not 24 hours but 18 minutes. The huge mass means an unthinkable gravity of 700 times Earth's, but only at the poles. Where the spin has most counter-effect, at the equator, the overall pull is a mere three times the earth's gravity. Humans can walk there, on crutches, to bargain with the centipede-like, hydrogen-breathing Mesklinites for the recovery of an expensive research probe that's been lost near the unreachable south pole.

It's Barlennan of Mesklin, captain of the native ship Bree, who steals the show. He's bright, brave, and experienced in sailing his world's liquid-methane seas. The immense journey to recover Earth's stranded treasure confronts Barlennan's crew with unexpected but ingeniously logical obstacles and menaces. Constantly in touch with humans by radio link, Barlennan is both grateful for the scientific insights these visitors provide and suspicious about what—as a mere "primitive"—he—he's carefully not being told. As journey's end approaches, Barlennan makes some quiet plans of his own... Mission of Gravity is an acknowledged classic of old-fashioned SF world-building. —David Langford

Post-modern to the nth degree, fermenting genre references and massive conceptual detail into data overload, Appleseed reconfigures the distant future through a century of science-fictional preconceptions and techo-pagan fantasy. Throwing the Stinky Meat Brain reader into a spaced-opera populated by exceptionally alien ETs, where not just the technology but the biology is future-shockingly outré where an AI interfaced humanity has been reduced to a nihilistic vulgar hedonism, Appleseed is a phantasmasgoriacal tuned-in, switched-on, tripped-out and hung-over epic in the spirit of the 60s brave New Worlds of New Wave SF; imagine Aldiss, Delany and Moorcock rewriting The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels as forensically graphic anti-erotic hard(core) SF.

In wired prose, Clute even dissects the online zeitgeist Most of the data streams displayed the Insort Geront logo, the fiery three-snake caduceus, the marque of the vastest of the godzillas—an ancient Human Earth term for any corporation, whether snail or trad dot.com or seeded nous cube, which having gone rogue was no longer subject to the rule of law of any individual state or planet or system Whether this is pretentious adolescent obscenity, a synaesthetic masterpiece which redefines the genre, or a honker of a shaggy dog story is a debate primed to run for years.—Gary S. Dalkin

This masterful follow-up to the 1993 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is an essential purchase for anyone who's serious about fantasy. Those who are serious about horror will also find it an excellent reference. The works of prolific and confusing authors such as Michael Moorcock, as well as authors such as J R R Tolkien, who have many posthumously published fragments are explained with admirable clarity. Especially fascinating are the numerous terms for motifs and themes, constituting what the editors call a map of the many "fuzzy sets" in the universe of fantasy fiction—terms such as "crosshatch," "polder" and "water margin." There are many entries on horror movies and the better-known horror writers (only writers who write no fantasy, such as Richard Laymon, are excluded). You'll also find carefully written definitions of horror, dark fantasy, supernatural fiction, gothic fiction, sychological thrillers and weird fiction. Locus calls The Encyclopedia of Fantasy "massive and welcome" and writes: "This will be the standard reference for years to come." —Amazon.com

Eoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl, describes his creation as "Die Hard with fairies". He's not far wrong. Artemis Fowl is the most ingenious criminal mastermind in history and with his trusty sidekicks, Butler and Juliet, in tow he hatches a cunning plot to divest the fairyfolk of their pot of gold. Of course, he isn't foolish enough to believe in all that "gold at the end of the rainbow" nonsense. Rather, he knows that the only way to separate the little people from their stash is to kidnap one of their number and wait for the ransom to arrive. But when the time comes to put his plan into action he reckons without Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon (Lower Elements Police Reconnaisance) Unit—a sort of extra small Clarice Starling with pointy ears and wings—and her senior officer Commander Root, a man (sorry, elf) who will stop at nothing to get her back.

Fantastic stuff from beginning to end, Artemis Fowl is a rip-roaring, 21st-century romp of the highest order. The author has let his imagination run riot by combining folklore, fantasy and a fistful of high-tech funk in an outrageously devilish book that could well do for fairies what Harry Potter has done for wizardry. But be warned: this is no gentle frolic so don't be fooled by the fairy subject matter. Instead what we have here is well written, sophisticated, rough and tumble storytelling with enough high-octane attitude to make it a seriously cool read for anyone over the age of 10. —Susan Harrison

Pears Cyclopaedia for 1993-1994, the 102nd Edition, with ISBN 0720720249 .These older editions of Pears make for a unique birthday gift for anyone born in that year. Likewise, the current year's edition is an invaluable up-to-date single-volume encylopaedia.