High above the planet, aboard a fifty-mile-wide alien vessel, The Authority - seven awesomely powerful meta-humans - act as bouncers for the Earth. If you threaten the life and liberty of its inhabitants, they'll get nasty in the pursuit of your blood. Reality Incorporated is the first ever multiversal business corporation. They strip-mine and globalise on a universal scale. Now they want The Authority's technology as their next exploitable resource or they'll reduced the Earth to an asteroid cloud. The Authority has only one answer - fight's on! The latest volume in this acclaimed, gut-crunching series features a brilliant new creative team to pitch The Authority once more into action!

Mary Morrissey's second novel The Pretender, begins with an utterly fascinating premise: why should a Polish factory worker claim to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II? The novel unwinds smoothly in time, from Virginia in 1978 to post-First World War Berlin and finally to a childhood in rural Poland at the turn of the last century. There is something of Miss Havisham in the demeanour and behaviour of the first Anastasia——"a magnificent relic, a holy totem", whose life has been "as volatile as the century itself". She is almost deaf and imperiously selfish, with "a corrupted memory". She has been saved from herself by a former history professor with a "genealogical envy" for her Romanov past, who marries her to enter a royal dynasty. He not only dotes on her but more importantly believes in her.

It's a shame to leave this strange, symbiotic couple to their increasing squalor but Morrissey is more interested in exploring Anastasia's unreliable memory and takes the action to a hospital in Berlin in 1922, where a young woman who has been saved from drowning in the canal has forgotten her identity. Moved to an asylum where she's called Fraulein Unbekannt, the Unknown Woman, she refuses to speak and believes herself guilty of a crime. She is exempted from communal duties and washing, and treated with special privileges by the staff. When a fellow inmate reads an extract from a newspaper detailing the missing Anastasia, she resolves to "incubate a Princess" as an escape. Although the title of the novel does in a sense spoil the delicate ambiguity of Anastasia's "true" identity before the text itself does, the way the author teases out the "real" identity of the protagonist is brilliantly done. As though delusion is her cure, the woman grasps an alternative past to mask her guilt and loss, inventing a history that will protect her from poverty and anonymity. She pinches stories from other characters, much as a fiction writer will do, and twists events to bolster the notion of her tragic life. The climax of the book is delayed a little too long, but when it comes, it provides convincing emotional clues as to why a peasant Polish girl, with a great appetite for love, should fancy herself as royalty and seek immunity for her crime. —Cherry Smyth

James Morrow had published SF novels before, but This Is the Way the World Ends (1986) reached a new level of intensity, tackling World War III horrors with ultra-black magic realism plus a touch of Lewis Carroll. Like George Orwell's 1984, it still packs a grim punch although history took another course.

As the Cold War heats up, Americans frantically buy "scopas suits"(Self-COntained Post-Attack Survival) as protection against nukes. Tombstone engraver George Paxton can't afford one for his young daughter, until a strange old woman commissions epitaphs for her "parents" and pays by directing him to a magic shop where the scopas suit costs only his signature—acknowledging responsibility for any nuclear war. Soon we realise George's improvised epitaphs are for Eve, Adam and everyone:

She was better than she knew. He never found out what he was doing here.

Whimsy and social satire give way to nightmare as the missiles fall, scopas suits prove useless, and post-nuclear hell is painted in stomach-churning detail: flashburns, melted eyes, shattered people begging for death.

George, though, is rescued. As one of six who signed the McMurdo Sound Agreement, he must stand trial in Antarctica for complicity in murdering humanity. Prosecution, defenders, judges and police are the "unadmitted", unborn future generations now denied real life, whose sheer rage has won them temporary existence. Old disarmament and deterrence arguments, wittily rehashed in the Nuremberg-like court, seem all too different after the worst has happened. This queasy tragicomedy isn't easily forgotten. —David Langford