Warm, imaginative and often funny, Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers thoughtfully examines the price and cost of corporate colonialism and humanity’s ever-present need to expand.

In the distant future, Destry, a ranger who works for the Environmental Rescue Team on planet Sask-E, discovers a hidden city. Destry and the rest of her team are tasked with ensuring ecological stability on Sask-E, which is owned by the terraforming corporation Verdance, before Verdance sells plots of the planet’s land to the highest bidders. The ERT thought they were the only inhabitants of Sask-E. But the city Destry discovers is populated by an entire previous generation of terraformers, and she and the ERT consider whether to stand against Verdance and their murky motives. Centuries later, while a planetwide conspiracy threatens everything the ERT has done to turn Sask-E into a hospitable planet, the fallout from Destry’s conflict with Verdance resurfaces.

The Terraformers is an expansive, entertaining book, full of comprehensive world building and exacting detail. Every living thing in the terraformed areas of Sask-E provides data that flows back to the ERT: Messages can be sent through blades of grass or through water. Robotic drones converse with people, and genetically enhanced animals can communicate via text message. Newitz giddily explores the convergence of digital and ecological systems, and their enthusiasm is infectious. The Terraformers is full of parallels to contemporary issues (corporate greed versus environmental sustainability, the intersection of machines and humans), and while Newitz intensely examines these topics, the reader will never feel lectured, bored or disconnected from the characters.

But once The Terraformers concludes, the questions it poses remain. In our race to remake the universe for ourselves, what kinds of stewards will we be?

Tennal Halkana is a problem. He’s a problem for his family because he prefers drinking in gambling dens to fulfilling the demands of being part of one of the most prominent political families on the planet Orshan. He’s a problem when it comes to relationships, flitting from one affair to another in rapid succession. But most of all, he’s a problem for society: Tennal is a reader, a person with telepathic abilities that were genetically engineered by the Orshan Fedstate. When Tennal breaks one too many rules, his aunt conscripts him into the army and orders him to sync, or completely merge his mind, with an architect, a person who can mentally control other people.

Lieutenant Surit Yeni, the architect ordered to link his mind to Tennal, is everything Tennal is not. The child of a notorious traitor, Surit ensures that his every move is thoughtful, controlled and—above all else—principled. Thanks to that last quality, Surit refuses to sync with the unwilling Tennal. The two men fake the bond instead, all while looking for a way to get Tennal out of the army and to the safety of the wider galaxy.

Ocean’s Echo is a slow burn that eventually blazes into a supernova, a novel constrained in its location but massive in its ambition. Its opening scene in a gambling den is exciting, but that action-packed sequence is paltry compared to what’s to come. Set in the same universe as author Everina Maxwell’s debut, Winter’s Orbit, this standalone novel layers intrigue atop intrigue, ratcheting up the stakes one excruciating notch at a time. Maxwell uses her space station settings as pressure cookers, creating close-proximity environments that force her main couple to change and bond with each other. Tennal’s sharp edges bring Surit’s stoicism into relief, while Surit’s rule-abiding nature clashes with Tennal’s chaotic inability to tell the truth. All the while, the pair is wrapped in a world built with care by Maxwell, a writer with a keen eye for detail and nuanced social interactions. Rather than getting lost in the weeds of the mechanics of faster-than-light travel or how exactly readers and architects were made, Maxwell zeroes in on the small moments of soldiers’ daily lives, from tokens that communicate fellow officers’ genders or the politics of getting a second slice of cake from the mess hall vending machine. 

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a massive amount of world building to absorb: Between various branches of the military, syncing, readers and architects, the wealth of vocabulary and protocol to wade through can be overwhelming at first. The learning curve will be less steep for readers who loved Maxwell’s first foray into this universe, but rest assured that this is still a standalone novel that reads like one. Perfect for lovers of science fiction served medium-hard, Ocean’s Echo is the optimal blend of emotional maelstrom and suspenseful military drama.

Station Eternity, Mur Lafferty’s intergalactic whodunit, is a thrilling ride starring interesting characters from the farthest reaches of the universe.

There are many aliens on Space Station Eternity but only three humans. The sentient station granted sanctuary to social outcast (by choice and for good reason) Mallory Viridian and the insufferable Adrian Casserly-Berry, an ambassador from Earth. Mallory left Earth without a second glance because no matter where she goes, someone she knows dies. It’s like she’s the heroine of a cozy mystery series, except she has to deal with real-life consequences like always being a suspect and worrying that the people around her aren’t long for this world. The third human on the station is stowaway Xan Morgan, a handsome former soldier with a mysterious past, and Mallory is terrified he”ll fall prey to her curse. When it’s announced that a new shuttle full of humans will dock on Eternity, she knows they”ll soon be in danger as well. And sure enough, as soon as more humans arrive, both they and the station’s alien inhabitants start dying.

With its focus on the diverse races of aliens who call the space station home, Station Eternity is more creative than many stories with a similar setting, and its human characters are far more humble. They are hitching a most likely temporary ride on the station and therefore can never forget that they need to respect the aliens’ ways. Lafferty describes various alien beings with dry wit, gusto and imagination, from the rocklike Gneiss to a hivemind of sentient wasps who constantly ask inappropriate personal questions. Even though the story is told from Mallory’s perspective, Lafferty’s universe contains multitudes.

Beyond the book’s sci-fi trappings, Lafferty also crafts a solid mystery, with perfectly timed reveals and clues, and her quick banter and endearing characters shine all the way to the finale. Mallory, her comrades and her foes all have flaws, and many of them are survivors of violent or abusive situations. The near-future world of Station Eternity is not a rosy utopia, and there is much discourse among the characters on the difficulties of being femme, or queer, or trans, or a person of color. It makes Mallory’s quest to protect Eternity—an island of hope, coexistence and cooperation in a vast, alien-eat-alien universe—all the more imperative.