Almost history

Jon Courtenay Grimwood on 1610 | Unto Leviathan

1610: A Sundial in a Grave, by Mary Gentle (Gollancz, £12.99)

Mary Gentle's novels hover in the grey area between fantastic, postmodern and historical fiction - and because of this she probably gets less attention than she deserves. 1610 takes Dumas, echoes of Stanley J Weyman's Under the Red Robe and a large amount of historical research and shuffles it into the story of Valentin Rochefort, a down-at-heel disgraced aristocrat who acts as hitman and spy for the Duc de Sully.

The year, obviously enough, is 1610; Europe hangs on the edge of the thirty years war, with the English civil war a shadow on the future and the St Bartholomew's day massacre a bitter memory. The last thing Rochefort needs is to be trapped within a mathematical conspiracy to change history. The prose is flinty, the characters real and, with the sexually complex and occasionally deviant relationship between Rochefort and the young duellist Dariole (who is not all he seems), Gentle pushes hard at the boundaries of genre. An Arthur C Clarke-award nominee in waiting.

Unto Leviathan, by Richard Paul Russo (Orbit, £6.99)

Richard Paul Russo's Ship of Fools won the Philip K Dick award when it came out in the US in 2001. Now published in the UK as Unto Leviathan, it outlines an alien encounter that goes badly wrong, seen through the eyes of Bartolomeo Aguilera, a man who wears his deformities proudly rather than have his body surgically or genetically corrected.

Trapped aboard a vast spaceship, knowing nothing but the present and having little sense of history or what has gone before, Captain Costa, his crew and passengers stumble across evidence of an atrocity committed on a deserted world and must decide whether to investigate or flee to safety. Russo's writing is tight, his characters are believable and the plot and ship's politics grip from beginning to end, but we never quite discover why the aliens enjoy hanging small children from hooks like meat in an abattoir. Perhaps that's part of the point.

· Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Felaheen is published by Earthlight