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Gollancz, 390 pages, $36

“High Vaultage” is a delightful steampunk detective comedy set in Even Greater London, an electrically charged urban sprawl taking up the entire lower part of England in an alternate 19th century.

The heroes are a pair of private investigators: Archibald Fleet, a former policeman mechanically revived from death (a process Queen Victoria herself has undergone several times), and Clara Entwhistle, a journalist-sleuth. They’re hired to find a missing person but soon find themselves involved in something much bigger.

Steampunk stories have fun imagining a society where technology has advanced in curious ways. You get lot of that here, including the supercomputer under Oxford’s Babbage College, the Brunel Corps of Engineers, a Church of the Mechanical Man, and automaton mudlarks scavenging on the frozen Thames.

It’s this sort of world-building that makes “High Vaultage” such a joy, with quirky new discoveries coming in nearly every chapter. Fleet and Entwhistle are an engaging odd couple and the mysteries and conspiracies they uncover are suitably complex, involving lots of shady goings-on that are related with good humour and at a fast pace.

Starlost Unauthorized and the Quest for Canadian Identity

By D.G. Valdron

Fossil Cove, 318 pages, $24.99

Chances are that unless you’re a North American of a certain age you’ve never heard of “The Starlost,” a made-in-Canada science-fiction show that ran for a single season of 16 episodes on CTV and in U.S. syndication back in 1973.

Being a Canadian of that certain age, I do remember it. Or at least I remember star Keir Dullea’s moustache.

Dullea played one of three recurring characters on board a giant (200-mile-long) spaceship “ark” consisting of various separate biospheres — a premise with a lot of potential, most of which remained unrealized.

“The Starlost” doesn’t have a great reputation, to put it mildly, despite its interesting credits. Harlan Ellison came up with the original idea and was a writer (using the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird), Ben Bova served as an adviser, and visual effects legend Douglas Trumbull was a producer.

Watching it today, it’s easy to make fun of the cheap and dated production values, but D.G. Valdron’s combination cultural commentary/series companion provides an unironic fan’s notes, making a case for the show’s being “inescapably Canadian,” a reflection of the national identity in ways that perhaps only we can relate to.

“The series is infamous as the worst Sci-Fi series ever, perhaps because the Americans who judged it never really understood it,” Valdron writes. “And what is more Canadian than getting no respect or recognition?”

Juice

By Tim Winton

Picador, 528 pages, $26.99

Once more into the cli-fi wasteland of a world destroyed by global warming. This time it’s Tim Winton’s native Western Australia, a place that sometime in the next century, after the civilizational collapse of the Terror, has been sunburned to a crisp. Life is hardscrabble in the worst way, and people have to spend a lot of time living underground, unable to even go outside in the daylight hours.

In what has become a very familiar trope in postapocalyptic stories, perhaps reflecting a theme of generational guilt that is very much front and centre again, a man on a mission journeys through this valley of ashes accompanied by a child. They come across an abandoned mine and see it as a place of refuge. But the current inhabitant, a man with a crossbow, takes them prisoner. With the bowman as audience, the man spends the rest of the book telling his story, the epic recital of a sun-scarred Scheherazade.

The novel’s obvious comparison is to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” not just for the man-and-child framing story but for the bleak moral vision, improbably elevated dialogue vocabulary and the grit in the landscape. But the angry environmental message gives added juice and relevance to this fierce dystopic tale.

We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine

By Deni Ellis Béchard

House of Anansi, 424 pages, $25.99

If environmental collapse is one of the more popular themes in current science-fiction, anxiety over AI isn’t far behind. In particular, the notion that sentient machines may become capable of creating a Matrix-style virtual reality to which consciousness could be uploaded is seen as either an existential threat or the rapturous next stage in human evolution. Or both.

Deni Béchard’s latest is set in this digital afterlife, with members of a family awakening after a second American Civil War to find themselves isolated in a giant virtual reality program run by a benevolent AI, whose prime directive is to protect them in their various bubbles. Which means you can expect more philosophical questioning than action as the characters and machine reflect on consciousness as perhaps just code, and contemplate life as “an atemporal circle: the minds of humans giving rise to a creator god who in turn gifts them their existence.”

Béchard digs deep into these techno-spiritual speculations and the result is a poetic and profound meditation on what dreams may come in the metaverse.