BRINK volume 4 by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard, (Rebellion, £12.99), continues one of the most interesting and thoroughly imagined science fiction comics of recent years.

Originally a strip in the weekly 2000 AD, it takes place in a near future where environmental degradation has forced the human race to evacuate to giant space stations. They’ve taken corporate rule along with them, so the rich are still rich and the rest live in cramped near-poverty, plagued by crime, narcotics and apocalyptic religious cults.

Through a plot that blends horror, cop story and mystery, Abnett’s script and Culbard’s art work together with a rare harmony to create an exciting and convincing portrait of a future.

JT Nicholas’s Stolen Earth (Titan, £8.99) is a straightforward space adventure in the best SF tradition of good writing and quick reading — and it also has plenty to say about benign dictatorship and self-determination. This, too, features a human diaspora forced from the Earth by its ancestors’ folly and living pretty miserably in space stations and colonies.

The old home planet is interdicted by a high tech defence system: in theory, no-one can get in or out. But one small spaceship, crewed by the disillusioned, the dissident and the fugitive, must do so. Solid good fun from start to finish.

In 1913, Ursula, a young Englishwoman in rebellion against her stiflingly proper background, accepts a job as a head gardener deep in the Pampas of Argentina, in The Haunting Of Lagrimas by WM Cleese (Titan, £8.99).

Many days’ travel from its nearest neighbour, a grand house, abandoned after a family tragedy, is being restored by a new generation. Ursula’s task is to bring the gardens back to their former majesty, but why are the owners desperate enough to hire an inexperienced woman for what everyone considers a job for a mature man? She will discover the answer to that in the most terrifying way.

Told in the authentic manner of the Edwardian ghost story, full of historical and geographical detail and atmosphere, this is a haunting tale of class warfare and revenge.

Just a few years later, but in a changed world, another well-to-do young woman is mourning her two brothers, casualties of WWI, in All The White Spaces by Ally Wilkes (Titan, £8.99).

Partly to honour their lost dreams, and partly for an opportunity to live as the person she’s always felt herself to be, she becomes a young man named Jonathan, and he stows away on the ship of a polar expedition.

Jonathan’s new life is as thrilling and fulfilling as he’d hoped, but his joy is short-lived as disasters multiply. It’s as if there are parts of the Antarctic that refuse to be explored.

The reader is left to decide whether this fabulously impressive debut is science fiction or fantasy, but either way its greatest impact comes from Wilkes’s palpable recreation of the reality of polar exploration. You’ll feel the icy winds cutting through you long after you finish reading.