Bangladeshi author Saad Z Hossain’s Djinn City (Unnamed) is set both in his home country and the realm of the Djinns. These are novels that show how environmental change is a global phenomenon, and nowadays SF is written all over the world.

You won’t soon forget its star turn, a flying bear as big as a cathedral rampaging through wastelands. Jeff VanderMeer’s vividly weird Borne (4th Estate) takes a different, neo-surrealist approach to the topic. Just as rich, though much tighter in narrative focus, is Paul McAuley’s superb Austral (Gollancz), set in a powerfully realised near‑future Antarctica transformed by global warming. It is as much a reflection on how we might fit climate change into fiction as it is a detailed, scientifically literate representation of its possible consequences. Kim Stanley Robinson is the unofficial laureate of future climatology, and his prodigious New York 2140 (Orbit), a multilayered novel set in a flooded Big Apple, is by any standard an enormous achievement.

Genre writing has been exploring the possible futures of climate change for many years, and 2017’s three best novels engage in powerful and varied ways with precisely that subject. Where, he asked, is all the fiction about climate change? Well, it turns out that the answer is science fiction. A year ago, Amitav Ghosh usefully stirred things up with his rebuke to “realist” modes of writing.

Best books to read 2017 fantasy