In the Three Worlds, sentient nonhuman species are a dime a dozen, and the detritus of countless lost civilizations is embedded in a lush, magic-infused landscape. The author Martha Wells, who trained as an anthropologist, has previously brought readers to this verdant fantasy realm via a trilogy and a series of shorter stories, but THE EDGE OF WORLDS (Night Shade, $24.99) marks the start of a new saga in the Books of the Raksura.  Returning readers will reap the greatest rewards, because the focus is again on Moon, the foundling who spent the original trilogy reconciling with his traumatic past. Moon’s still a fish out of water among the shape-shifting Raksura, although he has lately settled somewhat into his role as a new father. In this outing, however, Wells widens the lens beyond Moon’s personal struggles. A multispecies group of scholars from a distant empire arrives to ask the Indigo Cloud court’s help in solving a mystery that might involve the Raksura’s evolutionary ancestors — who have shown a marked tendency to dabble in dangerous magic and eldritch abominations. Now, like Moon, everyone in the story is challenged to discard tradition in favor of answers and survival.  The venerated pulp spirit in science fiction and fantasy has dwindled since the golden age of the 1920s to ’50s. Yet an atavistic craving for adventure remains, and it is this need that Wells’s books in general and the Raksura books in particular satisfy. The stories are straightforward adventure, but what makes Wells’s “new pulp” feel fresh is its refusal to take the easier storytelling routes of its forebears. Rather than thinly veil an existing human society as alien others, for example, Wells — a master world builder — creates a multicultural world of humanized monsters. Rather than caricature anyone who isn’t white and male, as pulp too often did, Wells casually includes characters like Shade, a pampered princess among his people who looks like a white man but can transform into a huge polyamorous humanoid dragon. This is characteristic of the series.  The result is breathtakingly surprising and fun. So for readers who missed earlier entry points to this delightful series, now is the time to get on board.  Since the publication of the story “Blood Music” in 1983 (novelized in 1985), Greg Bear has been solidly positioned as one of the greats of the “hard” subset of science fiction — big-idea stories, for the most part, centered on some key scientific tenet. In his introductions to the stories in JUST OVER THE HORIZON: The Complete Short Fiction of Greg Bear, Volume 1 (Open Road, paper, $16.99), Bear frequently touts their scientific bona fides and provides some information about their publication history. Though the collection has no overall introduction, these bits of framing nevertheless open a fascinating window onto what the genre was like in the 1970s and ’80s, when most of the tales here were published.  Bear’s deftness of phrase and metaphor is simply lovely, even when he’s writing about (in “Blood Music”) the world literally dissolving into a posthuman group mind of smart cells. He sticks the landing with protagonists who fit within hard science fiction’s traditional viewpoint — put-upon Everymen who chafe amid bureaucracies and the petty expectations of simpler people. The stalwart astronauts of “A Martian Ricoroso,” who struggle to survive a bizarre cyclic Martian biosphere while also second-guessing and betraying one another, are an unromanticized example. A better depiction might be John, the down-on-his-luck truck driver who discovers an ugly conspiracy while ferrying souls to hell in “Dead Run.” In this and other stories that swerve away from the hard sci‑fi bracket, the characters seem freer to struggle with human concerns like who gets to define morality.  But with protagonists outside Bear’s obvious comfort zone, he’s noticeably clumsier. The worst example is the first story in the anthology: the Nebula Award-nominated “Sisters,” about a teenage girl who’s one of the last few genetically natural people in a designer-children future. She reads like an adolescent girl as written by a middle-aged man — given the undue attention she pays to her own breasts, for example, though other flags also suggest she is more a symbol for an idea than a three-dimensional character in her own right. There aren’t many characters like these in the anthology, but where they land, they thud.  Fans of hard science fiction are likely to be more forgiving than newcomers to the field, though. With 14 newly revised stories and one unproduced screenplay on offer, this is a solid introduction to the oeuvre of a classic writer.
A multicultural world of humanized monsters, trouble on the highway to hell, an epidemic of spontaneous combustion and a journey toward the self.