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Shadowpaw Press, $19.95, 192 pages

The Rip Van Winkle story has often been adapted by science-fiction authors as a way of transporting present-day characters far into the future. And in Robert J. Sawyer’s “The Downloaded,” it comes in handy again.

In 2059 a crew of scientists have their bodies frozen and their minds uploaded into virtual reality programs before being sent to a new planet. At the same time, a pilot prison project has dangerous offenders spending their sentences in VR. Both these plans go awry when civilization is destroyed while colonists and criminals are in cold storage at the Quantum Cryonics Institute in Waterloo. When they wake up 500 years later, the scientists haven’t arrived at Proxima Centauri but are on a wrecked Earth with only a few Mennonites (the low-tech “back-up plan for humanity”) left minding the store, and an even bigger planetary catastrophe looming.

Even though it’s a quick read, “The Downloaded” manages to work in a number of current hot-button political matters, like the anti-vaccine movement and trans rights, while also asking bigger questions about what the final cost of some of our beliefs might be.

Mal Goes to War

By Edward Ashton

St. Martin’s Press, $39, 296 pages

Edward Ashton is best known for hard-driving action, and fans are already looking forward to the film version of his smash-mouth bestseller “Mickey7.” In the meantime, they can enjoy “Mal Goes to War,” a standalone novel that’s written in the same frantic mode, with some added humour in the vein of Martha Wells’ popular “Murderbot Diaries” series.

The Mal in the title is short for Malware, an independent AI program that has the ability to leave its native “Infospace” and inhabit the bodies of specially adapted humans.

Despite his name, Mal isn’t a bad guy. In fact, after being stranded in the real world among the “monkeys” (that is, humans), he takes on the mission of shepherding an augmented girl through a deadly combat zone in the civil war being fought between techno-human hybrids known as Federals and unmodified, puritanical Humanists. Along the way, there’s lots of body-hopping adventure, accompanied by observations on humanity made from a point of view that’s both intimate and alien.

Mania

By Lionel Shriver

Harper, $37, 288 pages

“Facial Justice” is a celebrated 1960 dystopian novel by L. P. Hartley about a future state where beauty has been outlawed and good-looking people must be made to look less attractive through cosmetic surgery, all in the name of equality.

“Mania” has a very similar message, which tells you something about how old some of the battle cries in today’s political squabbles are.

Lionel Shriver is an outspoken critic of political correctness, and “Mania” is her satire of cancel culture and “wokeness.” It’s set in an alternative present dominated by the ideology of “Mental Parity,” which means that “all human brains are the same” and nobody can be seen as more intelligent than anyone else. You can’t even use the word “smartphone,” because, of course, that would be “smartism.”

As satires go, “Mania” can be heavy-handed, and the idea might have worked better as a short story or novella. But it’s a telling look at where we’re at in the culture wars and how high some of those engaged in such battles feel the stakes have been raised.

Alien Clay

By Adrian Tchaikovsky

Tor, $33.99, 388 pages

Prolific British author Adrian Tchaikovsky, best known for his “Children of Time” series, stakes out some challenging new territory in “Alien Clay.”

Having gotten himself in trouble with the repressive Earth government known as the Mandate, xenobiologist Arton Daghdev is transported, in the roughest way imaginable, to the prison planet of Kiln, where he will be worked to death in a labour camp and then have his body recycled. It seems a grim fate, until Kiln shows signs of having been inhabited with intelligent life at some point in the past. Might someone or something still be out there? Professor Daghdev is just the guy to find out.

“Alien Clay” is several different books in one. It’s a horror story in which the horror isn’t evil, only something dangerously non-human, a form of life with its own predatory mechanisms for survival and reproduction. It’s also a parable that draws a link between evolution and revolutionary politics. But at the most basic level, it’s more first-rate world-building from Tchaikovsky, an expert at introducing new ways to think about our place in the cosmos.