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Bellis Coldwine has come to realize that the better part of valor involves removing herself from the unsettled colony New Crobuzon at the first available opportunity. A passage on the Terpsichoria presents itself as a viable escape, even though it is bound for Nova Esperium, a way station for lowlifes, slaves, convicts, and ne’er-do-wells of every description. Thankfully, she can use her skill as a translator to help pay her way. This talent also comes in handy when the Terpsichoria is raided by pirates and those passengers less adept linguistically are summarily killed.

Once captured, Coldwine is taken to a floating island of lashed-together vessels called the Armada, where her talents as a translator are put to use researching a vast library of pilfered books that lie within the core of the Armanda’s floating metropolis. She soon uncovers a sinister conspiracy between the two twisted rulers of the Armada and Uther Doul, the pirates’ leader, involving the huge, unpredictable beast from the ocean's depths that they hope to harness as an energy source to transport the Armada. The remaining voyage includes acts of despicable treachery, battles of unimaginable proportions and enough anticipatory excitement to keep the pages turning at a brisk pace.

Mieville, whose previous novel "Perdido Street Station" received both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award, continues in the same world as the first book, delving deeper into its intricacies. While the book gets off to a bit of a slow start, and Coldwine takes awhile to warm up to, the payoff is there, and the persistent reader will wind up both fulfilled and satisfied with this eventful cruise to New Crobuzon.

"Hominids" by Robert J. Sawyer, Tor, $25.95.

There’s a 40-foot sphere filled with 1,100 tons of heavy water in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada when inexplicably an unconscious man appears floating in the sealed tank. Even stranger than his sudden arrival is the man himself – heavily muscled, ridged eyebrows, profusely hairy and broad nosed with a receding jaw line. If the scientists didn’t know better they’d swear he was a Neanderthal, which, in fact, he is. How he got there is equally as astounding, for he is a physicist named Ponter Boddit who was at work in his own comfortable world building a quantum computer with his partner, Adikor, when a glitch transferred him into the alternate reality that we call home.

In Ponter’s world it was the Neanderthals who survived some 40,000 years ago, not the Homo sapiens, and they evolved into quite a different civilization. War is nonexistent, there is no belief in the afterlife or a supreme being, and there are no sexual stereotypes – almost like living in the lyrics of a John Lennon song. But this Utopia comes at the cost of privacy, as is evidenced by the microcomputer implanted in Ponter’s flesh that monitors his every activity. However it does not seem to have managed the switch in universes, and as a consequence, Adikor is being accused of the unheard of Neanderthal crime of murder, a crime punishable by the sterilization of all the male members of his family. Faced with a rather undesirable stay in the world of the Homo sapiens, Ponter must try to find a way back to his own turf.

Sawyer, a Hugo Award runner-up for "Calculating God" in 2001, is off to a great start in the first of a planned trilogy. The characters are likable, the science reasonable, and the premise of alternate universe is a comfortable one. The reader awaits the next installment when Neanderthal and human promise to get a little closer.

"The Salmon of Doubt" by Douglas Adams, Harmony Books, $24.

When Douglas Adams died last year he left a void felt by legions of readers who eagerly awaited the publication of a book with the working title "The Salmon of Doubt"that had been in the works for a decade. This long-anticipated volume was originally rumored to have been the third Dirk Gently novel, but somewhere along the line gears shifted, and those in the know speculated that it would instead be a continuation of the Hitchhiker series. That Adams was notoriously prone to writer's block was well-known, but some dogged detective work by Harmony Books editor Peter Guzzardi resulted in the cobbling together of fragments from several of Adams’s computers to produce as much of the book as existed. The result was around 80 pages of novel, hardly worth the postage to send this posthumous literary valentine. So a couple of short stories were added, along with interviews, essays, reminiscences and periodical articles to bring the final page count to almost 300, and a subtitle ("Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time") was added to make sure people realized it was that Douglas Adams.

While the novel fragment will be of intense interest to devoted fans, it definitely has the feel of a work in progress whose destination may not have been completely known even to its author. The two short stories were originally published in 1986, one of them beginning its existence as a sketch for a television show starring Graham Chapman. Happily, it is the nonfiction pieces in the book that work best – from his longtime appreciation of British rock music, to ruminations on the state of his nose, to his heartfelt, but gently amusing, paeans to atheism.

At its best Adams’s work resembles the illegitimate love child of Monty Python and Terry Pratchett, a subversive zaniness that offers readers unexpected insights into the mysteries of both the cosmos and the human soul. Adams will be sadly missed, but this book is not a complete grave-robbing defilement of his legacy, but a bittersweet reminder of what the master could have contributed if only the ride had lasted a few light years longer.

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