Plans, like time, have proved remarkably elastic during this pandemic, and books I’d intended to discuss here have been delayed half a season or more, while books I didn’t cover upon their release have taken on new significance. So consider this column a chaotic pantry from which to prepare a week’s worth of meals: Here are six very different books, remarkable enough in their difference, I hope, to feed at least that many different hungers.

Tessa Gratton’s “Queens of Innis Lear” spun “King Lear” sideways, giving Lear a black queen and mixed-race daughters, and setting the story in a fantasy analogue to Britain teeming with root and star magic. Gratton’s LADY HOTSPUR (Tor, 592 pp., $29.99) is set 100 years later in the same world and inspired by “Henry IV” — and, as the title suggests, imagines the principal characters as women instead of men.

Prince Hal never wanted to be a prince; she was happy as one of the Lady Knights of her liege, Banna Mora, and in love with the Wolf of Aremoria — her fellow knight Hotspur. But when Hal’s mother leads a rebellion, commits regicide and crowns herself queen, Hal is thrust into a position of authority over both her lover and her now-deposed prince. Their relationships are thrown into further turmoil by a prophecy from Innis Lear, the magical nation to their north: “The dragon will burn, the lion will break and the wolf will choose the end.”

Like “Queens,” Gratton’s new novel is gigantic and decompressed: Though it’s full of battles and political machinations, it’s also very slow. Gratton lingers on a tear in a man’s cloak so that Hotspur can muse on what that suggests about his character. I turned pages, with engagement and interest, at roughly the pace of walking around a room and pausing to take in the view through the window. But the novel isn’t boring and invites the kind of long, quiet habitation that I associate with a very different kind of book.

While it’s not a direct sequel to “Queens,” I wouldn’t recommend reading “Lady Hotspur” first. Much of its plot draws on the first book’s world-building and pivotal characters, and at several places I found myself straining to remember what had happened in “Queens” to better untangle some knot of politics or plot.

I experienced Tochi Onyebuchi’s RIOT BABY (Tor.com, 176 pp., $19.99) as one tightly held breath. Moving from South Central Los Angeles to Harlem to Rikers Island to a speculative near-future in short bursts of fierce feeling, “Riot Baby,” Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults, is as much the story of Ella and her brother, Kevin, as it is the story of black pain in America, of the extent and lineage of police brutality, racism and injustice in this country, written in prose as searing and precise as hot diamonds.

Ella has a “Thing,” a power that manifests variably as telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, but isn’t ever described in those terms; she experiences it as overwhelming grief and anger, as explosion and aftermath, and struggles with controlling and deploying it over the course of the book. Kevin, born in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots, grows up in Harlem in the shadow of Ella’s furious, repressed power — but when Ella vanishes after watching reports of the murder of Sean Bell on television, she takes her limited protection of him with her. Kevin’s adolescence consists of being harassed by the police and consistently steered away from education and prospects, before getting arrested on an attempted armed robbery charge and imprisoned on Rikers.

Onyebuchi’s voice work is magnificent, sharp and whipping, and he shifts from macro to micro with confident flexibility. Ella’s sections are written in the third person, and through her Thing-ridden eyes we see decades of cruelty toward black people; meanwhile, Kevin’s first-person narration roots us in the immediacy and hopelessness of his contemporary experience. Though it’s ostensibly centered on Ella’s and Kevin’s coming-of-age, “Riot Baby” isn’t a bildungsroman so much as a reversal of one: an elegiac portrait of how white supremacy strips the future from black children, violence by violence, across generations and individual lives.

I read this book with frustrating double vision: seeing with one eye the gorgeousness of Onyebuchi’s writing, the visceral heat of it, and with the other the vast indifference of the people who most need to be confronted with its power. But at its heart, this book recognizes that intimate knowledge of suffering can be a source of strength, can be sustaining as well as depressing — that we can grieve the inheritance of generations of ancestors’ pain while marveling at their endurance, and recognize that resilience as part of their legacy.

K. M. Szpara’s DOCILE (Tor.com, 492 pp., $27.99) is an ambitious and provocative debut, smooth to read yet thorny to grapple with; I found it difficult to appreciate without wanting to argue with it. In an alternate near-future Maryland, people have inherited debt on a vast scale and must sell themselves into indentured servitude to the wealthy in order to avoid prison. To facilitate the loss of years of life and agency, debtors are offered Dociline, a drug that makes them willing, contented drones for the duration of their contracts and dims their memories of what they endured as so-called Dociles. In theory, the Dociline wears off within two weeks of the final dose; in practice, it’s more complicated.

Elisha Wilder saw his mother vanish into servitude for 10 years; four years after her return, she still behaves as if she’s on Dociline. Determined both to settle his family’s debt and to avoid the same fate, Elisha decides to sell himself into sexual slavery to a trillionaire while exercising one of the seven rights allowed to Dociles: the right to refuse the drug. But the trillionaire who buys his debt is Alex Bishop, scion of the family that invented Dociline and chief executive of the company that produces it — which makes Elisha’s refusal of the drug newsworthy. Soon Elisha is approached by undercover operatives from Empower Maryland — a group trying to end debt slavery — while Alex is under pressure to make Elisha behave like a Docile without Dociline.

The book alternates between Elisha’s first-person point of view and Alex’s, and Szpara’s writing is supple and attentive to the nuances of their evolving relationship: As Elisha loses personhood and agency, Alex develops empathy and conscience. Szpara uses the rhythm of that alternation to remarkable effect; there’s a shocking moment when, after the end of an Alex chapter, we expect the return of Elisha’s voice — but stay instead with Alex’s, as if his voice has replaced Elisha’s completely. It’s a dark turning point both in their relationship and in the book’s structure.

Beneath the praise on the back cover of “Docile” is a content warning: “Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.” This is accurate, but what it doesn’t say (though several of the blurbs gesture toward it) is that the rape and sexual abuse in question are written to be titillating, even as Elisha acknowledges, repeatedly, that what’s been done to him is rape. The book’s world-building largely functions as a moral framework in which the author tries to ethically indulge in, explore and problematize a specific set of power-play kinks, and to muse, after the fact, on whether those sexy scenarios were OK.

This is a literary practice more common in fan fiction than in commercial fiction; in fact, Tor.com’s advertising campaign included fan-generated tags from Archive of Our Own — a Hugo Award-winning repository of fan fiction — indicating that the book would feature sexual encounters in which consent is dubious (“dubcon”) or nonexistent (“noncon”). So “Docile,” paradoxically, is a book very deliberately packaged to solicit the enthusiastic consent of its readers, and I find that fascinating, even as I’m ambivalent about how well the book succeeds in its project.

Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries comprise four novellas — “All Systems Red,” “Artificial Condition,” “Rogue Protocol” and “Exit Strategy” — about a grumpy, depressed cyborg named Murderbot, a security unit that is trying its best to keep its humans alive, its secrets close and its favorite soap operas on loop in a grim, space-faring far future. NETWORK EFFECT (Tor.com, 346 pp., $26.99) is Murderbot’s highly anticipated first novel-length adventure.

Over the course of the novellas, Murderbot protected wayward human clients from steadily escalating danger, became sentient, ran away from the people it cared most about in order to better understand its past and present, and returned to them after a dramatic final confrontation with an especially evil corporation. In “Network Effect,” Murderbot is living a contented life with its preferred humans, and working as a personal bodyguard for its friend Dr. Mensah and as a security consultant for people it trusts. While returning home from a mission, Murderbot and its team are captured by what appear to be alien hostiles operating from within a stolen, bot-piloted ship called Perihelion — which Murderbot better knows as ART, the friend it made in “Artificial Condition.”

Like a feature film following a television series, “Network Effect” faces the challenge of presenting a longer-than-usual episode for existing fans while standing on its own as an intelligible entry point for new readers. It more than succeeds, with all the intensity, humor and deep feeling of the novellas flourishing in a more complex and ambitious structure. While the chief pleasure of the Murderbot Diaries is the protagonist’s unique and delightful voice, “Network Effect” introduces new characters and subtly different perspectives in a way that only amplifies its shocking joy. I caught myself rereading my favorite parts the way Murderbot rewatches episodes of “Sanctuary Moon,” and I can’t recommend it enough.

As if playing professional football, music and online role-playing games weren’t enough, Chris Kluwe has now written science fiction. His debut novel, OTAKU (Tor, 352 pp., $26.99), is an energy drink in book form: brightly colored, refreshing and designed to be bolted down for effect without much tasting. In a far-future, post-water-war dystopia where the United States has split into warring polities colloquially known as “gummies” (a right-wing Christian theocracy in what’s left of Florida) and “silkies” (a hyper-corporate technocracy on the West Coast), the Infinite Game unites people around the world in a virtual experience of extreme fantasy sports.

Inside the game, Ash is an elite celebrity athlete called Ashura the Terrible; outside it, she lives an anonymous hardscrabble existence in Ditchtown, the drowned ruins of Miami, pouring the vast sums of money she makes from the game directly into her mother’s medical bills and trying to get along with her younger brother, Kiro. But when Ash discovers that someone’s turning gamers into deadly puppet-assassins, the borders between her real and virtual worlds begin to thin.

“Otaku” is light on world-building and character, but heavy on technical specs and point of view. Ash’s voice and perspective are the main driving forces of the book, and her narration — especially of action and anger — is riveting in its competence and bleak desperation. Thematically, Ash’s repeated mantra of “just another encounter” when confronting danger in the real world is very moving, and speaks powerfully to how games — in fiction and outside it — make life’s difficulties bearable. Kluwe’s prose is also often startlingly beautiful — startling because he can swing from “Aching muscles roll and pop like beaded water on a skillet” to “skyway scrotum massacre” with the lazy ease of a pendulum.

In other respects, though, I found “Otaku” wearying; conversations often feel stilted and unconvincing, more about scoring rhetorical points with the reader than inhabiting a believable character. I found myself wondering whom the rhetoric was for — whether it was intended to persuade young men not to hate women, or to affirm the experiences of women to women, or just to vent Kluwe’s frustration at how terrible people can be on and off the internet. I’m sympathetic to all these aims, but I’m not sure all three can be achieved through the same means — and “Otaku” is one long sustained note, increasing in volume more than complexity.

Like the Infinite Game itself, “Otaku” is swiftly immersive, but not a place you actually want to dwell in at length. The characterization is thin to the point of being flimsy and the world-building doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. But they aren’t really the point; the book is more an aggressive stance than anything else, a revenge fantasy directed at trolls and their apologists and enablers. As such, it’s pretty cathartic. It’s less in conversation than in fierce confrontation with Gamergate, the coordinated harassment campaign conducted by a few hundred men over social media in 2014, targeting women prominent in games development and criticism, and still periodically fouling the waters of fan communities. In this respect, the last two sentences of the acknowledgments page are worth the whole book.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s SHOREFALL (Del Rey, 493 pp., $28) is the second book, after “Foundryside,” in his Founders series, a secondary-world fantasy that draws on Renaissance Italy and Enlightenment Britain for its setting and mixes modern-day programming with the Industrial Revolution for its magic system. It comments on capitalism and intellectual property while being an absolutely wild ride.

“Foundryside” introduced the magical technology of “scriving,” writing glyphs and sigils on objects in order to make them behave in ways that defy physical reality. But scriving is a proprietary art, up until recently practiced only by the elite families in the city of Tevanne who hire in-house scrivers and keep their inventions in gated communities called campos, leaving the city’s poor and destitute to fend for themselves — or hiring them to steal one another’s secrets.

In “Shorefall,” Sancia Grado has gone from living as a thief usefully cursed with the ability to “hear” the scriving written on objects, to being a talented scriver in her own right. Three years after the events of “Foundryside,” Sancia; her girlfriend, Berenice; her grumpy mentor, Orso; and the paladin-like chief of security, Gregor, are a crack team of innovators working to transform the Commons through their scriving work — as well as through targeted transfers of wealth and information from the walled campos of Tevanne’s powerful families. But a successful heist leads to catastrophic complications when Sancia receives warning that an ancient, impossibly powerful scriver is en route to Tevanne — a hierophant, one of the original creators of their magic technology. And he intends to transform the world a lot more quickly and irrevocably than our heroes.

“Shorefall” is the book I’ve most thoroughly and uncomplicatedly enjoyed this year so far. It shocked and delighted and upset me from page to page, managing to thread humor and pathos and intrigue together with the speed and precision of a loom. Its comments on our present moment are so deft and sly that when they turn earnest it’s deeply affecting: The refrain of “Move thoughtfully … and bring freedom to others” sometimes brought me to tears. “Foundryside” blew me away, and this is a perfect sequel. I’m so excited to see what happens next.