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IMAGINE that in remote Maine, the personal and literary stomping ground of Stephen King, one of horror鈥檚 most prolific writers, there is a state-sanctioned facility set up to house those rare children gifted with psychic powers.

Twelve-year-old Luke Ellis is the latest arrival: a telekinetic who can鈥檛 do much more than rattle a pizza tray. But what he lacks in mental brawn he more than makes up for in intellect. And as the kids around him endure increasingly brutal tests designed to boost their power and break their will, it is his intelligence 鈥� surplus to requirements in the eyes of Mrs Sigsby, the institute鈥檚 coldly calculating director 鈥� that offers the only hope of escape.

A sure crowd-pleaser, The Institute is arguably a throwback to King鈥檚 early novels such as Carrie, The Shining and Firestarter. They were novels of the cold war, ushering the parapsychology of that time into the mainstream. After all, Danny Torrance didn鈥檛 just hear ghosts in The Shining鈥榮 Overlook Hotel, he was a low-level telepath particularly susceptible to psychic phenomena.

With the success of the Netflix series Stranger Things, everything old is new again. The cult, 1980s-set drama has reawoken our passion for secret government bases and clairvoyant wunderkinds. King could have simply traded on this mood of nostalgia, but The Institute is better than that, a thoroughly contemporary take on old anxieties. One of King鈥檚 best novels in years, The Institute ratchets up the tension from Ellis鈥檚 kidnapping to his violent confrontation with the powers that be.

鈥淪ci-fi, with its historical dependence on tales of exploration and civilisation-building, is ripe for reinvention鈥�

Key to the book鈥檚 success is its emphasis on the necessity of personal resistance. Just as small-scale injustice paves the way for appalling corruption, so too can a child鈥檚 defiance open the door for wider rebellion. At a time when it takes 16-year-old Greta Thunberg to hold world leaders accountable for a lack of action on climate change, this is a message that is sure to resonate.

The debut novel of Indigenous Australian author Claire G. Coleman touched the same nerve a couple of years back. Terra Nullius refers to the legal status (鈥渘obody鈥檚 land鈥�) of Australia at the time of its original settlement by Europeans. Deeming the land to be empty negated the history, and threatened the lives, of more than 500 indigenous groups who did, in fact, inhabit the continent.

Postcolonial science fiction has surged in recent years, with the critical success of Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tade Thompson and Jeannette Ng, to name a few. The genre, with its dependence on tales of exploration and civilisation-building, is clearly ripe for reinvention. Coleman does exactly that. With Terra Nullius and her forthcoming novel The Old Lie, she weaves together faux-historical sources and perspectives, pitting incumbents against newly arrived settlers. For the first half you may feel as if you are diving into a gritty and disquieting piece of historical fiction, but the blurb for Terra Nullius lays such thoughts to rest: 鈥淭his is not Australia as we know it.鈥� Coleman implies that those best-placed to lead the resistance may be those who have been resisting for generations.

While the psychopathic hirelings of both novels may present as cartoonishly thuggish, King and Coleman remind us that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.