James Nicoll Reviews

Greg Van Eekhout’s 2021 Weird Kid is a stand-alone middle school science fiction novel.

Jake Wind is a student at Cedar Creek View’s¹ middle school. It’s his first day at middle school and it is going to be stressful. This is true for most of the new kids there but it’s extra-super-true for him. Like most kids his age, he’s experiencing unfamiliar physical changes. Unlike most kids, he is subject to transformations that are both rapid and extreme. Jake, you see, is a shape-shifting space monster from beyond the stars²!

Inadvertent shape-shifting aside, however, Jake is just a kid so it’s off to school for him.

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Greg Van Eekhout’s 2011 The Boy at the End of The World is a standalone post-apocalyptic adventure.

Fisher is decanted into a high-tech ark under attack. He’s a newborn in the body of an adolescent boy. He manages to escape the facility before it is destroyed. The good news: Fisher was imbued with a suite of skills before being decanted and he is accompanied by a helpful robot named Click. The bad news: his skills are not applicable to current circumstances and Click is broken.

His new world presents him a whole series of exciting discoveries. For one thing, Fisher is no apex predator. He is in fact very far down this world’s food chain.

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Greg van Eekhout’s 2019 Cog is a standalone young-adult SF novel. 

The untrained eye could mistake Cog for a twelve-year-old boy. In fact, he is a humanoid robot, designed as a tool for research on cognitive development. Like humans, Cog can learn from his experiences. 

Sometimes he learns the wrong thing. Assured by his parent-figure, uniMIND researcher Gina, that ​‘good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment,’ Cog sets out to optimize his learning environment by making some big mistakes.

Mission more than accomplished! 

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