James Nicoll Reviews

Magic is the only weapon against the gods in the powerful final novel of this epic fantasy trilogy about battlemages and sorcerers in a world that fears their powers. 

A plague rages in the streets of Perizzi. City guards rally to deal with riots while the young magicians of the Tower pool their healing powers to find a cure. 

Elsewhere, new alliances are formed to stem the rising darkness strengthening a deity who feeds on pestilence and decay. Gods, Sorcerers and Battlemages must set aside the past and their vendettas to work together or risk unleashing greater suffering than they can possibly imagine… 

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Augh. Why can’t I finish these on time? And why am I producing fewer reviews in a year when I am a Hugo finalist. Work harder, Nicoll.

May

21 books read. 12.5 by women (60%), 8.5 by men (40%)

Works by POC: 9 (43%)

Year to Date

103 books read. 57.75 by women (56%). 43.25 by men (42%). 2 by an author whose gender is unknown (2%).

Works by POC: 42.75 (42%)

And now the meaningless chart. 

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This new installment in the smart, snarky, and action-packed Heroine series follows personal superhero trainer Lucy Valdez and friends Aveda Jupiter and Bea and Evie Tanaka as they combat a new supernatural threat.

Lucy Valdez is many things: fight trainer/bodyguard to superheroines, fabulous vintage fashion plate, undisputed karaoke queen at local joint, The Gutter. She is also one of the toughest fighters in all of San Francisco without superpowers. So why can’t she seem to confess her feelings to her longtime crush Rose Rorick, head of the San Francisco Police Department’s Demon Unit? 

Well.… actually, she knows why. She’s afraid Rose won’t like the real Lucy, the Lucy underneath all the fabulous bravado. (She is still fabulous underneath that bravado – just in a different way.) 

When a mysterious new karaoke star rises up at The Gutter and eclipses her, Lucy finds her confidence further shaken – and when strange, seemingly supernatural happenings threaten both this new star and The Gutter’s very existence, she must rise to the challenge and investigate alongside Rose. Will Lucy be able to vanquish the demonic threat to her beloved karaoke haven, confess her true feelings to Rose, and reclaim her karaoke throne? 

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H. G. Wells played a central role in defining the intellectual, political, and literary character of the twentieth century. A prolific literary innovator, he coined such concepts as ​“time machine,” ​“war of the worlds,” and ​“atomic bomb,” exerting vast influence on popular ideas of time and futurity, progress and decline, and humanity’s place in the universe. Wells was a public intellectual with a worldwide readership. He met with world leaders, including Roosevelt, Lenin, Stalin, and Churchill, and his books were international best-sellers. Yet critics and scholars have largely forgotten his accomplishments or relegated them to genre fiction, overlooking their breadth and diversity. In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole provides a definitive account of Wells’s work and ideas. She contends that Wells casts new light on modernism and its values: on topics from warfare to science to time, his work resonates both thematically and aesthetically with some of the most ambitious modernists. At the same time, unlike many modernists, Wells believed that literature had a pressing place in public life, and his works reached a wide range of readers. While recognizing Wells’s limitations, Cole offers a new account of his distinctive style as well as his interventions into social and political thought. She illuminates how Wells embodies twentieth-century literature at its most expansive and engaged. An ambitious rethinking of Wells as both writer and thinker, Inventing Tomorrow suggests that he offers a timely model for literature’s moral responsibility to imagine a better global future.

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