James Nicoll Reviews

The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang (June 2023)

Inspired by a classic of martial arts literature, S. L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws are bandits of devastating ruthlessness, unseemly femininity, dangerous philosophies, and ungovernable gender who are ready to make history — or tear it apart.

In the jianghu, you break the law to make it your own.

Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor’s soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job. 

Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away. 

Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan. Mountain outlaws on the margins of society, the Liangshan Bandits proclaim a belief in justice — for women, for the downtrodden, for progressive thinkers a corrupt Empire would imprison or destroy. They’re also murderers, thieves, smugglers, and cutthroats. 

Apart, they love like demons and fight like tigers. Together, they could bring down an empire. 

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Secondhand Daylight by Eugen Bacon & Andrew Hook (October 2023)

Something is happening to Green. He is an ordinary guy, time-jumping forward at a startling, uncontainable rate. He is grappling to understand his present; his relationship is wholly tattered; his ultimate destination is a colossal question mark. Zada is a scientist in the future. She is mindful of Green’s conundrum and seeks to unravel it by going backwards in time. Can she stop him from jumping to infinity? Their point of intersection is fleeting but memorable, each one’s travel impacting the other’s past or future. And one of them doesn’t even know it yet. Secondhand Daylight is a reverse story in alternate timelines between two protagonists whose lives must one day intersect. A titillating offering from World Fantasy Award-finalist Eugen Bacon, an Otherwise Fellowships honouree for ​‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. In collaboration with three-time British Fantasy Society Award-winner Andrew Hook.

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James Nicoll Reviews – 2269 reviews and counting! – is funded by commissions and by my Patreon.

Many thanks to my existing patrons! If you enjoy my endless rambles through the brambles of speculative fiction, please consider supporting my Patreon.

(This is late because in the flurry of year beginning posts, I overlooked what should be a routine post)

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James Nicoll Reviews Review Categories, as of January 1, 2023:

Spine-tingling suspense cut!

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Onward into the future! And to start 2023 off on an up note, while I would be more than happy to be a finalist for almost every speculative fiction award this year, please don’t nominate me for a Hugo in 2023. 

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Chasing Whispers by Eugen Bacon (September 2022) 

Chasing Whispers is a unique Afro-irrealist collection of Black speculative fiction in transformative stories of culture, longing, hybridity, unlimited futures, a collision of worlds and folklore. 

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Huh. I need to find a new header image for 2023.

December 2022

22 works reviewed. 12 by women (55%), 9 by men (41%), 1 by a non-binary author (5%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 9 by POC (41%).

Year to Date

260 works reviewed. 143 by women (55%), 109 by men (42%), 8 by a non-binary author (3%), 0 by authors whose genders are unknown (0%), and 102 by POC (39%).

Grand Total to Date

2268 works reviewed. 1267 by women (56%), 949 by men (42%), 34 by non-binary authors (1%), 18 by authors whose gender is unknown (1%), and 676.75 by POC (30%).

Government Types December

Total 22, Not Applicable 3 (14%), Unclear 0 (0%), Anarchy 0 (0%), Pure democracy 1 (5%), Representative democracy 5 (23%), Oligarchy 11 (50%), Autocracy 2 (9%).

Government Type 2022 TD

Total 260, Not Applicable 40 (16%), Unclear 18 (8%), Anarchy 6 (2%), Pure democracy 2 (0.5%), Representative democracy 72 (28%), Oligarchy 99 (36%), Autocracy 23 (9%).

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Once again the calendar has ground around to that part of the year when the endless lengthening of the nights finally reverses, and the days begin to lengthen. We shall not freeze after all! Thematically appropriate holiday wishes!

Thanks to my editor Karen Lofstrom for turning my word-salad into sentences and paragraphs and to my web person Adrienne L. Travis for giving me a place to post my reviews. All 2,264 (to date) of them. 

Thank you to my audience of seven plus years! Thank you to all my patrons, on Patreon and here. And a big thank you to the creators everywhere who give me something to review..

While I experiment to see just how much food it takes to explode me, please enjoy Well Told Tale’s seasonally relevant reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, The Star.

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Infinity Gate by M. R. Carey (March 2023)

INFINITY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING. 

The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds – except that they’re really just the one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an AI threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they’ll eradicate it by whatever means necessary, no matter the cost to human life.

Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth’s environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel. It could save everyone on her dying planet, but now she’s walked into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of.

And she needs to choose a side before it kills her. 

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The Woods Are Waiting by Katherine Greene (July 2023)

In the tradition of Lisa Jewell and Ruth Ware, Katherine Greene’s debut thriller is a dark descent into the sinister traditions and customs of a small town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Yet no superstition will prepare childhood friends Cheyenne and Natalie for the macabre truth that awaits them. 

Cheyenne Ashby knows the dark and disturbing history of her hometown of Blue Cliff, Virginia, all too well. It’s why she left. Growing up deep within the woods with her eccentric mother, Constance, she was raised on the unusual customs and generational superstitions linked to the local legend of an evil entity that haunts the forest. 

Five years ago, the bodies of three children were found in the woods. It was a man — not a mythical beast — named Jasper Clinton who was convicted of these heinous crimes. For five years the town breathed just a bit easier with a real-life monster behind bars. 

But when another child goes missing, Cheyenne and Natalie are determined to discover the truth and uncover the town’s dangerous secrets rooted in its terrifying past. 

The two women must confront the reality of the superstitions they always believed in and their town’s complicated connection with who — or what — lives in the woods. 

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