James Nicoll Reviews

A young man plagued by the ability to see ghosts races to save the mythological land of Tara from a terrible fate in Erika Lewis’s stunning debut, Game of Shadows.

Thousands of years ago in Ireland, an ancient race fought a world-changing battle — and lost. Their land overrun, the Celtic gods and goddesses fled, while the mythical races and magical druids sailed to an uncharted continent, cloaked so mankind could never find it. This new homeland was named Tara.

In modern day Los Angeles, Ethan Makkai struggles with an overprotective mother who never lets him out of her sight, and a terrifying secret: he can see ghosts. Desperate for a taste of freedom, he leaves his apartment by himself for the first time — only to find his life changed forever. After being attacked by dive-bombing birds, he races home to find the place trashed and his mother gone.

With the help of a captain from Tara who has been secretly watching the Makkais for a long time, Ethan sets out to save his mother; a journey that leads him to the hidden lands, and straight into the arms of a vicious sorcerer who will stop at nothing until he controls Tara.With new-found allies including Christian, the cousin he never knew he had, and Lily, the sword-slinging healer who’d rather fight than mend bones, Ethan travels an arduous road — dodging imprisonment, battling beasts he thought only existed in nightmares, and accepting help from the beings he’s always sought to avoid: ghosts. This L.A. teen must garner strength from his gift and embrace his destiny if he’s going to save his mother, the fearless girl he’s fallen for, and all the people of Tara.

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Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency
dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond
spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and
combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also
involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his
expense reports are *still* a mess.

Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness,
the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on
TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob
nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the
attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British
government looking for public services to privatize. There’s a lot of
potential shareholder value in the Laundry’s ​“knowledge assets.”

Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly
unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.

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Commander Raymond Burntwood of the Royal Navy has returned to England where he meets the reclusive heiress Lady Ariana Grayhart. After the scandal of a night spent dancing together, Ariana returns home to Northumberland. Raymond’s superiors — seeking information about Ariana’s father — dispatch the commander under the cover of courting the heiress.

All is not as it seems in the Grayhart household. Captain Grayhart is an invalid, the servants maintain a monkish silence, and secrets are layered upon secrets. Everyone has their own agenda, from Raymond’s friend and confidante Du Bois, to the family lawyer Sir Berwick, and Ariana herself.
In the midst of it all, Raymond must unravel the truth of Captain Grayhart’s decline and save Ariana’s reputation and fortune. In doing so, he learns dark secrets about himself that could tear his world apart.

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The luxury cruise ship the Martian Queen was decommissioned years ago, set to drift back and forth between Earth and Mars on the off-chance that reclaiming it ever became profitable for the owners. For Saga and her husband Michel the cruise ship represents a massive payday. Hacking and stealing the ship could earn them enough to settle down, have children, and pay for the treatments to save Saga’s mother’s life.

But the Martian Queen is much more than their employer has told them. In the twenty years since it was abandoned, something strange and dangerous has come to reside in the decadent vessel. Saga feels herself being drawn into a spider’s web, and must navigate the traps and lures of an awakening intelligence if she wants to go home again.

When Hob Ravani’s uncle turns up dead, and her childhood friend gone without a trace, Hob will put everything on the line to find out what happened. With her adoptive father, the leader of the mercenary company the Ghost Wolves, Hob will defy TransRift, the company that owns their entire world.

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February

19 works reviewed. 11 by women (58%). 8 by men (42).

Works by POC: 14.5 (76%).

I wanted to review at least 20 items but heath and technical issues got in the way. 19 is still better than last year. As well, 2017's attempt to focus on black authors was a lot more successful than 2016: 14.5 works versus 8, with no authors repeated. Still room for improvement but not as much room as last year.

Year to Date

42 works reviewed. 23 by women (55%). 18 by men (43%). 1 by a non-binary author (2%).

Works by POC: 20.5 (49%)

Compared to last year: Up 2 works reviewed, down 1 by woman (My Friday theme this year has a lot more men than the last two themes, which is to say "any at all".). POC up by 9.5. Non-binary authors down by 1, which is sad because I want to make 2017 the year when I do a better than terrible job at reviewing non-binary authors. The problem is that I tend to focus on one issue to the exclusion of others. Oh well. Ten months to improve my stats, unless the Americans kill us all.

And now for my favourite part: the meaningless table!

Key: WNB stands for “women and non-binary genders”, while POC stands for “person of colour”. R/R stands for “reviews/reviewers”. Figures in brackets are percentages; for R/R the percentage represents the site’s R/R over my 2015 R/R. SFX is actually called SFX; it is not short for anything. Same with io9. F&SF is the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. SFS is Science Fiction Studies. LARB is the Los Angeles Review of Books. CSZ is the Cascadia Subduction Zone

Review source	Total	WNB (%)	POC (%)	Reviewers	R/R (%)
Locus	324	163 (50)	22 (7)	17	19 (5.7)
JNR 2016	255	163.5 (64)	62.5 (25)	1	255 (78)
SFX	165	48 (29)	10 (6)	30	5.5 (1.5)
Romantic Times	146	84 (57)	14 (10)	(incorrect)	n/a (n/a)
Tor	141	66 (47)	18 (13)	27	5.2 (1.6)
Strange Horizons	139	66 (48)	30 (22)	80	1.7 (0.5)
Rising Shadows	83	25 (30)	1 (1)	2	41.5 (12.6)
Interzone	67	21 (31)	7 (10)	19	3.5 (1)
F&SF	59	32 (54)	5 (9)	5	11.8 (3.6)
Analog	58	10 (17)	3 (4)	1	58 (17.6)
Io9	56	17 (30)	12 (21)	10	5.6 (1.7)
Asimov's	53	21 (23)	3 (6)	3	17.7 (5.4)
Vector	52	18 (35)	4 (8)	26	2 (0.6)
SFS	45	48 (21)	2 (4)	38	1.2 (0.3)
James Nicoll Review 2017	42	24 (57)	20.5 (49)	1	42 (13)
NYRSF	42	11 (26)	6 (13)	24	1.8 (0.5)
Foundation	38	9 (24)	1 (3)	27	1.4 (0.4)
LARB	35	11 (31)	7 (20)	28	1.3 (0.4)
Lightspeed	28	16? (57)	14 (50)	3	9.3 (2.8)
CSZ	23	19 (80)	8 (35)	17	1.4 (0.4)

I love this time of year. It’s so easy to bound up the chart, from last place to 6^th from last and I can now say I reviewed more works by POC than Analog, Asimov’s, CSZ, F&SF, Foundation, IO9, Interzone, LARB, Lightspeed, NYRSF, Rising Shadows, Romantic Times, SFS, SFX Tor, and Vector did in 2015.

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I was literally just thinking I should review another Carey.

It’s good that I went out to see what Canada Post had delivered because the squirrel who has taken such an interest in the mail box recently had the package halfway to the sidewalk when I looked out the door.

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Publishers send me books. Let me know if any of these look interesting.

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23 books read. 12 by women (52%). 10 by men (43%). 1 by non-binary authors (4%). Ah, my old foe, rounding error. This month has an atypically high fraction of men because last month I convinced myself that December 31 fell on the Sunday and did a double review of books by men, counting them against December’s stats. There were days I knew December 31 was on the Saturday. Truly, the ability of the brain to believe two mutually exclusive facts is impressive. 

POC 6 (26%). It’s just dumb luck it was that high. 

I wonder, should I be comparing these to 2016? 

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The Waterloo region (and neighboring areas) are not generally known as hotbeds of spec-fic writing. If you’ve heard of us at all, it’s most likely thanks to the University of Waterloo or the annual Oktoberfest. Why, Kitchener’s Public Library does not even bother to keep track of which SF authors come from the surrounding region ¹.

But I do.

Spec-fic authors who either live in or near Waterloo region or did live here in the past include the following. 

R. J. Anderson
Orin Bishop
Evelyn Barber
Marie Bilodeau
W. Patrick Bradley
Erin Bow
James Bow
Patricia Bow
Melanie Card
Robert Card
Suzanne Church
M. L. Clark
Kristen Ciccarelli
Ange Clayfield
John Robert Columbo
Ryan Consell
Julie Czerneda
Karen Dales
James Roy Daley
Kit Daven
A. K. Dewdney
Cory Doctorow
Chris Evans
Jon Evans
Pat Forde
Ed Greenwood
B. C. Holmes
Matthew Hughes
E. K. Johnston
Edward Llewellyn
Jen Frankel
J. M. Frey
James Alan Gardner
Sephera Giron
Viktor Haag
Chris Hadfield
Kate Heartfield
Josh Hoey
Matthew Douglas Ingraham
Dean Italiano
Becka Kinzie
Armon Kishen Kohli
Ash Kreider
Alisse Lee-Goldenberg
Violette Malan
Lyn McGinnis
Jane Ann McLachlan
John McMullen
David Morrell
Amber O’Brien
Dave Okum
Neil Randall
Sarah Raughley
Vanessa Ricci-Thode
Stephen B. Pearl
Yuy Ren
Thomas J. Ryan
Graydon Saunders
Robert J. Sawyer
Emily Schooley
John Settle
Dylan Siebert
Ray Slay
Richard H. Stephens
Craig Stewart
Glynn Stewart
Ruth Stuart
Dave Switzer
Sarah Totton
An Tran
Sarah Tolmie
Jessica Vitalis

Non-Fiction Authors

Andrea Austin
Andrew Deman

Restaurants

The Watchtower



Over the next year I will be reviewing fifty-two works ² of speculative fiction by as broad a cross-section of the names above as I can manage. Please join me. 

1: Or local authors of any kind. 

2: Not necessarily prose works: spec-fic comes in other forms as well. 

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