James Nicoll Reviews

The Shattered Stars

Richard McEnroe

Bantam Books [1983]

182 pages

Synopsis: Moses Callahan has a debt-laden starship. Desperate for crew and cargo, he accepts a very shady cargo from a businessman and hires Deacon Halloran, a shell-shocked veteran of war to pilot his ship. The businessman turns up very dead but the cargo, a Bethe trigger able of catalysing a wide range of nuclear reactions, arrives anyway. Planning to hand it over to the legal authorities at the far end, Moses accepts it.

Complications ensue. 

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A Hostage for Hinterland

Arsen Darnay

Ballantine Books [1976]

248 pages

Synopsis: A thousand years after the last Limited Nuclear War [Number 13, I think], two cultures divide North America between them. The Structures are highly limited in area but stretch many kilometers into the air, held up by antigravity devices, whose cooling is dependent on helium imported from the Hinterlands. The Hinterlands are occupied by numerous tribes, both hostile to technology and dependent on it, especially the high tech which is primarily only available from the Structures. Every five years, both sides hammer out trade agreements and as the book opens, the current set of negotiations are about to begin.

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Captain Empirical

Sam Nicholson

Ace Books [1979]

342 pages

Synopsis: A fix-up from several short stories published in Analog, framed by a story in which the main character, Captain Schuster, faces unanticipated danger in the asteroid belt, is feared lost and the various reactions of the folks back home during the time they think he is probably dead. Most of the stories [shown as personal recording played back by people breaking into Schuster’s private files for their own individual reasons, some self-serving, others self-serving in different ways] take place at sea:

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We All Died at Breakaway Station

Richard C. Meredith

Ballantine Books [1969]

244 pages.

Synopsis: Three starcraft, the Iwo Jima, the Pharsalus and the Rudolph Cragstone, arrive at Breakaway Station, a link in the chain of FTL communicators between Earth and its colonies in the Palantine. The three craft are crewed by the half-dead, people who are just barely able to be made operational using extensive cyborging. They are carrying a cargo of even more badly wounded military personnel from the on-going war with the Jillies, a race of hideous, inscrutable aliens who have declared a war to the death with humanity.

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The Wanting of Levine

Michael Halberstam

Berkley Books [1978]

458 pages

Synopsis: it’s 1988, the decline of the US has proceeded ever further, and the popular President¹ Bigelow has declined to stand for re-election. Senator Rackey looks likely to get the Democratic Party nomination until he murders his wife. This is eventually seen as an unsurmountable barrier to election and so his supporters must look around for someone else to run. A.L. Levine, who has worked for the Democratic Party for years, accidentally has his name added to a list of possibles the party wants to test for political viability. He tests very strongly and eventually gets the green light to vie for the position of Democratic candidate for the President and subsequently, if he wins, to run for President against the Republican candidate.

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The Taking of Satcon Station

Barney Cohen and Jim Baen

Tor Books [1982]

287 pages

Synopsis: Bockhorn is a field agent for MA&P, one of the big space carriers. Part of his job is hunting down contract runaways and as the book opens, he is called to Satcon Station to look for Lauren Potter whose boss, T.J. Janes, claims may have run off. Investigation shows that Potter is in another station with a hard man named Cobb. Bockhorn catches up with them and decides that All Is Not As It Seems. More investigations lead him to discover that T.J and Potter were lesbian lovers, that big money is involved somehow, that someone else is tracking Cobb and Potter and eventually that someone has shot off Cobb's face. Hijinks ensue.

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The Godwhale

T.J. Bass
Ballantine Books [1974]
281 pages

Synopsis: Larry Dever, several centuries in the future on an Earth with about 35 billion people, manages to get himself badly injured on a vacation. Too severely damaged for the technology of the day to cure completely [Having been more or less cut in two], he opts for Temporary Suspension, hoping to be woken in a future era with the ability to make him whole again. He is revived a few centuries later but while the method exists to give him a whole body, the method [raising a clone and using it for parts] seems unethical to him and re-opts for TS, missing a chance to join a seeding mission to Procyon.

Two thousand years pass. The Earth is occupied by the Hive, a world city covering all of the land and filled with 3.5 trillion four-toed nebbishes, the malnourished and degenerate descendants of current day humanity. The Hive has no room for useless people like Larry and it re-awakens him in order to urge him to commit suicide.

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Casey Agonistes
Richard McKenna
Ace [1978]
212 pages

This is a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories by McKenna. There are five stories and an introduction by Damon Knight. Descriptions do no justice to the stories.

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War Games
Karl Hansen
Playboy Paperback Science Fiction [1981]
288 pages

Synopsis: The setting is the solar system sometime in the future. Biotechnology allows the adaptation of life, including human life, to harsh and exotic environments. Accordingly, Titan has been the target of ecopoeisis and have a rich and varied native ecosystem, including tweaked humans, nicknamed ​‘elves’ by the Terran humans. The elves are oppressed by the decadent Terran Empire and the guerrilla war between elves and humans forms the background of the story.

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A Fond Farewell to Dying

Syd Logsdon

Timescape Pocket Science Fiction [1981]

206 pages

Synopsis: Two centuries after a massive nuclear war which destroyed the Western Powers, the Soviet Union and China, changed the climate so that the icecaps melted and stunted the birthrates of the world due to radiation- induced sterility, India and itslarge Moslem neighbor Medina have become the new superpowers.

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