James Nicoll Reviews

Silverlock

John Myers Myers

Ace Books [1979]

516 pages

Synopsis: Clarence Shandon is adrift, both spiritually and literally, his ship, the Naglfar , having sunk suddenly while at sea. He manages to survive the wreck and when he makes his way to a floating spar finds another man already clinging to it. This man is Golias, a bard. Eventually, they manage to reach an island, apparently deserted.

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The Man Responsible

Stephen Robinett

Ace Books [1978]

245 pages

Synopsis: Harry Penny is a lawyer. He gets involved in two cases simultaneously: One involves a Mrs. Crawley, a wealthy widow who has invested $160.00 in a planned city deal in South America and who has good reason to think that the city is not being built, having visited the site. The other case involves a Mr. Marshall Pierce, who has been accused of assault and battery. As it turns out the two cases are connected: the man Pierce allegedly tried to hit, Vargas is a business associate of Dr. Sterling, the investment genius whose city Mrs. Crowley’s $160.00 is tied up in. A third potential client comes in, who also has money tied up in Sterling’s project but Harry turns him down, because of the potential conflict of interest with Mrs. Crawley, even though this man, Church, has lot more invested and is in dire financial straits.

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Earthwreck!

Thomas N. Scortia

Fawcett Gold Medal [1974]

224 pages

Synopsis: It’s 1988 and the US and SU both have impressive manned space stations in orbit. The US is preparing to return to the Moon, to built a second-strike weapons facility, as allowed by various weapons treaties. The Soviets are planning a manned mission to Mars, to follow up on their extremely successful series of unmanned probes. Because of certain terms in the space-militarization treaties, the two stations,while not cooperating as in Bova’s Millennium, do have open and frequently used lines of communication.

Soon after Captain Quintus Longo leaves his family to serve a tour of duty on the American station, a nuclear war breaks out on Earth, triggered by a joint Japanese-Arab terrorist nuclear attack on Tel Aviv using Chinese nuclear weapons.

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Nightwatch

Andrew M. Stephenson

Dell Books, 1979

320 pages

Synopsis: Dan Frome finds himself drafted into a tour of duty on the Moon in the early 21^st century due to his expertise with Golems, artificial intelligences, which he believes will be used in an upcoming uncrewed Jupiter mission. En route, he discovers that each of his fellow crewmates has a different idea why they are headed for the Moon. 

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And Having Writ…

Donald R. Bensen

Ace [1978]

250 pages

Synopsis: Four interstellar explorers crash land on Earth. In our timeline, their craft exploded over Tunguska, Russia. In AHW, one of the crew members uses a device which creates a universe in which the crew don’t die and they survive with only minor philosophical damage to Valmis, the crewman responsible.

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Rite of Passage

Alexei Panshin

Ace Books [1968]

254 pages

Synopsis: Mia Havero lives on a giant starship [A back of the envelop calculation shows the volume of the ship is on the order of 10,000 cubic kilometers]. Originally built to ferry colonists from an overcrowded Earth to colony worlds, after Earth’s self-destruction, the ship’s crew put it and its seven sister ships to use as living quarters and a base of power over the less advanced colonies, with whom they trade carefully hoarded information for resources. The Ships tolerate no misbehavior from colony worlds: around twenty of the colony worlds have been ​‘morally disciplined’, wiped out from space.

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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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