James Nicoll Reviews

Ballroom of the Skies
John D. MacDonald
Nelson Doubleday 1979 (1951),
218 pages

Practically a short story. Unfortunately, near the end they give an actual date: 1979. Oops.

WWIII happened in the early 1970s, leaving the US as a second-rate power allied to Pak-India. PI is opposed by a coalition including Irania and North China and WW IV is looming on the horizon. One man, Darwin Branson, has been working to prevent war but on the eve of a critical meeting he is killed and reprogrammed [or replaced by a simulacrum] by a mysterious couple. The new Branson is openly arrogant and cynical, and war is not to be averted.

Read more ➤

Stardance
Spider and Jeanne Robinson
the Dial Press/James Wade, 1977,78,79
218 pages

Die-hard fans of S&JR might want to skip this one.

Synopsis: Charlie Armstead, video artist is introduced to Shara Drummond by her sister Norrey. Shara has talent but is physically unsuited to dance as it is done in the late 20th century. Charlie and Shara form an alliance to sell Shara's dance commercially but they fail to find a market niche. Charlie turns to drink and Shara disappears from his life.

Read more ➤

The Byworlder
Poul Anderson
Signet, 1971,160 pages

Synopsis: it is somewhere between around 2002 and 2010. No significant wars have been fought in ages. Technology is advancing nicely and significant breakthroughs have occurred in the technology of teaching. The relative international calm was broken three years before the book opens by the arrival of a Bussard ramjet from Sigma Draconis. The ramjet is a hybrid ramjet/photon drive of extreme power, and the great powers are very interested in not letting the ship fall into any one nation’s hands, since the drive could be used to erase whole cities from existence casually. To everyone’s immense frustration, the ​“Sigman”, as the ET is called, is apparently not very interested in communication with humans, spending far more time zipping around the solar system than trying to talk to humans.

Read more ➤

The Tomorrow File

551 pages

Synopsis: The rise and fall of Nicholas Bennington Flair, as detailed in three sections. 

Read more ➤

Systemic Shock
Dean Ing
Ace, 1981, 298 pages

I was going to review the entire trilogy but Life Is Too Short plus I want to save up my bile for the Baxter HC that justcame in [1].

Synopsis: It’s 1996 and the entire world is about to go pear-shaped. Young Ted Quantrill is a teenage boy scout out with his officious and incompetent scout master when WW IV starts [WW III was General Sir John Hackett’s 1985 WW III]. The book follows several main points of view: Quantrill’s, Boren Mills’ [an intelligence officer], Sandy Grange’s [a 9 year old girl at the beginning of the story], Eve Simpson [teen holostar sex kitten], and an omniscient narrator writing from some point after WW IV. Don’t know much about that last except he’s an American and possibly a Mormon.

Read more ➤

The Persistence of Vision
John Varley
The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1978

I’m cheating: after reading even a light bus-crusher like Eon I wanted something I could knock in an hour. This is a review of the short story The Persistence of Vision (tPoV), not the collection tPoV. The collection is very good and I recommend it but be warned it is out of print.

Read more ➤

2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke
Signet, 1968
221 pages

I remember this as a light read and it is, even more so than I recalled. It still is a counter example to the colon rule, being quite readable even now, so long after its writing that people who were children when it came out are old and wrinkly now.

Read more ➤

Eon
Greg Bear
Tor, 1985
503 pages

Who is Carol Russo? She seems to do a lot of cover design.

Synopsis: It’s December 2000 and a 300×100 km potato-shaped asteroid is going into close but eccentric orbit around Earth.

Read more ➤

The Texas-Israeli War: 1999
Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop
Del Rey, 1974
209 pages

Synopsis: In 1983, the Treaty of Oslo led to the widespread downsizing of the world’s nuclear arsenals. People being people, the nuclear WMD were replaced with chemical and biological weapons. In 1992, an escalating series of wars starts when Ireland dopes British water with LSD: by the end of the war 90% of the world has died and Israel is the sole industrial nation functioning. The US is embroiled in a Texan civil war and the land-hungry Israelis have signed up on both sides as mercenaries, trading their high tech military skills and weapons for promises of land and money.

Read more ➤

The Judgment of Eve
Edgar Pangborn
Dell, 1966
159 pageI’m cheating: depending on how you take the evidence, The Judgment of Eve could be set anywhere from around 2000 to 2020 and the narrator is living centuries in the future.

Synopsis: Eve lives with her mother and an idiot named Caleb in the New England woods twenty years after a small nuclear war and a plague have destroyed civilization and reduced the human population to the bare edge of sustainability. Eve is 28 when the first visitors arrive: Kenneth, who is near-blind, old Claudius, whose arm was crippled when a building fell on him and Ethan, friend of Kenneth. There is some friction over Eve. The solution, arrived at by her mother reading fairy tales, is that Eve will set a quest. She tells the three to leave and return in the fall to tell her what love is.

Read more ➤