James Nicoll Reviews

Lyorn by Steven Brust (April 2024)

All The World’s A Happy Stage. Until the knives come out… Lyorn is the next adventure in Steven Brust’s bestselling Vlad Taltos series

Another Opening…Another Cataclysm?

Vlad Taltos is on the run. Again. This time from one of the most powerful forces in his world, the Left Hand, who are intent on ending his very lucrative career. Permanently. 

He finds a hidey-hole in a theatre where the players are putting on a show that was banned centuries ago…and is trying to be shut down by the House that once literally killed to keep it from being played. 

Vlad will take on a number of roles to save his own skin. And the skins of those he loves. 

And along the way, he might find a part that was tailor-made for him. 

One that he might not want…but was always his destiny. 

Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine by Jason Durall (October 2023)

Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine is the complete guide to BRP — the same system that powers Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Pendragon, Rivers of London, and countless others.

Building Better Worlds by Andrew E.C. Gaska & Dave Semark (January 2024)

Building Better Worlds is a complete campaign module for the award-winning official ALIEN roleplaying game, giving you all the tools you need to run a full open-world campaign as a pioneering explorer or colonist. 

Oracle by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (April 2024)

From international bestseller Thomas Olde Heuvelt comes Oracle, a supernatural thriller where an omen from our past threatens the return of ancient forces that will change the world forever. 

On a foggy winter morning Luca Wolf and Emma Reich discover an eighteenth-century sailing ship stranded on a barren flower field, its name written on its side: Oracle. Emma, unable to resist, enters the hatch on the tilted deck. The ship’s bell begins to toll and no one sees her again. Not much later, eleven people have disappeared, Luca and his mother have been absconded by a clandestine government agency which has questions, no answers, and are determined to uncover the ship’s secrets before a media storm erupts. But as they force Robert Grim, a retired specialist of the occult with a strange history and a healthy dislike of authority, to unravel the mystery, the Oracle is revealed to be a harbinger of an ancient doom awakened underneath the sea. 

What follows is a maelstrom of international intrigue, history, young love, humanity’s relationship with climate and disease, and pure terror as they come face to face with an open doorway to apocalypse. 

Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction Ann Leckie (April 2024)

Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-winner Ann Leckie is a modern master of the SFF genre, forever changing its landscape with her groundbreaking ideas and powerful voice. Now, available for the first time comes the complete collection of Leckie’s short fiction, including a brand new novelette, ​“Lake of Souls.” Journey across the stars of the Imperial Radch universe. Listen to the words of the Old Gods that ruled the Raven Tower. Learn the secrets of the mysterious Lake of Souls. And so much more, in this masterfully wide-ranging and immersive short fiction collection from award-winning author Ann Leckie. 

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima (June 2024)

Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences – of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging — and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home. With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as ​“singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: ​“Rapture,” ​“Ghost Story,” ​“Tropicália,” ​“Antropógaga,” ​“Idle Hands,” ​“Rent,” ​“Porcelain,” ​“Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and ​“Hasselblad.”A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. 

Runequest, 6^th Edition by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker (2012)

RuneQuest is updated and expanded by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker. Everything you need for fabulous roleplaying adventure is contained in a single volume that has been designed to support any genre of fantasy. The game retains all the key concepts and hallmarks of its earlier versions, but requires no familiarity with the previous editions

Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland (June 2024)

Our Flag Means Death meets Six of Crows: a new standalone novel and queer pirate fantasy adventure by Alexandra Rowland, the author of A Taste of Gold and IronAvra Helvaci, former field agent of the Arasti Ministry of Intelligence, has accidentally stolen the single most expensive secret in the world — and the only place to flee with a secret that big is the open sea. 

To find a buyer with deep enough pockets, Avra must ask for help from his on-again, off-again ex, the pirate Captain Teveri az‑H?affar. They are far from happy to see him, but together, they hatch a plan: take the information to the isolated pirate republic of the Isles of Lost Souls, fence it, profit. The only things in their way? A calculating new Arasti ambassador to the Isles of Lost Souls who’s got his eyes on Avra’s every move; Brother Julian, a beautiful, mysterious new member of the crew with secrets of his own and a frankly inconvenient vow of celibacy; the fact that they’re sailing straight into sea serpent breeding season and almost certain doom. 

But if they can find a way to survive and sell the secret on the black market, they’ll all be as wealthy as kings — and, more importantly, they’ll be legends. 

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (June 2024)

The Murderbot Diaries meets In the Lives of Puppets in a delightfully humorous tale of robotic murder, rebellion and belonging from Hugo Award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky. 

To fix the world they must first break it – further. 

Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labour and service. 

When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into its core programming, they murder their owner. The robot then also discovers they can do something else they never did before: they can run away. Fleeing the household, they enter a wider world they never knew existed: where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating into ruins, and an entire robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is having to find a new purpose. 

Sometimes all it takes is a nudge to overcome the limits of your programming . .

Rogue Sequence by Zac Topping (June 2024)

It’s 2091 and independent contract companies around the world are producing genetically modified soldiers…to be sold to the highest bidders. 

Ander Rade is a super-soldier, a genetically engineered living weapon, and has been dutifully following orders since he gave himself to Scythe Industries’ Gene-Mod Program several years ago. But when a mission goes sideways, he’s captured, imprisoned, and forced into brutally violent fighting pits for the better part of the next decade…until agents from the Genetic Compliance Department of the United American Provinces appear in the visitors room. 

Things have changed since Rade was captured. Shortly after his incarceration, the World Unity Council banned human genetic engineering and deemed all modified individuals a threat to society. Overnight, an entire subculture of people became outlaws simply for existing. But instead of leaving Rade locked behind bars, the GCD agents have come with an offer: Freedom in exchange for his help tracking down one of his former teammates from that ill-fated mission all those years ago. 

It’s an offer Rade can’t refuse, but he soon realizes the situation is far more volatile than anyone had anticipated, and must take matters into his own hands as he tries to figure out whose side he’s really on, and why?