James Nicoll Reviews

Out in the darkness of space, something is targeting the Greatships.With their vast cargo holds and a crew that could fill a city, the Greatships are the lifeblood of human occupied space, transporting an unimaginable volume — and value — of goods from City, the greatest human orbital, all the way to Tradepoint at the other, to trade for xenoglas with an unknowable alien species. It has always been Marca Nbaro’s dream to achieve the near-impossible: escape her upbringing and venture into space.All it took, to make her way onto the crew of the Greatship Athens was thousands of hours in simulators, dedication, and pawning or selling every scrap of her old life in order to forge a new one. But though she’s made her way onboard with faked papers, leaving her old life — and scandals — behind isn’t so easy. She may have just combined all the dangers of her former life, with all the perils of the new . .

The Stone Road is a haunting, lyrical fantasy set in a harsh world of grit and monsters. In Casement Rise, a dusty town at the end of days, Jean is a young girl with an innocent but timeless voice that will call to all of us. The day Jean was born a mysterious force named Furnace awoke a few miles out of town that mysteriously calls people to it, never to be heard from again. Jean’s father has been called to it and so many others besides. The novel revolves around Jean, and her relationships both with her stern and overprotective grandmother, and the ancient evil that is Furnace. Jean’s grandmother has always kept Casement Rise safe from monsters, but in protecting Jean, she may have left it too late to teach her how to face the demons on her own, and now it’s time to grow up. With the lyrical cadence of The Last Unicorn and intense imagery of Wizard of Earthsea, The Stone Road is a powerful novel of hope and belonging. 

This psychological sci-fi thriller from a debut author follows one doctor who must discover the source of her crew’s madness… or risk succumbing to it herself.Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship — all specialists in their own fields — as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility. Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes — and that’s when things begin to fall apart. Park’s patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing — neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself — is as it seems.