James Nicoll Reviews

The Liar’s Knot by M. A. Carrick

Trust is the thread that binds us … and the rope that hangs us. In Nadezra, peace is as tenuous as a single thread. The ruthless House Indestor has been destroyed, but darkness still weaves through the city’s filthy back alleys and jewel-bright gardens, seen by those who know where to look. Derossi Vargo has always known. He has sacrificed more than anyone imagines to carve himself a position of power among the nobility, hiding a will of steel behind a velvet smile. He’ll be damned if he lets anyone threaten what he’s built. Grey Serrado knows all too well. Bent under the yoke of too many burdens, he fights to protect the city’s most vulnerable. Sooner or later, that fight will demand more than he can give. And Ren, daughter of no clan, knows best of all. Caught in a knot of lies, torn between her heritage and her aristocratic masquerade, she relies on her gift for reading pattern to survive. And it shows her the web of corruption that traps her city. But all three have yet to discover just how far that web stretches. And in the end, it will take more than knives to cut themselves free… 

Voices From the Radium Age by Joshua Glenn

A collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century by authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to W. E. B. Du Bois. This collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century features work by the famous (Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes), the no-longer famous (“weird fiction pioneer” William Hope Hodgson), and the should-be-more famous (Bengali feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain). It offers stories by writers known for concerns other than science fiction (W. E. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk) and by writers known only for pulp science fiction (the prolific Neil R. Jones). These stories represent what volume and series editor Joshua Glenn has dubbed ​“the Radium Age” – the period when science fiction as we know it emerged as a genre. The collection shows that nascent science fiction from this era was prescient, provocative, and well written. Readers will discover, among other delights, a feminist utopia predating Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland by a decade in Hossain’s story, ​“Sultana’s Dream”; a world in which the human population has retreated underground, in E. M. Forster’s ​“The Machine Stops”; an early entry in the Afrofuturist subgenre in Du Bois’s last-man-on-Earth tale, ​“The Comet”; and the first appearance of Jones’s cryopreserved Professor Jameson, who despairs at Earth’s wreckage but perseveres – in a metal body – to appear in thirty-odd more stories. 

The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume 2 Tarun K. Saint

From sinister plans of xenocide to speciesists who have taken it upon themselves to Off-World those unlike them; from simulations that memorialize stories obliterated by a book-burning world to the Master Pain Merchant who is always at hand to administer a dose of long-forgotten sensations; from genetically modified Glow Girls who can kill with a touch to a droid detective actively seeking out justice — this stellar volume of cutting-edge science fiction showcases, in prose and verse, 32 of the most powerful voices in the genre from the Indian Subcontinent.
Taking forward the formidable task achieved to critical acclaim by the first volume of The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, the present collection masterfully transports readers to worlds strangely familiar, raises crucial questions about the place of humans in the universe, and testifies to the astonishing range and power of the imaginative mind.