James Nicoll Reviews

The Aurora Awards are Canada’s annual English-language Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards. The 2025 Aurora Award Ballot has been released. The finalists are:

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Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree (November 2025)

Return to the cozy fantasy world of the #1 New York Times bestselling Legends & Lattes series with a new adventure featuring fan-favorite, foul-mouthed bookseller FernFern has weathered the stillness and storms of a bookseller’s life for decades, but now, in the face of crippling ennui, transplants herself to the city of Thune to hang out her shingle beside a long-absent friend’s coffee shop. What could be a better pairing? Surely a charming renovation montage will cure what ails her!If only things were so simple…It turns out that fixing your life isn’t a one-time prospect, nor as easy as a change of scenery and a lick of paint. 

A drunken and desperate night sees the rattkin waking far from home in the company of a legendary warrior, an imprisoned chaos-goblin with a fondness for silverware, and an absolutely thumping hangover. 

As together they fend off a rogue’s gallery of ne’er-do-wells trying to claim the bounty the goblin represents, Fern may finally reconnect with the person she actually is when nothing seems inevitable. 

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Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill (September 2025)

To survive the challenge of a trickster god, a quick-witted acolyte rallies her ancestors with cunning subterfuge and outright rebellion. 

Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. As a child with godly blood in her, if she cannot earn a divine chaperone, she will never be allowed to leave her temple home. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks. 

In folk tales, the Fox is a loveable prankster. But despite their humor and charm, T’sidaan, and their audition, is no joke. They throw Nesi back in time three hundred years, when her homeland is occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin. 

Now, Nesi must ally with her besieged people and learn a trickster’s guile to snatch a fortress from the disgraced and exiled 100^th Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt. 

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It’s is weird that 2025 seems to be racing by, despite each day being jam-packed with new and entirely unnecessary crises. At least carefully curated fiction offers the opportunity to visit worlds that make sense. Of course, nothing makes finding new fiction to read easier than a tasty bowl of Maggi soup a reliable review site, such as James Nicoll Reviews.

If you’d like to support James Nicoll Reviews, you have a number of options.

Do you want ongoing say in what I review? Join my Patreon here

Do you immediate gratification¹? Commission a review!

Do you languish under the burden of excess wealth? Spontaneous donations may be accomplished via my Paypal.

Bales of hundred-dollar bills delivered in the dark of night are also acceptable. Contact me for my mailing address.

1: Immediate gratification on a cosmological time scale. 

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March 2025

21 works reviewed. 9 by women (43%), 9 by men (43%), 1 by non-binary authors (5%), 2 by authors whose gender is unknown (10%), and 9 by POC (43%).

The end of month report is getting rather long so I think I will put the cut up here.

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Extremity by Nicholas Binge (September 2025)

A time-traveling, end-of-the-world police procedural, Extremity is True Detective if written by Philip K. Dick. 

When once-renowned police detective Julia Torgrimsen is brought out of forced retirement to investigate the murder of Bruno Donaldson, a billionaire she worked with whilst undercover, she doesn’t expect to find two bodies. Both are Bruno — identical down to the fingerprints — and both have been shot. 

As the investigation sucks her back into the macabre world of London’s rich elite, she finds herself on the hunt for a mysterious assassin who has been taking out the wealthy one by one. But when she finally catches up with her quarry, she unveils an entire world of secrets: impossible documents about future stock market crashes, photographs of dead clones, and a clandestine time-travelling conspiracy so insidious it might just mean the extinction of the entire human race. 

If Julia is to have any chance of preventing this terrible future, she’ll have to revisit her own past, the terrible choices she made undercover, and the brutal act that destroyed her once legendary career.

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Monsters and Other Tales of Humanity by Carla E. Dash (July 2025)

Revealing both how terrifying and how heroic individuals can be when untethered from relationships, Monsters and Other Tales of Humanity portrays the ways people cope with loneliness. A woman is haunted by Death, who progressively resembles her drowned fiancé . A child seeks beauty in a handsome stranger’ s greenhouse and holds out hope for a savior. A woman’ s husband is murdered by police, and her monstrous children enact a bloody revenge. A negligent mail carrier believes stars are disappearing from the sky, heralding the annihilation of the universe. A video game character’ s dissonance with the actions he must perform precipitates a choice that could destroy his world. Speculative and lyrical, these stories explore the human need for connection and how the lack of ties warps lives. 

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Fabula Ultima Natural Fantasy Atlas by Emanuele Galletto (March 2025)

The NATURAL FANTASY ATLAS for FABULA ULTIMA will bring you into worlds deeply permeated by the cycles of time and nature, where young heroes face the consequences of past mistakes and demonstrate that history does not have to repeat itself, creating a brave future of coexistence, much like in classic JRPGs!

• Dive into a new JRPG subgenre based upon harmony and change with 4 new Classes (Floralist, Gourmet, Invoker, and Merchant) and new Heroic Skills to create even more new combinations!
• 10 natural fantasy locations: archetypal settings with tips and hints for playing an intense natural fantasy campaign or which you can use as inspiration to breathe life into your world.
• Craft equipment and tools with any materials you gather using the rules for custom weapons and forging.
• Introduce Quirks, optional rules that add even more depth to your characters, and take a break to share a convivial moment with the camp activities.
• 5 Villains, challenging new bosses of increasing power to use in your adventures, providing your Players with tougher and more exciting challenges.
• 208 full-color pages, featuring manga and chibi-style illustrations from international artists.

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Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders (August 2025)

In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders’s own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic. A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic – with very unexpected results – in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love. 

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training – she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she’s also a powerful witch. 

Serena, Jamie’s mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories. 

Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn’t know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path. 

Now it’s up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives. 

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To quote the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Site:

SFFA members* can now submit their nominations for works done in 2024. Members may submit up to five different works in each of our ten categories. We ask that you only nominate in categories if you are familiar with the eligible works. Our nomination form closes at 11:59pm Eastern Time on April 5^th.

More details at the other end of this link.

Both James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old Science Fiction are eligible (in the Best Fan Writing/Publication category), as are many other fine Canadian works.

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