James Nicoll Reviews

The Gatekeeper’s Staff by Antoine Bandele

TJ Young has been surrounded by magic his entire life, yet he has never tapped into it… until now.

Fourteen-year-old TJ grew up normal in a secret community of gifted diviners in the heart of modern-day Los Angeles. His powerful sister was ordained to lead his people into a new age of prosperity, but her mysterious death in Nigeria threatens to destroy the very foundations of TJ’s world.

Desperate to pick up where his sister left off and uncover the secrets behind her questionable death, TJ commits himself to unlocking the magical heritage that has always eluded him. So he enrolls in Camp Olosa‑a remedial magic school for the divinely less-than-gifted in the humid swamps of New Orleans.

But little does he know, TJ is destined to cross paths with powerful spirits of old thought lost to time: the orishas.

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Call of Cthulhu is (of course) Chaosium’s horror role-playing game, based on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Sandy Petersen’s first edition was published 40 years ago when the field was still young. CoC is very likely Chaosium’s most successful RPG, one of few games of its vintage that has not to my knowledge suffered long periods when it was either out of print or at least hard to find. Quite remarkable, particularly given the usual limited lifespans of licensed products.

I’ve played 2^nd and 5^th editions (which is to say, the post-Lynn Willis versions). The differences between those editions did not seem so dramatic at the time. 7^th on the other hand has somehow become two massive tomes, and a cursory examination indicates some major differences: stats appear to have become much larger, for example, I’m curious how these differences work out in play. Whether that curiosity will overcome my current inability to get through long volumes is a detail to be resolved at a later time. 

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Destroyer of Light by Jennifer Marie Brissett

The Matrix meets an Afro-futuristic retelling of Persephone set in a science fiction underworld of aliens, refugees, and genetic engineering in Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Destroyer of Light.

Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the three habitable areas of the planet – Day, Dusk, and Night – the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably bind three stories:*A violent warlord abducts a young girl from the agrarian outskirts of Dusk leaving her mother searching and grieving.*Genetically modified twin brothers desperately search for the lost son of a human/alien couple in a criminal underground trafficking children for unknown purposes. A young woman with inhuman powers rises through the insurgent ranks of soldiers in the borderlands of Night.Their stories skate across years, building to a single confrontation when the fate of all — human and alien — balances upon a knife’s‑edge.

Warning: This book is designed for audiences 18+ due to scenes of physical and sexual violence, and themes that some may find disturbing. 

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This is the roleplaying game of Action Science! Which is like Science! but with added Action! Based on Brian Clevinger and artist Scott Wegener’s Atomic Robo comic book, whose title character is an autonomous robot created by Nikola Tesla. If the game is true to the comic, adventures should involved misguided science, zany schemes, snappy banter, explosions, and the triumph of good over evil. Or at least over Dr. Dinosaur.

This would be an example of the source material winning out over the game mechanics. I’m just not a big Fate fan, perhaps because my tastes crystalized decades before Fate grew out of Fudge. I am quite fond of Atomic Robo, though, and maybe that’s enough. 

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Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders

In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary. The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse. Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant. The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, ​“this generation’s Le Guin.”

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June 2021

22 works reviewed. 12 by women (55%), 10 by men (45%), 0 by non-binary
authors (0%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 works
by POC (36%)

Year to Date

128 works reviewed. 69.5 by women (54%), 52.5 by men (41%), 3 by
non-binary authors (2%), 3 by authors whose gender is unknown (2%), and
52 works by POC (41%)

Grand Total to Date

1876 works reviewed. 1052 by women (56%), 782 by men (42%), 24 by
non-binary authors (1%), 18 by authors whose gender is unknown (1%), and 531.75 (28%) by POC (28%).

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Tesseracts edited by Judith Merril

The FIRST volume of the ongoing series…

Each year we choose a team of editors from among the best of Canada’s writers, publishers and critics to select innovative and futuristic fiction and poetry from the leaders and emerging voices in Canadian speculative fiction. This is the anthology that started it all!

Tesseracts features fiction by Hugo and Nebula award winning authors Spider Robinson and William Gibson, as well as Élisabeth Vonarburg, Rhea Rose, Robert Zend, Michael G. Coney, Robert Priest, Candas Jane Dorsey, Eileen Kernaghan, Christopher Dewdney, Daniel Sernine, D. M. Price,Terence M. Green, Dorothy Corbett Gentleman, Gerry Truscott, Benjamin Freedman, Phyllis Gotlieb, Gary Eikenberry, Marc Sevigny, Robert John Colombo, Marian Engel, D. M. Price, Margaret McBride, A. K. Dewdney, Susan Swan, Lesley Choyce, Robert Sward, and David Kilpatrick.

About Judith Merril

The late Judith Merril is considered one of the most prolific authors and editors in the field of Science Fiction. Born in New York in 1923, she founded the Futurians, a group of SF writers and editors. Her first SF story, ​‘That Only a Mother,’ was published in 1948. Judith edited numerous SF anthologies including Dell’s Year’s Best SF from 1956 – 1967, and was the ​‘Books’ columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1965 – 69. She helped to establish Toronto’s Rochdale College library (based largely on her own private collection) which is now known as The Merril Collection. Judith founded the speculative fiction writers group Hydra North in 1984, and was awarded two Canadian Science Fiction Lifetime Achievement Awards: for contributions to the field and for achievements in editing. She passed away September 12, 1997 from complications following an angiogram. She is sorely missed by her fans and fellow writers. 

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Runequest 2^nd edition was, as previously established, my second go-to roleplaying game in my (and the hobby’s) early days of roleplaying. The house system used for RQ came to be known as Basic Roleplaying or BRP. The earliest instance of the BRP rules on their own was a 16-page booklet in the Worlds of Wonder box set. This and the three setting specific world books established that BRP could serve as a game engine for a wide range of genres. 

Skip forward twenty years

Thanks to various events, Chaosium lost the rights to Runequest. They still owned Basic Roleplaying, however, and this, the 2008 Big Gold Book, is the most recent attempt to distill into one volume enough essentials of the system to serve as a generic game system, from fantasy to science fiction, from mystery to superhero. 

BRP mechanics are straight-forward and suit settings where characters should be comparatively fragile. The essentials are easy to convey to new players, although the ease with which characters die or go mad should perhaps be left as a delightful surprise. 

As it happens, Chaosium regained the rights to Runequest, which means this edition of BRP is somewhat surplus to their needs.. PDFs of the main book and various supplement are available but currently physical books are not available. This may change in the future. In any case, another streamlined edition of BRP and various BRP-based games are in the offing. 

As it happens, I have a use for such a flexible system. The nostalgia aspect does not hurt.

(I’m joking. I’ll kick ideas around, and hunt down various supplements to see if they have the elements I want but I never actually run anything)

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Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid’s Tale in this blend of Chinese history and mecha science fiction for YA readers. The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain. When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected – she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way – and stop more girls from being sacrificed. 

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(My master list alphabetical but I reserve the right to backtrack or jump ahead as the whim takes me. Also, my intention is one of these per week for a year but my list currently has about three dozen games on it, well short of fifty-two)

One of a surprising number of Fria Ligan games I own (they had a sale! Buying RPGs was my go-stress relief in the waning days of the Trump regime), this RPG is an an official licensed product for the Alien movie franchise. Licensed products are a bit of a risk for companies; large media empires are prone to arbitrary decisions and often disappointed by the money RPGs deliver, while franchise fans can be very picky, for example as I was when I complained thirty years ago that Leading Edge’s 1991 Aliens Adventure Game could not duplicate the events of the film.

Although I have not played this game – obviously, or why would I be discussing it – casual perusal suggests that unlike its predecessor, Aliens does a very nice job of simulating the movies. Partly, this is because the Year Zero game engine Fria Ligan uses produces fragile player characters. Partly, it is thanks to a mechanic particular to this iteration of the Year Zero engine, stress dice. This reflect that many characters find being stalked by hordes of ravenous predators a bit trying. A little stress actually helps characters accomplish tasks, the catch being that stress also increases the odds of catastrophic failure. Campaigns could be tricky due to the tendency of player characters to explode like tripe-filled balloons, but it could be an amusing one-off.

Like all of the Fria Ligan books I’ve purchased, the production values on this are great, although I find white print on black background hard to read. The book looks very sturdy. As an artifact, Alien is very impressive. 

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