James Nicoll Reviews

Melissa Scott’s 2020 Storm Warning is a tie-in novel for the American animated web series Gen:Lock .

Following the Great Union of the Fourth Turning Republics AKA the Union AKA Team Evil’s attack on New York, the Polity AKA the Good Guys, the Good Guys have been hard pressed to hold the line at the 88^th Meridian. The core of the resistance is the Gen:LOCK program, which allows pilots to briefly imprint their minds into Holons, advanced mechas. Only a small fraction of the population is capable of taking advantage of Gen:LOCK technology, thus the job of keeping the free world free falls on a small number of people, not all of whom are the sort of people governments would ordinarily trust.

Seventeen-year-old Cammie MacCloud, for example, is a former criminal.

Read more ➤

Jayge Carr’s 1979 Leviathan’s Deep is a standalone science fiction novel. 

The Kimassu Lady, Consecrate in the House of Equity, serves her people by doling out justice according to need. Few are in more need of justice than the meddling Terrens. With a little orange skin dye the Terrens can pass for Delyene, but their ways are quite alien.

Read more ➤

2021’s Symbiosis is the second volume in Nicky Drayden’s Escaping Exodus series. 

Centuries ago, survivors of wrecked Earth enslaved great space faring beasts — Zenzee — to provide new, living, habitats. Exploiting the Zenzee for human convenience rather than sustainability, humans managed to reduce the Zenzee population to a mere handful. Any evidence that Zenzee were conscious beings was ignored. Faced with the choice between business as usual and extinction OR sustainable practices and survival, the crew of the Parados embraced the unthinkable and opted for change.

Under Doka Kaleigh’s leadership, the people of Parados 1 have reformed their ways. The cost? Many personal inconveniences. Unfortunately for Doka, who has been grudgingly allowed to lead by Parados 1’s matriarchy, the other members of the Senate are unconvinced the new ways are better. They are, in fact, playing a long game.

Read more ➤

nobody103 (Domagoj Kurmaic)’s Mother of Learning is a completed web-serial. The 823,563-word effort was serialized between Oct 17, 2011 and Feb 10, 2020.

Zorian Kazinski is neither as talented as his oldest brother Daimen nor as charming as his second oldest brother, Fortov. That’s fine with him. He doesn’t want to be shown off by his social-climbing parents. But Fortov’s value as a social investment fizzled when he turned to be a likeable freeloader. Zorian is now subjected to unwanted attention from parents who are determined to turn his diligent studiousness to account. He appears to acquiesce but … is looking forward to that wonderful day when he can cut all ties with his family (save, perhaps, for his annoying but adorable younger sister, Kirielle). 

For the moment, he has to settle for the lesser distance provided by his stay as a boarder at Cyoria’s Royal Academy of Magical Arts.

There, Zorian will spend a surprising amount of time in third year. Years and years. Or he will spend a couple of months. It depends on your perspective.

Read more ➤

Makoto Yukimura’s Planetes (Japanese: プラネテス, Hepburn: Puranetesu, Ancient Greek: Πλάνητες Planētes) is a Japanese hard SF manga. 2016’s Planetes Omnibus Volume 2 collects all of the Planetes material that was not included in Volume 1 (reviewed here). Some of this is bonus backstory, some of it tells readers what came next for the protagonists. 

In Volume 1, the crew of the DS-12 Toy Box —Hachirota ​“Hachimaki” Hoshino, Fee Carmichael, Ai Tanabe, and Yuri Mihairokov — took a break from scouring the skies for deadly orbital debris in order to save the day from the Space Defence Front¹. That adventure over, all that remains is getting on with the rest of their lives. 

Read more ➤

Premee Mohamed’s 2021 A Broken Darkness is a sequel to Beneath the Rising .

A year and a half ago, wunderkind Johnny Chambers and her bestest friend Nick Prasad saved the world from the Dimensional Anomaly. True, they were a bit late and hundreds of millions of people died. The important thing is that seven billion people didn’t die. 

Nick hasn’t spoken to Johnny in the last year and a half. It’s not just because Johnny was responsible for providing other-dimensional beings with the chance to invade our world. Although that is a large part of it.

Read more ➤

2020’s The Last Emperox is the third and final volume in John Scalzi’s The Interdependency trilogy. Three books to a trilogy is a visionary step other authors would do well to emulate. 

The Interdependency: still doomed by the impending collapse of the Flow, on which all interstellar trade depends! Emperox Grayland II: still determined to save the Interdependency’s people! The entire Nohamapetan family, with the exception of the late Amit Nohamapetan (still dead!): still an enormous pain in the ass. 

Read more ➤

Judith Merril’s 1950 Shadow on the Hearth is a standalone post-apocalyptic novel. 

When her maid Veda calls in sick, harried Westchester housewife Gladys Mitchell waves goodbye to her commuter husband and tackles the household chores alone. There is so much to do that it is not until well after the fact that she learns that the US has been attacked with atomic bombs. 

Read more ➤

2021’s The Unbroken is the first volume in C. L. Clark’s Magic of the Lost series.

Touraine might have grown up an uncivilized believer in gods and magic had the Balladairans not taken her from her native Qazāl to educate her in Balladairian ways. She then sent to serve as a Sand , a conscript¹ soldier. No other choices offered.

Balladair has enough faith in their training that they do not hesitate to send Touraine and her fellow Sands to El-Wast, in subjugated Qazāl. Back to her home country, to put down a rebellion. 

Read more ➤

Jo Sung-hee’s 2021’s Space Sweepers (Korean: 승리호; Hanja: 勝利號; RR: Seungriho; lit. Spaceship Victory) is a Korean space-opera film. 

The Earth is polluted and surely doomed. At least, that is the case put forth by visionary UTS CEO James Sullivan (Richard Armitage). Sullivan is determined to save a chosen few of his friends, giving them refuge on a terraformed Mars. Vastly wealthy, and with his own private army, he seems sure to get his way. 

The Victory’s crew are not among the chosen. They are just blue-collar non-citizens on whose labour the wealthy’s lavish lifestyles depend. Victory’s crew – humans Kim Tae-ho (Song Joong-ki), Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu), and robot Bubs (Yoo Hae-jin), and Captain Jang (Kim Tae-ri) — salvage debris from heavily trafficked space lanes. In other words, garbagemen. 

Not people who could possibly impede someone like the great James Sullivan.

Read more ➤