James Nicoll Reviews

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s 1976 Inferno is the first installment in their Inferno series. 

Allen Carpentier’s unremarkable science fiction career ends when an attempt to win the love of fans ends with a drunken plummet from an open window to the sidewalk waiting below. 

Allen is very, very dead. He is also still conscious, which is something of a surprise to this agnostic SF writer.

Read more ➤

Emiko Jean’s 2018 Empress of All Seasons is a standalone secondary universe fantasy.

Animal Women have a simple lifestyle: find a gullible human man, seduce him, marry him, take his possessions, and leave. Any girl children who result from the union are raised, while the useless boys are discarded. 

Mari is an Animal Woman to whom fate has been unkind. Almost every Animal Woman is incredibly beautiful. Mari is not. Faced with a daughter unable to befuddle men with her looks, Mari’s mother decided to set her daughter on the path to the loftiest husband of all: an emperor.

Read more ➤

Yumi Tamura’s post-apocalyptic manga 7 Seeds was serialized in Shogakukan’s Bessatsu Shōjo Comic magazine from 2001 to 2002, then in Flowers magazine. Its run concluded in May 2017. The full run fills thirty-five bound volumes.

Natsu Iwashimizu goes to sleep in her familiar bedroom. She wakes on a sinking ship, which she narrowly escapes. When she and the other three survivors reach the coast, they find a world transformed.

Read more ➤

2018’s The Bitter Twins is the second volume in Jen Williams’ The Winnowing Flame trilogy.

The Jure’lia have returned to an ill-prepared Sarn. The tree-god who once protected Sarn is near-death. Its war-beast fruit have improperly ripened; they lack ancestral memories. The god-touched Eborans are a vanishing face.

All is not quite hopeless.

Read more ➤

Harry Harrison’s 1970 One Step from Earth is a science fiction collection. All the stories involve matter transmission. 

Read more ➤

2019’s Fortuna is the first volume in Kristyn Merbeth’s The Nova Vita Protocol.

Many decades ago a fleet of generation ships carried refugees from doomed Earth to Nova Vita, a nearby red dwarf. There humans settled five worlds with native biospheres: Nibiru, Deva, Pax, Titan, and Gaia. Faced with the challenge of adapting to alien planets, humans did what humans do best: they turned on each other.

Interplanetary trader Mama Kaiser has no illusions about the future of her children. The paranoid governments of Nova Vita dislike and distrust anyone from other planets. The best that Interplanetary vagabonds can expect is grudging indifference. The only people who will look out for the Kaisers are Kaisers. Blood above all!

Which didn’t prevent Corvus Kaiser from signing up for a three-year tour in Titan’s endless civil war. 

Read more ➤

Fiyah: A Magazine of Speculative Black Fiction is published by Troy L. Wiggins. Editorial staff are as follows: Executive Editor: DaVaun Sanders, Poetry Editor: Brandon O’Brien, Acquiring Editors: Danny Lore, Kaleb Russell, and Eboni J. Dunbar, Art Direction and Layout: LeKesha Lewis, and Cover Artwork by Steffi Walthall. This is Fiyah’s thirteenth volume.

Read more ➤

Aiya Kyu and Aneko Yusagi’s Rising of the Shield Hero is a manga adaption of Yusagi’s light novel series of the same name. It is an isekai portal fantasy. 

Finding himself short on cash, twenty-year-old student Naofumi Iwatani takes refuge in a convenient library. A fantasy novel catches the otaku’s interest when it falls off a shelf onto his head. He scans it briefly and decides that its scenario — four chosen ones saving their world — seems too contrived. No sooner does this thought cross his mind when he is transported to the world within the tome. He’s one of the four chosen ones.

Read more ➤

2013’s Velveteen vs. the Multiverse is the second volume in Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen vs. series.

Velma ​“Velveteen” Martinez seeks refuge from her former crew, the Super Patriots, America’s paramount super-franchise. She moves to Oregon, the only state that hasn’t contracted with the franchise. She’s free to build a new life, with a new apartment, new adventures, and a new boyfriend. The Super Patriots’ predatory ways are behind her.

Just kidding. Cutting ties with the Super Patriots is an affront Marketing will never forgive. Harassment ensues.

Read more ➤

John Varley’s 1980 The Barbie Murders (later re-published as Picnic on Nearside) is a collection of science fiction stories. Most but not all of them are set in Varley’s Eight Worlds milieu. 

Read more ➤