James Nicoll Reviews

Emily Foster’s 2016 The Drowning Eyes is a standalone secondary-universe fantasy.

Town after town has been sacked by the Dragon Ships. Widespread paranoia is cutting into the good ship Giggling Goat​’s business; it’s much harder for Tazir to find passengers willing to book passage.

Still, no matter the danger, there is always someone anxious enough to pay well for transport across risky waters. It could be ​“runaway bride,” ​“person looking for a lost relative,” or ​“murderer who needs to get away from the scene of the crime.” Tazir’s recruiting efforts pay off in the form of a young girl named Shina. She seems naïve and harmless, needs to travel quickly, and is willing to pay an impressively large fee.

All is not quite as it seems.

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James E. Gunn’s 1972 The Listeners is a collection of related stories pitched as a novel. All concern the search for extra-terrestrial life through the means of radio telescopes.

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2018’s Aru Shah and the End of Time is the first volume of Roshani Chokshi’s Pandava series. 

Desperate to fit in with the wealthy kids at her school, preteen Aru Shah has spun a diverting web of lies. The flaw in her bold scheme is that her lies are transparently false. Vexed at Aru’s fabrications, a bevy of schoolmates confront Aru at her home, an annex to the Museum of Ancient Indian Art and Culture that her mother runs. 

Feeling that her reputation at school is on the line, Aru makes a bold move: she will show her skeptical frenemies a genuine curse lamp. 

This could be the gambit that dooms the world.

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Kiri Wazawa’s on-going The Morose Mononokean (Fukigen na Mononokean) is a Japanese contemporary-fantasy manga. Volume 1 collects the first four issues, first serialised in Square Enix’s Gangan Online magazine.

On Hanae Ashiya’s first day in high school, he took pity on what he took to be a discarded toy in danger of being squashed by foot traffic. The ​“toy” was no toy but a fuzzy demon, which immediately latched onto the hapless boy. With his lifeforce rapidly dwindling, Ashiya is beyond the aid of any mundane succor. 

Luckily for Ashiya, his high school has a resident exorcist whose mystic ads Ashiya can see.

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Chandra K. Clarke’s 2020 Echoes of Another: A Novel of the Near Future is, as the subtitle suggests, a near-future novel.

Ambitious researcher Kel has turned off-the-shelf technology into a useful experimental device that records brain states. More importantly, it can induce those states, once recorded. The ever-so-focused Kel does not consider any uses for her invention aside from the very specific one she had in mind when she created it. 

Others will be more creative.

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Poul Anderson’s 1966 The Trouble Twisters is a collection of three stories, all set in Anderson’s Polesotechnic League, all featuring young David Falkayn. 

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Yuki Midorikawa’s Natsume’s Book of Friends (Natsume Yūjin-chō) is a Japanese fantasy manga series. First serialized in LaLa DXin 2005, it switched to LaLa in 2008. Volume 1 collects the first four issues.

Takashi Natsume is an orphan, passed from relative to relative as so often happens in manga. His current guardians are Touko and Shigeru Fujiwara, who are determined to give the boy a stable home. Takashi values his foster parents and for this reason keeps his greatest secret from them: he has occult powers.

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2020’s Critical Point is a third volume in S. L. Huang’s Russell’s Attic series. 

If Cassandra ​“Cas” Russell were a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the little placard in front of her seat would read ​“Super-Mathematics.” Cas can perform and apply hypercomplex mental calculations at stupendous speed, a talent that she applies to everything from simple bookkeeping to acrobatics. 

What Cas doesn’t have is a moral compass. She’s working hard to develop a functional substitute because she craves human contact. Not being an amoral monster appears to be a crucial step towards maintaining her rudimentary social life.

Her friends may need the monster in Cas. 

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2014’s Orconomics: A Satire is the first volume in J. Zachary Pike’s Dark Profit Saga.

Disgraced dwarf berserker Gorm Ingerson is woken from his latest drunken bender by an adventurer doing his best to kill a terrified goblin. Gorm beats the adventurer to a pulp and takes his stuff. 

Rather than killing the defenseless goblin out of hand, as tradition dictates, Gorm takes the goblin, Gleebek, to the great city of Andarun to get its Non-Combatant Papers. It’s an act of charity that attracts just the wrong sort of attention.

Soon after arriving in Andarun, Gorm gets an offer he cannot refuse.

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2019’s The Lost Puzzler is the first volume in Eyal Kless’ Tarakan Chronicles. It is a post-apocalyptic adventure. 

The Catastrophe annihilated the Tarakans (who lived in high-tech enclaves on a distant-future Earth) and their enemies but it didn’t quite manage to kill every human on the planet. A few humans survived, scrounging what they can from the ruins. It’s a hard-scrabble life, full of unwanted adventure. 

But adventures make good stories. 

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