James Nicoll Reviews

Yoko Ogawa’s 1994 dystopic The Memory Police: A Novel was originally published under the title Hisoyaka na kesshō. The 2019 translation is by Stephen Snyder.

Life on the island is a process of slow erosion, as memory after memory is stripped from the inhabitants. Escape is impossible; among the memories lost is any recollection of seafaring. 

A minority are seemingly immune to this process. No worries! Where there is some natural immunity, the Memory Police intervene without fail or mercy.

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1966’s Orbit 1 is the first volume in Damon Knight’s long-running Orbit anthology series. 

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Veronica G. Henry’s 2021 Bacchanal is a standalone historical fantasy novel. 

Baton Rogue in 1939 has very little to recommend itself to Eliza Meek. It’s too bad that having landed in Baton Rogue, Eliza has yet to find the means to escape it. Not only is Eliza on the wrong side of the colour line, but her unusual talents terrify the citizens of Baton Rouge. 

Salvation arrives in the form of the Bacchanal Carnival. 

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Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 Sands of Mars is a standalone science fiction novel. It was his debut novel. It has also been published as The Sands of Mars.

To commemorate the maiden voyage of Ares, first passenger rocket on the Earth-Mars loop, famed science fiction author Martin Gibson has been dispatched to document the voyage. Although not decrepit as such, Gibson is old enough that he began writing when interplanetary travel was a matter of imagination and not practical engineering. Thus, he can provide an interesting perspective on the realities of crewed space flight. 

While space flight is as unexciting as legions of engineers can arrange¹, the voyage does provide some unexpected surprises.

Warning! Spoilers ahead!

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Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night is a novel about a fascist dystopia. It was originally published under the pen name Murray Constantine (Some editions still are).

The Twenty Years War ended with Nazi Germany’s utter victory over the other nations of Europe and Africa. Seven centuries later, the Nazi Empire is rivaled only by the Japanese Empire. The pious Germans who dominate Nazi Europe believe with all their hearts ​“in pride, in courage, in violence, in brutality, in bloodshed, in ruthlessness, and all other soldierly and heroic virtues.” For most Germans, to do otherwise is literally unthinkable.

Hermann is one such German. His reassuringly inflexible world view will be upended when his old chum Alfred re-enters his life. 

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Nahoko Uehashi’s 2020 The Beast Warrior is the second book in her Beast Player young-adult secondary-universe fantasy series. Cathy Hirano’s translation was published in 2020, which makes me optimistic that more Uehashi books will be translated in the near future. 

Eleven years after the events of The Beast Player, the kingdom of Lyoza is still wrestling with the repercussions of a controversial marriage: Lyoza’s religious leader, the Yojeh, married the kingdom’s Aluhan military commander. This was intended to heal the rift between the kingdom’s two great factions, but many subjects are alarmed by the unconventional move.

Meanwhile, Elin, Lyoza’s keeper of the Royal Beasts (whom readers may remember from Beast Player) has her own problems. Once again, mass death shapes her life.

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2001’s The Precipice is the first volume in Ben Bova’s Asteroid Wars series, which in turn takes place in his interminable Grand Tour setting. 

The Precipiceis also the very first book I was paid to review. I suspect the reason my review garnered me a place as one of the SFBC’s first-readers was less due to any insight I offered and more because I had the book read and the review submitted less than a day later. Twenty years and six thousand nine hundred plus reviews later, how does The Precipice stand up?

Heartbroken over the death of his former lover, former President Jane Scanwell (who died while assisting refugees from a natural disaster), Dan Randolph sets out to save the 21^st century¹ Earth from climate change and civilization itself from the short-sighted bureaucrats, self-serving politicians, deranged conservatives of the New Morality, and (of course!) the witless masses who enable the activities of the preceding factions. 

Rather conveniently, no sooner has Randolph resolved to fix a broken world than malevolent businessman and compulsive horn dog billionaire Martin Humphries arrives in Randolph’s office to offer the means to do just that. There is, of course, a catch.

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Anthony Boucher’s 1969 The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction is a fantasy and science fiction collection. It would be confusing were it not a fantasy and science fiction collection … although I should add that it is not a Fantasy and Science Fiction collection in the sense some might have expected from Boucher¹.

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Ciannon Smart’s 2021 Witches Steeped in Gold is a young-adult secondary-universe fantasy novel. It is Smart’s debut novel.

A decade before the novel opens, Judair Cariot, Witches Council Doyenne, deposed Empress Cordelia Adair. In the ten years since, Judair has ruled the island of Aiyca with an iron hand. A place for everyone and everyone in their place. Which could be a grave, as was true for more than one of the Adair clan. 

Judair’s despised daughter Jazmyne is as unhappy as anyone with her mother’s punitive rule. She has covertly joined the resistance. Which would be a death sentence in itself, were she to be found out, but … there’s another reason to be afraid. Judair is as ruthless to her family as she is to her subjects. Judair sacrificed her own daughter, Jazmyne’s sister Madisyn, after deciding that Madisyn wasn’t fit for purpose. Jazmyne might be next. 

Jazmyne is proceeding according to a cautious, methodical plan. This is about to be junked by a huge monkey-wrench of a development.

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The Fall of Doc Future by W. Dow Rieder is an online superhero novel. It was serialized between 2012 and 2013.

Those closest to Doc Future can tell something is wrong with the super-genius. Never one to share his problems with the intellectually inferior — and as far as Doc can tell, everyone is his intellectual inferior — Doc is unwilling to publicly acknowledge the toll that his prophetic nightmares are taking on him. Ridding himself of them would deny him the means to foresee world-threatening crises before they happen, so he must find some way to live with them. 

As it happens, while Doc is a bright guy, self analysis is tricky. Doc does not fully understand his own problems.

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