James Nicoll Reviews

1948¹​’s Death on Gokumon Island is the second volume in Seishi Yokomizo’s Detective Kosuke Kindaichi series. The 2022 English edition was translated by Louise Heal Kawai.

Like many Japanese men, eccentric detective Kindaichi spent 1937 to 1945 serving in the Japanese army. A lucky survivor, he was repatriated back to Japan. Kindaichi has one final war-related task, one that brings the no longer young man to ill-omened Gokumon (Hell’s Gate) Island.

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John Brunner’s 1974 Web of Everywhere is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

Skelters supplied humanity with inexpensive global teleportation¹. Island paradises were but a step from vast cities. Likewise novel plagues, irate terrorists, and savage bandits were but numbers on a keypad away from vulnerable populations. Faced with a rising tide of chaos, governments lashed out with nuclear weapons. Two thirds of the human race perished.

Decades later, two men visit an outpost of the long-dead world before the Blowup.

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Robert C. O’Brien’s 1974 Z for Zachariah¹ is a stand-alone post-apocalypse novel.

The war began in the spring. One week later it was over. The valley in which the Burden farm lay was spared by a quirk of geography and weather. Death lies beyond the hills bordering the valley.

Fifteen-year-old Ann Burden’s family never returned from their final attempt to find survivors outside the valley. After they vanished, Ann tended her farm alone save for the surviving animals. As far as she knows she is the last human on Earth.

One day, a strangely garbed stranger appears.

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Tarun K. Saint and Francesco Verso’s 2024¹ Ecoceanic: Southern Flows is an anthology that examines the impact of climate change on the global south.

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Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold’s 1986 Borderland is the first volume in the Chronicles of the Borderlands modern fantasy shared universe.

The Borderland is the region between Faerie and the human world (1), a region where neither elf magic nor human technology is reliable. Governed by neither side, the Borderland becomes a refuge for society’s outcasts: artists, criminals, and teenagers.

Extensive ISFDB digression warning.

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Gu Byeong-Mo’s The Old Woman with the Knife is a stand-alone thriller. First published as Pagwa in 2013, the 2022 English translation is by Chi-Young Kim.

Hornclaw is an unremarkable-appearing sixty-five-year-old woman. Hornclaw conscientiously avoids any detail that might stick in people’s minds. After all, it would not do to be a memorable-appearing ​“disease control specialist” … or as the police might phrase it if they ever caught her, assassin for hire.

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Demon Daughter is a secondary universe fantasy novel. Demon Daughter is the 12^th volume in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric & Desdemona series.

Adorable moppet Otta has lived all her short life on her father’s trading vessel Golden Chance. Like many children, she would like a pet. Her misguided attempt to tame a ship’s rat provokes the First Mate to throw the beast overboard. The consequences are far beyond anything the First Mate could have imagined.

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1979’s The Universe Next Door is the first volume in Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy.

Despite his unusual name, Furbish Lousewart is destined to ride a wave of populist know-nothingism into the Oval Office.

At least, Furbish will do so in some universes.

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Cherie Dimaline’s 2023 Funeral Songs for Dying Girls is a stand-alone modern fantasy.

Sixteen-year-old Winifred ​“Win” Blight lives with her taciturn father in the Winterson Cemetery¹, where her father operates the crematorium. While living in a house² on cemetery grounds has its drawbacks — fellow students (the jerks) call Win ​“Wednesday Addams³” — Win has lived there her whole life and it’s all she knows. News that declining business may force the crematorium to shut down is unwelcome news, as the Blight home is a free perk of graveyard employment.

Win has one card to play: the cemetery ghost.

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Dr. Kelly Weinersmith¹ and Zach Weinersmith’s 2023 A City on Mars is a non-fiction text. City asks three questions:

Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?

The answers will astound space settlement fans!

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