James Nicoll Reviews

Elaine U. Cho’s 2024 Ocean’s Godori is a thus-far stand-alone near-future science fiction novel.

Ocean Yoon saved Teophilus ​“Teo” Anand, lesser son of the vast Anand Tech commercial empire, from a violent death. Her employers should have rewarded her; instead, they assigned her to their worst ships. But the highly skilled and determined Ocean has made the best of her circumstances and her career is reviving. Teo? He’s doing OK, living his rich kid life.

Fate brings Ocean and Teo back together.

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2024’s We Speak Through the Mountain, a sequel to Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds, is a near-future science fiction novella.

Nineteen-year-old Reid Graham was one of the lucky few invited to attend university at Howse University. Reid was also one of the lucky fewer who survived her trip across the post-collapse hellscape between her tiny home community and Howse, which is sheltered in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.

Having reached Howse, Reid can put her troubles behind her. Will she?

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Insomniacs After School, Volume 6 is the sixth tankōbon in Makoto Ojiro’s contemporary manga series. Serialized in Shogakukan’s seinen manga magazine Weekly Big Comic Spirits, Insomniacs After School has been ongoing since May 2019. The English translation of Volume 6 came out in 2024.

Fellow insomniacs turned belated astronomers Ganta Nakami and Isaki Magari are pursuing their hobby in Isaki’s grandmother’s rural home. The teens were, of course, provided with a chaperone in the form of Isaki’s older sister Haya. Haya has better things to do with her time than keep an eye on two teenagers. When opportunity presented itself, Haya departed, leaving Ganta and Isaki alone.

However will two unsupervised teens fill the time?

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John Brunner’s 1982 Manshape is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

Jorgen Thorkild oversees the Bridge System, which allows people to step from one world to another, provided only that both worlds are spliced into the interstellar transportation network. Physical challenges now solved, that leaves only cultural impediments standing between all the human worlds and a single, unified society.

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Anne McCaffrey’s 1970 Alchemy and Academe is (to quote an inside page) ​“A Collection of Original Stories Concerning Themselves with Transmutations, Mental and Elemental, Alchemical and Academic.”

Or rather, it’s an anthology etc. Ah, well, still less misleading than the cover, which claims that Alchemy and Academe is ​“Enchanting tales of some sorcerers and their apprentices,” which it isn’t, not really. As far as I can tell, Alchemy and Academe is one of two anthologies edited by McCaffrey.

Of all the editors I would have expected to compare McCaffrey to, it would not have been…

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Trang Thanh Tran’s 2024 She Is a Haunting is a stand-alone modern horror novel.

Jade Nguyen was accepted by UPenn, but failed to get a full scholarship. Jade is painfully aware that, were her mother to learn of Jade’s financial shortfall, Jade’s mother would take out loans and work even more hours at her nail salon. This is unacceptable to Jade. She adds her financial situation to the list of secrets Jade keeps from her mother.

The alternative is almost as unacceptable. To spare her mother, Jade embraces it: appeal to her estranged father, the man who abandoned Jade’s mother, Jade, and Jade’s siblings. Her father agrees to fund Jade’s education… at a price.

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2021’s You Sexy Thing is the first volume in Cat Rambo’s Disco Space Opera Series.

Having deployed a regulatory loophole to exit her service to the Holy Hive Mind, Captain Nicolette ​“Niko” Larsen invested her back wages in the TwiceFar Station’s Last Chance restaurant. Aided by those of her subordinates fortunate enough to have survived certain events prior to the novel, Niko has enough funds to keep the Last Chance running for about three months¹. If the restaurant cannot be made profitable in that time, the crew will get to explore the exciting world of insolvency.

Salvation appears in the form of food critic Lolola Montaigne d’Arcy deBurgh.

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Park Seolyeon’s 2022 A Magical Girl Retires is a modern fantasy. The 2024 English translation is by Anton Hur.

Jobless, three million won¹ in debt, her dream of becoming a clock repair person dead, now alone in the world, an unnamed twenty-nine-year-old Korean woman resolves to kill herself, ideally in a manner that will inconvenience as few people as possible. Before she can steel herself up to hurl herself from a bridge, Clairvoyant Magical Girl Ah Roa appears in a cab to forestall the twenty-nine-year-old.

The twenty-nine-year-old is not the hapless loser she believes she is. She is a Magical Girl. Rather than being a burden the world would be better off without, the twenty-nine-year-old may be its savior.

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Norman Spinrad’s 2002 He Walked Among Us is a science fiction messianic fable¹ … or possibly an entirely mundane story about deranged people with overlapping manias and the people who exploit them.

The novel’s protagonist, Hugo Award winner Dexter Lampkin, was certain that Transformations was his Big Novel. But Transformations didn’t even earn out its advance. On the advice of Harlan Ellison, Dexter turned to cracking out television scripts. This did not produce the accolades that Dexter was sure should be his, but it did deliver the income he and his family needed.

Despite his Big Novel’s fate, Dexter does not turn his back on SF conventions. After all, SF conventions provide him with a steady stream of low-self-esteem unattractive fat women with whom he can cheat on his hot wife Ellie.

Fate hands Dexter the chance to save the world.

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John Wyndham’s 1955 The Chrysalids is a stand-alone post-apocalyptic coming of age novel. The Chrysalids was also published under the title Re-Birth.

David Strorm lives in Waknuk, a thriving backwoods community in Labrador. The Tribulation that erased the Old People and their semi-mythical civilization left much of the world an uninhabitable desolation. Labrador and nearby Newf are exceptions, but even here the Tribulation left a legacy that has shaped the local culture.

Beware spoilers.

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