James Nicoll Reviews

2022’s The Void Ascendant is the third and final volume in Premee Mohamed’s Beneath the Rising trilogy.

Nick Prasad survived the destruction of Earth at the manipulative limbs of cosmic horrors. He survived tumbling through dimensions. Arriving on alien Aradec, he embraced the role of designated prophet. True, he has had to enable some terrible things, but as long as his superiors do not tire of him, playing prophet allows him to put off his death. It’s not much but it’s all Nick can hope for.

Now, it seems that even personal survival may be out of the question.

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Premee Mohamed’s 2021 The Annual Migration of Clouds is a stand-alone post-apocalyptic novella. 

Reid Graham is ecstatic to receive a letter of acceptance from Howse University. Howse is not merely a respected centre of learning. It is one of the few places in Canada that retains high technology despite a series of calamities that have reduced the population of the world by two orders of magnitude. 

The catch? Reid has to get to Howse on her own. This is tricky. Howse is hundreds of miles away from Reid’s home; there are few automobiles still functioning. And … there are other problems. 

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Premee Mohamed’s 2021 And What Can We Offer You Tonight is a standalone dystopic tale of revenge. 

The world of the distant future is perfectly ordered and just. The wealthy are free to enjoy their wealth; the poor are free to work at ill-paid jobs and die of hunger and disease. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. 

Courtesan Winsome Winfield is murdered by a client of her brothel, the House of Bicchieri. That’s OK by the House: a free-spending customer is more important than a mere prostitute. 

The other courtesans of the House give their friend a quiet burial. 

Winsome’s resurrection is utterly unexpected. 

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Premee Mohamed’s 2021 A Broken Darkness is a sequel to Beneath the Rising.

A year and a half ago, wunderkind Johnny Chambers and her bestest friend Nick Prasad saved the world from the Dimensional Anomaly. True, they were a bit late and hundreds of millions of people died. The important thing is that seven billion people didn’t die. 

Nick hasn’t spoken to Johnny in the last year and a half. It’s not just because Johnny was responsible for providing other-dimensional beings with the chance to invade our world. Although that is a large part of it.

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Premee Mohamed’s 2021 These Lifeless Things is a near-future cosmic horror novella.

Eva is fortunate enough to witness humanity’s first contact with otherworldly intelligences. More exactly, she is part of the very small fraction of the human population to survive Them.

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Premee Mohamed’s 2020 Beneath the Rising is a standalone cosmic horror novel.

Nick Prasad is poor and brown. Even though he’s quite bright, he can’t even consider going to university; he has family obligations. His friend Joanna ​“Johnny” Chambers is wealthy, white, and a world-famous super-genius scientist. Despite the vast gulf between them, the two teens have been friends since childhood. Nick is madly smitten with Johnny. Johnny is fond of Nick. But there’s this vast gulf between them …

Having cured HIV and Alzheimer’s, Johnny turns her attention to solving climate change. Solution: replace fossil fuels with an inter-dimensional reactor. Too bad that Johnny has saved the world from climate change by creating a gateway to something much worse.

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Premee Mohamed’s 2018 novella, The Apple-Tree Throne, is an alternate-history fantasy.

Having served overseas in the army of the Greater Republic of Britannia, Lieutenant Braddock returns home with a debilitating leg injury. His commanding officer, Major-General Theodore Wickersley, returns in a coffin. Having been promoted far beyond his competence: the Major-General made egregious mistakes that led to his death. 

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