James Nicoll Reviews

Bob Shaw’s 1976 A Wreath of Stars is a stand-alone near-future science fiction. I am ~80% that certain that it was the second Bob Shaw novel I ever read.

Gilbert Snook used his technical skills to travel the world, maintaining aircraft in the breakaway nations so common in the 1990s. It was good life (for him): he made as much money as he needed and he could be as introverted and anti-social as he liked. This worked… until he ended up in the breakaway republic of Barandi. There he pisses off Colonel Freeborn¹, second in command to President Ogilvie, and finds himself sent to the diamond mines. Not as a miner, as a teacher, but it’s still not at all the life he wanted.

Then ghosts start appearing in the deepest parts of the mines. If the mines shut down, Snook may be blamed. Indeed, Freeborn will probably enjoy ordering the grating Canadian executed.

Read more ➤

Bob Shaw’s 1977 Who Goes Here? Is the first of his Warren Peace comedic SF novels. It is also the first Bob Shaw novel I ever read. 

Warren Peace is utterly untroubled, perfectly content. This is because he is an amnesiac. Warren remembers nothing because his memories have been artificially removed. His memories were removed by the Space Legion at his request. In return, Warren signed up for a thirty-year¹ tour of duty with the Space Legion.

Why Warren did this is a mystery to Warren. Amnesia. His new employers don’t care, not least because they suppose that if Warren wanted to erase all his memories, he must have been a complete monster. 

Read more ➤

1975’s Orbitsville is the first volume in Bob Shaw’s Orbitsville trilogy. 

Vance Garamond is a competent starship pilot but a terrible babysitter. He fails to prevent his boss’s son from falling to his death. His boss, Elizabeth Lindstrom, the autocratic president of the company that controls interstellar flight, is notoriously vindictive. Rather than wait to see what form her vengeance will take, Garamond collects his wife Aileen and son Christopher and flees to the stars in a commandeered flickerwing starship, the Bissendorf.

If only there were somewhere beyond Lindstrom’s reach Garamond and his family could flee …

Read more ➤

Bob Shaw’s 1969 novel The Palace of Eternity is almost a mirror image of this week’s Tanith Lee: it starts off looking like the hardest of hard SF, then heads off into territory more often associated with fantasy. 

Sickened by his experiences in the great war between humanity and the alien Pythsyccans, retired soldier Mack Travener settles on the planet Mnemosyne. Conventional interstellar craft cannot approach the planet, which is surrounded by a shell of fragments left by two shattered moons. Mnemosyne seems doomed to remain an eternal backwater. Inexplicably, despite its rustic nature, the planet is a hotbed of creativity, particularly artistic creativity. 

Mack’s attempt to reinvent himself as a civilian mechanic on a planet of peaceful artists is short-lived. 

Read more ➤

1979’s Vertigo is not my first Bob Shaw novel. That would be Who Goes Here.

It’s also not my favourite Bob Shaw novel. That would be The Palace of Eternity.

It is, however, the only Bob Shaw novel set in Canada¹.

Well, Alberta. But as an Ontarian I regard all of the lesser provinces with equal favour. At least they aren’t Manitoba! Well, except for poor Manitoba. 

Today’s venerables mourn the bustling Moon bases and omnipresent jet packs promised by the futurists and SF writers of ages past. Air Patrolman Rob Hasson’s twenty first century may not have moon bases ², but it definitely has the counter-gravity harness, that marvelous device that gave the freedom of the skies to millions. 

Millions of idiots. 

Read more ➤