James Nicoll Reviews

2022’s The Legacy of Molly Southbourne is the third installment in Tade Thompson’s Molly Southbourne series.

Each drop of Molly’s blood had the potential to grow into a new molly, one imbued by a mysterious process with the memories of previous Mollies. Molly Southbourne is long dead but the Mollies live on. Most live in a mutual support group … but one has been overlooked. She has been conditioned against killing the other Mollies, but she’s turned the urge to murder against random victims.

Her murder spree alerts authorities. They react. 

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Tade Thompson’s 2021 Far from the Light of Heaven is a stand-alone science fiction novel. 

Starflight is challenging but routine. Michelle ​“Shell” Campion’s father may have made the history books by vanishing mysteriously in space; but Shell does not expect to earn even a footnote. And why should she? Shell may be second-in-command on Ragtime but this is a sinecure. Starship Ragtime​’s captain is an infallible AI and there will be no need for human input. 

Shell’s expectations are too humble. She makes the history books, in the worst way possible.

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2019’s The Survival of Molly Southbourne is a sequel to Tade Thompson’s 2017 The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

Molly’s house is in flames but Molly herself is alive. Or rather, a molly is alive. 

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Tade Thompson’s 2019 The Rosewater Insurrection is the second volume in his Wormwood trilogy. 

Researcher Aminat Arigbede and her psychic husband Kaaro have a happy marriage. Their domestic bliss is ephemeral … they live on a planet that is slowly but inexorably being taken from the human species by alien invaders. 

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Tade Thompson’s 2017 The Murders Of Molly Southbourne is a standalone novel of SF horror.

Molly’s parents taught her four simple rules:

If you see a girl who looks like you, run and fight.
Don’t bleed.
If you bleed, blot, burn, and bleach.
If you find a hole, find your parents.

Failure to follow any one of these rules could mean death. For Molly, for her parents, for anyone involved. 

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2016’s Rosewater is Tade Thompson’s second novel; it follows 2015’s (unrelated) mystery Making Wolf.

Kaaro was once a talented thief. Now he’s a very reluctant member of Nigeria’s Section Forty-five, an obscure branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. S45 specializes in the odd and weird, the occult phenomena that have become all too real in the world created by the alien incursion of 2015.Nowhere on the world is the strange as present as it is in Kaaro’s hometown of Rosewater, which formed around an alien dome (known as Utopicity) in the 2050s. 

Utopicity seems happy to remain sealed and indifferent to humanity but the lifeforms it released have spread quietly across the world. A lucky few have been transformed. Kaaro is one of those changed ; that’s why he has ESP. Which in turn makes him valuable to S45. 

Kaaro is a reluctant draftee, but he’s also too lazy to do anything strenuous to escape his bureaucratic servitude. He limits his protest to habitual insubordination. Happily for Kaaro, adventure is coming for him.

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