James Nicoll Reviews

2012’s Range of Ghosts is the first novel in Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky series, which currently includes three linked novels and five shorter works. Or so I see on consulting the ISFBD, because if the hardcover I read has any hint that this is part of a series, I overlooked it. I will return to this point later. 

Life as a relative of the Great Khan isn’t all beer and skittles and sacking the defenseless cities of the great plains. Sometimes it involves massive civil wars. The death of a Khan usually triggers a squabble over the Khanate. Which of the rivals, Qulan or Qori Buqa, will gain power? Or will the war end with the Khaganate in ruins? Choosing which faction to join is a matter of life and death and neutrality is not an option. 

Temur chose poorly, which is why when we meet him he is the lone survivor of a slain army. He has been left for dead amidst the heaped bodies of his close relatives. 

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The good news about having read 1993’s It Happened Tomorrow is that I can now put a push-pin into India on a map of nations whose science fiction I have reviewed on James Nicoll Reviews.

On the minus side, it was not a particularly good book. 

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Anyone who has read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ten-part Shadows of the Apt series, with its insect-themed kinden (clans) might well think that Tchaikovsky is fond of bugs. Unlike so many of the rest of us. Remember the neighbourhood kids warning you about earwigs? Those horrifying creepy crawlies that might even now be laying their eggs in your ear while you are distracted reading this text? 

You don’t know the half of it. But you will, once you read 2015’s Children of Time.

Centuries from now, the never-modest Doctor Kern thinks of the nameless world twenty light-years from Earth as ​“Kern’s World”; she may not have terraformed the world, but she certainly plans to populate it with a species of her creation; monkeys infected with a nanovirus designed to push the primates towards intelligence. 

Everything goes exactly to plan … except that there’s a catastrophic, civilization-levelling war back on Earth. All the monkeys are killed before they can reach Kern’s World. However, the nanovirus reaches the surface. There, it finds alternate hosts on whom to inflict the Exaltation of Beasts. 

Spiders …

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1968’s Stand on Zanzibar is the first of a thematically connected series of dystopian novels, each wrestling with a different significant issue of the day (the day being the 1960s and 1970s). It is arguably John Brunner’s finest work. 

Brunner takes us to a 2010 where Earth is home to so many people — seven billion! — that if we all stood shoulder to shoulder in one location, we would cover the island of Zanzibar. There’s no sign of a Malthusian collapse on the horizon, but the unthinkable overcrowding has had consequences, ranging from draconian eugenic laws to outbreaks of violence. Conventional sexual mores have broken down and society has become saturated with frivolous, pandering, Murdochian mass media. 

Two roommates, Donald Hogan and Norman House, are drawn into seemingly unrelated events on the opposite sides of the Earth. 

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I love quasi-plausible SF set in our solar system, especially SF that tries to be at least semi-plausible. For a long time, Anglospheric SF had little interest in that particular literary niche. I was forced to look abroad. Which eventually resulted in my exposure to the 2003 – 2004 26-episode anime series Planetes, adapted by Sunrise from Makoto Yakimura’s manga of the same name.

Ah, the bright and shiny world of the 2070s! Space travel is, if not routine, at least common; oil has been replaced by lunar helium three¹, thus ensuring the continuation of energy-intensive civilization. Prosperity abounds!

For the people working for Technora’s Half Section, prosperity is unevenly distributed. Space is just where they happen to work. The Half Section, more correctly called the Space Debris Section, are the garbagemen (and women) of SPAAACE!

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Tanith Lee’s 1977 Drinking Sapphire Wine is a sequel to 1976’s Don’t Bite the Sun¹.

Dragged back to utopian four-BEE following the death of her pet and her unborn child, the nameless narrator chafes against a society which, they now realize, is much too limited. Life in four-BEE is pleasant and utterly meaningless; the narrator and other adolescents, the Jangs, are expected to do nothing but enjoy themselves … but even the adults (known only as older persons ) play no really useful roles. Any job worth doing is done by robots and quasi-robots because they can be trusted to do important jobs correctly. 

Even rebellion is meaningless in four-BEE. The quasi-robots who keep the city running simply fix any damage with a long suffering sigh. Or so everyone thought. And then … one of the Jangs, Zirk, outraged over a comparatively trivial disagreement, challenges the narrator to a duel. The duel leads to an interesting discovery. There is a crime the quasi-robot-run Committee will not forgive: 

Murder.

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2015’s Persona is Genevieve Valentine’s third novel. 

Suyana Sapaki is one of the International Assembly’s Faces, youthful delegates whose demanding jobs offer very little in the way of power or job security. Even popular Faces can fall from grace overnight and Suyana is nothing like popular; not only is she herself less than personable, but the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation itself is something of an international pariah. 

Summoned to meet with the American Face and his handlers to negotiate the terms under which the two Faces will feign a relationship — an arrangement that Suyana regards as indistinguishable from state-sanctioned prostitution — she gets a hint that someone believes her utility has dropped below zero. That hint comes in the form of several bullet wounds, none fatal. 

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I’ve read a lot of SF, but there’s a heck of a lot of it. More than I could read in my lifetime. That’s why this is the first book by William Shunn I’ve ever read, even though he has been publishing for decades and has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula¹. But … this book is not SF; it is autobiography.

Shunnhas done a lot of interesting things. He was part of the team that wrote the venerable word-processing program, Wordperfect, which many of us still feel was better than the Word that replaced it as the business standard. He was also something of a celebrity in Canada in the mid-1980s. 

WilliamS hunn was the earnest young Mormon missionary whose bomb threat to Flight 789 made newspaper headlines all across Canada. 

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2015’s The House of Shattered Wings is the first novel in Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen setting¹. Dominion of the Fallen features a world much like our own, so much like ours as to have its own Paris, City of Lights. This secondary world has been a refuge for Fallen angels for at least the last eight hundred years. Powerful and avaricious, the Fallen easily dominate the humans around them. They have transformed France into a paramount power ruled over by the angel-led Great Houses of Paris. 

In 1914, the Great Houses turned on each other, transforming Paris from one of the world’s wonders into one of its great horrors. At the time in which this novel is set, the Great Houses War is long over, but Paris remains a post-apocalyptic desolation. Some Houses still stand, but they are much reduced from their glory days. 

Thus far, House Silverspires has been one of the lucky ones. It survived the War. It survived the loss of its founder, Morningstar. It survived the unending jockeying for position between the surviving Houses. Whether House Silverspires can survive what is to come is entirely unclear. 

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Leah Bobet’s 2015 An Inheritance of Ashes is her second novel. The first was 2012’s¹ Above.

The war against the Wicked God is over; the dread lord and its army of Twisted Things were defeated by a single knife thrust from John Balsam’s blade. How exactly Balsam killed a god by stabbing it is unclear. Balsam vanished in the chaos that followed the Wicked God’s death and no one else knows what happened.

Indeed, all too few of the men who marched south from the lakelands to fight the Wicked God have returned. Young Hallie and pregnant Marthe wait for Marthe’s husband Thom to return, while doing their best to keep Roadstead Farm functioning. Shell-shocked veterans trickle north, but none of them are Thom. One wandering veteran, Heron, stays, trading his labour for room and board over the winter. Still, even with his help, the sisters may not be able to keep the farm … for reasons to be explained later. 

But the appearance of a Twisted Thing at a window hints that the war might not be as over as people think.

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