James Nicoll Reviews

C. J. Cherryh’s 1976 novel Gate of Ivrel wasn’t the first Cherryh novel that I read, but it was the first one I read that I liked. 

Exiled for killing one brother and maiming the other, Vanye can expect a short and brutal life as an outcast. What he does not expect is that he will inadvertently free Morgaine Frosthair from the mysterious qujalin mound known to the backward locals as Morgaine’s Tomb. This was no tomb, but temporal trap. The artifact has held Morgaine suspended in time for an entire century, ever since her last grand adventure ended in disaster and rout. 

Vanye’s reward is obligatory servitude to Morgaine. Decades may have passed since Morgaine last walked this world. but her task is not yet done. 

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Perhaps I never heard of Charles A. Tan’s 2012 anthology Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology; perhaps I read about it somewhere andforgot about it. Thanks to Melita Kennedy’s generosity and Lethe Press’ recent sale, I have received and read this book … much to my delight. 

I could add a something here about the history of the Filipino-Chinese community, but even a little research suggests that this cannot be done (properly) in one paragraph. 

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The Tanith Lee 1979 standalone Electric Forest is one of her straightforward SF stories. 

Magdala was clearly an exceptional child, but, sadly enough, not in any good way:

On any planet of the Earth Conclave, fetal conception was the controlled result of selective, artificial impregnation. This ensured that all children born were healthy. Occasionally, however, mistakes occurred in the area of contraception, and a fetus was conceived biologically. Sometimes, such children were less than perfect. It had happened that Magdala Cled was one of these. 

which is why her mother surrendered her to State Orphanage C; why her fellow orphans tormented her; why despite her natural intelligence she was consigned to a menial job; and why the name everyone called her was not her legal name but rather ​“Ugly.”

When Claudio Loro offers her beauty, how can Magdala resist?

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Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein’s 2015’s Letters to Tiptree delivers exactly what it promises in the title … and more!

While women have always written science fiction, their presence in the field grew phenomenally in the 1960s and 1970s. And many of these new writers were very talented. I remember looking at a stack of new SF novels I had just purchased and realizing that none of them had been written by men. 

But there was one major talent to whom the men could point, a male talent who proved that men were still players in the top leagues. To quote Ted Sturgeon¹

“nearly all of the top newer writers, with the exception of James Tiptree, Jr., were women.”

For those of you tuning in late, James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen-name of Alice Bradley Sheldon. But this book isn’t so much about Tiptree, exactly². It’s about how she affected her friends and readers …which includes the readers who might have been her friends had she not shot herself on May 19, 1987.

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My main complaint about Zen Cho is that she doesn’t publish as much and as often as I would like¹. Still, not only can I gleefully anticipate the second Sorcerer Royal book, but 2016’s The Terracotta Bride has just been released. And just purchased by me.

You might think death is the end to all of life’s problems. If you do, then some day you will discover, as did the unfortunate Siew Tsin, that this is not at all true. 

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I hope to review all of the essential short story, novelette, and novella collections published by Joan D. Vinge. You may ask what subset of existing Vinge collections are on that list; the answer would be ​“all three of them.” It would be easier if such a book as The Complete Collected Short Works of Joan D. Vinge were to exist … but it does not. Alas. 

I will begin with 1979’s Eyes of Amber and Other Stories, which contains, not only the novelette Eyes of Amber, but several other stories. As advertised.

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2011’s Master of the House of Darts is the third and to date final volume in Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian and Blood series. In the previous volume, Harbinger of the Storm, High Priest of the Dead Acatl and his allies resorted to some rather extreme measures to keep the Fifth World functioning (for the moment). This volume explores the consequences of that bold gambit.

The Empire now has a Revered Speaker and all should be well with the world. Should. In fact, Revered Speaker Tizoc-tzin’s first holy war gained a merely marginal victory and produced only a handful of prisoners for sacrifice. The gods may have spared the world, for now, but they certainly do not seem to be happy.

When a warrior collapses and dies during a holy rite, it falls to Acatl to investigate.

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1988’s The Book of the Beast is the second of Tanith Lee’s The Secret Books of Paradys. The Book of the Damned was a collection; The Book of the Beast is a novel. Made out of short stories! Mysterious are the ways of authors … or perhaps publishers.

Young scholar Rauolin had no inkling of the dark history of the D’Uscaret clan when he took a lodging in their ancient home. Others are better informed — the name alone is enough to reduce one prostitute to hysterics — but poor Rauolin doesn’t begin to grasp the trouble he has invited until after his assignation with the enchanting and quite dead Helise D’Uscaret. 

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I owe my awareness of this book Joanna Russ’ 1983 work How to Suppress Women’s Writing to the ancient Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf-lovers. I am shockingly under-read in Russ’ works¹, but this one I made a point of hunting down, because then, even mentioning the title could be reliably counted upon to start a flame war. Combustible = interesting. I suspect the main reason this work is no longer flame war fodder is because it is annoyingly difficult to acquire. It has been, what’s the right word? Oh, right. Suppressed.

As I will show, it’s not enough to have good will towards women’s writing. One also has to be continually on guard against tendencies one may not be aware of having. Tendencies one may have convinced oneself one does not have.

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Ctein and John Sandford’s Saturn Run came out to great acclaim in 2015. I am a big fan of hard SF set in our solar system, so I was very interested. At the same time I am incredibly cheap, so I didn’t run out and buy it. Instead, I put a hold on it at my local library¹. My decision to seek it out via my local library gave me a useful measure of just how popular it is, because I had to renew my reserve request twice and it still took six months for the book to show up in my spot on Kitchener Public Library’s hold shelf.

Having read it, I am very curious as to how certain plot elements have been received both inside the US and outside it. 

Six decades into the 21^st century, one unmotivated but very lucky grad student is in the right place at the right time to witness the detection of an alien starship. The aliens seemingly have no interest in Earth. Instead they go into orbit around Saturn, rendezvousing with … something. 

By the time China and America can dispatch expeditions to Saturn, the aliens are gone. But whatever it was that they visited is still orbiting Saturn. It might offer untold treasure to whoever can reach it first! (Or perhaps a devastating plague, but who could imagine a downer like that?)

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