James Nicoll Reviews

It has taken me four months, but I have finally arrived at the 14 ^th (final) volume in Hitoshi Ashinano’s Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō. Like the golden age of humans, the series has come to an end. 

A YKKless night looms
Weasels rip my flesh 

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Paul Drye’s 2015 False Steps: The Space Race as it Might Have Been delivers exactly what it promises on the cover: a grand tour of the spacecraft that failed to make it from drawing board to reality over the last seventy years. Drye limits himself to the history of crewed spacecraft; probes may offer far more bang for the buck (a factor in the failure of many of the spacecraft included in this volume), but they lack the romance of humans in space. 

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I no longer remember why I thought it would be a good idea to review 1973’s Time Enough For Love. It is by no means the worst of Heinlein’s books — that’s probably Number of the Beast, although I am told that The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which I have not read, gives NotB a run for its money — but considered as a whole, TEFL is not very good. It is, however, very long. As is this review. 

And yes, I am aware this book was nominated for a Nebula ¹, a Hugo², and a Locus ³.

Lazarus Long was a mere 213 years old when he first appeared in Methuselah’s Children . By the beginning of TEFL, he is an impressive two millennia old. Time weighs heavily on the ancient grognard. All he wants to do die. 

His descendants are not done with him and while dying may be every person’s right, it is not one Lazarus will get to enjoy. Chairman pro tem of the planet Secundus, Ira Weatherall, tempts the Methuselah with the one thing he cannot resist: an audience. 

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1994’s Darkness, I is the final volume in Tanith Lee’s Blood Opera trilogy. Thank goodness, because I am not sure I could have taken a fourth volume. 

In the previous volume, Ruth died, struck down by the revenge-seeking widow of one of her victims. That would have been the end of her story .. except that Ruth is a Scarabae. Not only are the Scarabae slow to age, they reincarnate. 

Ruth won’t have to wait too long to live again; Ruth’s mother Rachaela is pregnant.… 

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Welcome to the thirteenth review of Hitoshi Ashinano’s Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō. How happy I am to have read thirteen volumes of this manga! And how sad, because that means after this one there is only one left. 

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1978’s Irsud is the third volume in Jo Clayton’s Diadem series.

Two volumes ago, Aleytys, the red-haired and occasionally clothed bearer of the diadem, a strange artifact imbued with the minds of previous bearers, managed to find a way off her backward homeworld. Alas, she is no closer to finding her mother’s world. 

Volume two ended on a cliffhanger: Aleytys’ baby stolen and Aleytys herself sold to aliens. Aliens with an … um … parasitic wasp life cycle. I am afraid things will be getting worse for Aleytys before they get better. 

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2001’s Law of Survival is the third novel in Kristine Smith’s Jani Kilian series. 

Jani Kilian has had a tumultuous life. Framed for a murder, cashiered from the service, doomed to life as a fugitive … but eventually she achieves a soft landing. She has been cleared of the murder and is no longer hiding from the law. Well, cleared of that particular crime. Life as a fugitive meant cutting a few legal corners. The smart thing to do would be to find some unobtrusive niche in which she can exercise her considerable bureaucratic skills¹ and lay low.

But poor Jani is drawn, willy-nilly, back into human-alien conflict.

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James P. Hogan’s 1977 debut Inherit the Stars, first in the Giants series, makes me sad. It is not so much that it has aged badly — some parts of it have withstood the suck fairy — but because of what happened to its once-promising author. Of that, anon. 

Almost thirty years after man’s triumphant return to the Moon, explorers stumble across a tragic relic: a corpse. It proves oddly difficult to identify ​“Charlie,” as the corpse is nicknamed; he matches no missing spaceman and his spacesuit is of no known make. 

The mystery only deepens when it becomes clear that his body has been lying on the Moon for the last fifty thousand years. 

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1993’s Personal Darkness is the second volume in Tanith Lee’s Blood Opera trilogy. 

Even as the embers of the House are cooling, ancients Malach and Athena retrieve the surviving Scarabae. The hapless Rachaela is carried along in their wake. The Scarabae have vast resources. The loss of the House is merely the latest forced relocation among many. The dead cannot be saved but the Scarabae can rebuild. 

Rachaela’s demon-child Ruth, last seen fleeing from the corpse-filled House Ruth herself set on fire, has no interest in joining her family in their new stronghold, wherever that may be. She has an entirely different goal. 

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2016’s OathBound isthe fifth installment in Melissa Scott and Jo Graham’s ongoingseries, Orderof the Air .

Historybooks may later claim World War Two did not properly begin until1939, but the opening shots are already being exchanged in 1935.Germany is busy re-arming. Italy has revealed the essentialmeaninglessness of League of Nation ideas as its invasion of Ethiopiacontinues, unopposed by any save the Ethiopians and a handful ofvolunteers.

Somevolunteers join the struggle of their own choice. Others, like JerryBallard and his friends, are recruited.

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