James Nicoll Reviews

1972’s The Tar-Aiym Krang was the first in the seventeen to date¹ volumes of the Pip & Flinx series, the first book in the more than thirty to date Humanx Commonwealth Universe volumes and as far as I can tell, the very first book Alan Dean Foster ever wrote. That is a lot of firsts for one little book. How does it stand up forty-four years later?

Purchased on a whim by Mother Mastiff, Flinx is, by age sixteen, a talented thief and an experienced street performer. He has no idea that one seemingly minor encounter is going to catapult him from the only home he has ever known into a life of interstellar adventure.

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Melissa Scott’s 1994 Lambda-winning cyberpunk novel, Trouble and Her Friends, lives in the intersection of Black-Mask-style mystery and science fiction. It also has echoes of the end of America’s fabled Old West, perhaps in ways that were not intended twenty-two years ago.

Convinced that the age of cracking has been ended by the badly thought-out Evans-Tinsdale Bill, Trouble abandons her old online life and her hacker lover, and vanishes into the world of respectability. There she plans to spend the rest of her life living below the law’s radar. Cerise joins the forces of sanctioned anti-cracker security, a Henry Newton Brown of the future.

For three years, those plans work.

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1993’s The Book of the Mad is the fourth and final volume in Tanith Lee’s The Secret Books of Paradys series. It is also the first book in this series that prompted me to shout angrily at whoever wrote the cover copy.

The Paris of our real world may be far across the Uchronic seas from Paradys, but Paradys need not feel lonely. Two other versions of the depraved city, Paradise and Paradis, are close at hand. One only need know the correct magical path to walk from one to another. 

Alas, at present the only two people who know that secret are Felion and Smara, and they are as mad as they are murderous. They are confined to the Paradys lunatic asylum. 

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2006’s Farthing is the first volume in Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy. This short novel was followed by 2007’s Ha’penny and 2008’s Half a Crown.

If British mysteries are any guide, England’s stately homes, rising very so picturesquely out of a verdant countryside, exist primarily to provide suitably isolated locations for spectacular murders, murders sufficiently puzzling to justify the attention of the Empire’s greatest minds. Farthing is no exception: not only does it live up to genre expectations by quickly presenting readers with a gruesomely murdered and artistically posed corpse, but the dead man is a man beloved by all England. He is no less than the great Sir James Thirkie, the architect of the peace between Britain and Nazi Germany.

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Lawrence M. Schoen’s Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard was released in late 2015. The lack of lead time did not stop it from snagging a Nebula nomination two months later. I enjoyed large portions of this book, but I cannot fathom why this was considered worthy of a Nebula. 

Sixty-thousand years into the future, the Alliance includes four thousand worlds, each teeming with the descendants of terrestrials. Although not, as it happens, humans. Instead, eighty-seven different intelligent species share the galaxy, each of them evolved from a different non-human terrestrial species. 

The elephantine Fants are scorned by the other species. Eight centuries ago, the two species of Fant — Lox and Eleph — were given exclusive occupation rights to the planet Barsk. At the time it seemed like a good deal: the Fants got a homeland away from the other species who so loathed them, and the Alliance got access to Barsk’s pharmaceutical riches (thanks to the Fants’ hard work). 

That was eight centuries ago and circumstances change. 

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This is my third foray into what I have decided to call ​“the essential collections of Larry Niven, being an irregular review series I may not even get around to finishing or continuing” (or, as it turned out, tagging or giving its own formal series name in the sidebar). 

The actual physical book I am reviewing is something of a mystery, because I have no idea how I ended up with a copy of the 1974 printing of A Hole in Space . I clearly remember that the first Niven book I bought was the 1975 edition of Neutron Star

I liked it enough to snap up all the subsequent Niven collections. The book sitting on my desk is clearly the 1974 printing and was purchased new; both the price and the absence of the distinctive cover format Ballantine/Del Rey used for Niven in the latter half of the 1970 make that clear. Did I buy an old, but previously unsold copy that had lingered on bookstore shelves?

At first I thought that this book might be a relic of the failed commune that trashed my family’s farm. (Bad decision to rent to them, bad, bad.) They left behind a lot of junk. My copy of Beyond This Horizon is a hippy relic. But on second thought, I realized that we had cleared away the last remnants of the commune by 1971, or 1972 at the latest. Unless the hippies had developed a time machine just for buying books from the future, this book could not have been left by them. It’s a puzzle I will probably never solve. 

(Trivial? Well, it matters to me, OK? Provenance is important to collectors.) 

This was for many years my favourite Niven collection. Has time been kind to it? 

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1979’s The Door into Fire is the first volume of Diane Duane’s Tale of the Five. As I recall, there were to be at least four books in the series, but as of this posting, only two further volumes, The Door into Shadow and The Door into Sunset, have been published. A fourth book, The Door into Starlight, is mentioned on ISFDB, but only as ​“unpublished.”

In a world where grimdark rules the fantasy bookshelves, this book may seem like an oddly touchy-feely secondary world fantasy. It was even more remarkable back in the Disco Era, when it was first published.

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1991’s The Book of the Dead is the third in Tanith Lee’s The Secret Books of Paradys series. Like The Book of the Damned, it is a collection of short works. Also like The Book of the Damned, it is filled with characters making decisions they probably will regret, for however brief a time remains to them.

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The title of Alaya Dawn Johnson’s 2013 The Summer Prince mirrors Vinge’s The Snow Queen. A tip of the hat to Vinge, whether coincidental or deliberate, is appropriate: both the Snow Queen of Tiamat and the Summer King of Palmares Tres have the same retirement package. They get to be the human sacrifice in a succession rite.

Both novels concern themselves with romantic triangles, but the relationships involved are very different. The triangle in The Snow Queen is toxic; that in The Summer Prince (the triangle between June Costa, her old friend Gil, and Enki) may be complicated and stressful, but in the end all three participants love and support each other. It’s just too bad that Enki’s ambition to be the next summer king seems likely to be fulfilled … because that means that Enki’s life is going to be very, very short¹.

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Judging by the poll on my Livejournal, poor Reginald Bretnor is well on his way to the obscurity that awaits most of us. I remember him, not for his fiction or for the Future at War MilSF anthologies he edited (although, hrm, I do own them), but for non-fiction books like this one: 1974’s Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow: A Discursive Symposium. He also compiled Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future (1953)and The Craft of Science Fiction: A Symposium on Writing Science Fiction and Science Fantasy (1976)¹.

Parts of this collection provide an interesting snapshot of science fiction forty-odd years ago. Other parts, um, well .…

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