James Nicoll Reviews

I was in the mood for something like Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar collection, but the library didn’t seem to have anything along those lines. They did have collections by both Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, as well as several by Jaime Hernandez alone. It was one of the latter that caught my eye. 

While I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped I would, it did speak to a question raised by another Hernandez collection. 

A footnote in my review of Esperanza read, in part:

The original setting had superheroes in the way our world has rock stars; they were around, but the odds were that mundanes never got to meet them. One of Maggie’s friends, Penny Century, was a genuine adventurer who kept hoping she’d have an origin.

Thanks to God and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls, I now know that’s not the full story.

Read more ➤

1971’s Android at Arms brings us ever closer to the end of this review series. It’s not a Norton I encountered as a teen. To my surprise, even without the nostalgia factor, I kinda liked it. It succeeds in being creepy; indeed, it’s one of the creepiest Nortons I’ve read. 

Andas, Prince of Inyanga and likely heir to the emperor, went to sleep in a lavishly appointed bed chamber. He wakes in a stark prison cell, which comes as something of a surprise. 

Andas isn’t alone in the prison. His fellow prisoners come from many worlds, but all have one thing in common: they all are important people, at least on their own planets. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to kidnap powerful (or potentially powerful) people. That someone might be … the Psychocrats. Or the heirs of the Psychocrats. It’s impossible to tell, as the villains rule through their machines. 

On the basis of surprisingly little evidence, the prisoners convince themselves the mass kidnapping is only half of the scheme. The villains must have built android doubles for the prisoners, then swapped those doubles for the originals. Using the strategically placed androids, androids conditioned to obey their creators, the villains can control the galaxy. Bwahahaha! 

The prisoners have been suspended in stasis. They wake up when the prison’s stasis machines break down; they escape the prison because the locks have failed as well. They manage to get off-planet, thanks to the automated spaceport nearby (a spaceport like the one in Galactic Derelict ). Home again? Not so simple. 

Read more ➤

Third in Huang’s Russell’s Attic series, 2015’s Root of Unity sends protagonist Cas Russell on a treasure hunt. Her quest will pit her against a casually murderous criminal gang and it may well threaten her new friends. The prize is nothing less than a proof that will transform mathematics … and mathematics, or at least a specific application of mathematics, happens to be Cas’ superpower. 

Successful or not, Cas’ quest will definitely raise more questions than it answers. 

Read more ➤

For many people in North America — well, me, at least — Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed series was one of the first translated manga they ever saw. First published in 1985, it won the 1986 Seiun Award for Best Manga. Between 1988 and 1992, the series was published volume by volume by Eclipse Comics, which is the edition I first read¹. It was pretty addictive stuff back in the Reagan Era — no American comics I knew of explored SF themes like Shirow’s or had the same striking art — but how well does it stand up today? Does it still have the same punch in a world where many great manga are no further away than the nearest library?

Well, I just happen to have Appleseed: Volume One: The Promethean Challenge to hand.…

No country involved in World War Three resorted to nuclear weapons but there are other weapons of mass destruction. As the prelude puts it, ​“even without (nuclear weapons), the Earth became a quieter planet.”

Survivors Deunan Knute and Briareos Hecatonchires have settled in a very quiet, very peaceful neighbourhood. Before they came to town someone doused the place in sarin. The nerve agent is long gone, and so are the unfortunate inhabitants, leaving their material goods for the two soldiers to loot, and their homes for the woman and her cyborg friend to take for their own. 

But someone has noticed the pair.

Read more ➤

The great thing about being one of the early winners of an award is that it’s easy to be the first something. Maureen McHugh’s 1992 China Mountain Zhang may not have won the very first Tiptree Award, but it is the first book to win a Tiptree without sharing that victory with another novel. It also won a Lambda, was nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula and came in first in Locus’ Best First Novel. 

It’s also has a more challenging structure than the previous winners (A Woman of the Iron People and White Queen), which were relatively straightforward narratives. CMZ is an elaborate interweaving of several narratives, which touch each other only tangentially. 

With the Great Cleansing Wind relegated to an embarrassing memory of well-intended but disastrous political excess, 22^nd Century Americans like Zhang can forget about politics and focus on their careers and personal lives. Zhang has advantages that many other Americans lack, the most obvious of which is that although Zhang is mixed race, he can pass for Chinese. This is very useful in a world dominated by sometimes xenophobic Chinese. 

But life is not perfect for would-be engineer Zhang, for reasons not immediately obvious to those around him.

Read more ➤

As has been previously established, I am very fond of Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen. I was delighted to hear that Tor Books is bringing it back into print, after a lapse of fifteen years¹. Granted, it is being republished without the wonderful original Leo and Diane Dillon cover,

but this Michael Whelan kid Tor tapped to provide the new cover 

seems like he has potential. 

What better way to celebrate the re-release of a book I like than with a shiny new review!

Alas, unaware that The Snow Queen was going to be re-released this year, I reviewed the novel in question last year.

So what you’re actually going to get today is a review of one of the two sequels, 1991’s The Summer Queen, plus! extra! bonus! exhortations to buy both The Snow Queen and The Summer Queen.

The Hegemony has temporarily retreated from Tiamat, forced to abandon the only source of the Water of Life, the elixir which reverses aging. Tiamat’s twin suns are again nearing the black hole around which they orbit and the hyperspace route to Tiamat is unstable and unsafe. The Hegemony (the miniscule successor to a fallen galactic Empire) is forced to leave Tiamat to its own devices for the next century. Time enough for Tiamat’s Summer Queen, Moon Dawntreader, to encourage the two cultures of her world to modernize. If she succeeds, Tiamat will no longer be defenseless in the face of superior technology.

Or at least that was Moon’s plan. She’d have gotten away with it too, if not for that interfering cop, BZ Gundhalinu.

Read more ➤

1979’s Vertigo is not my first Bob Shaw novel. That would be Who Goes Here.

It’s also not my favourite Bob Shaw novel. That would be The Palace of Eternity.

It is, however, the only Bob Shaw novel set in Canada¹.

Well, Alberta. But as an Ontarian I regard all of the lesser provinces with equal favour. At least they aren’t Manitoba! Well, except for poor Manitoba. 

Today’s venerables mourn the bustling Moon bases and omnipresent jet packs promised by the futurists and SF writers of ages past. Air Patrolman Rob Hasson’s twenty first century may not have moon bases ², but it definitely has the counter-gravity harness, that marvelous device that gave the freedom of the skies to millions. 

Millions of idiots. 

Read more ➤

1970’s Ice Crown is one of Norton’s standalones, though it shares one background element with many other novels: the forerunners, the long vanished alien civilization whose fall foreshadows humanity’s fate. Oddly enough, what came to mind when I read this novel wasn’t other Norton books (like Forerunner Foray or the Warlock books), but a very well known television series of the 1960s.

Clio is a closed world, protected from all contact with the surrounding galactic civilization (a civilization of which it is utterly unaware). Or almost all contact; Offlas, his son Sandor, and Offlas’ niece Roane are allowed to visit Clio for research purposes, to search for rumoured Forerunner relics. Not that either Offlas or Sandor see much value in Roane’s potential contributions to the mission.

Access to Clio is a rare privilege, but one with a price: there is to be absolutely no contact between the scientists and the locals. An offending off-worlder pays a steep price for violation of the rule: essentially an end to their career. For the unfortunate local who encounters an off-worlder, the cost is much higher: they are to be memory wiped. This is intended to preserve the great secret: Clio is just one world among many. 

Any guesses as to how long it takes for Roane to break that cardinal rule?

Read more ➤

Bujold returns to the world of Curse of Chalion in the 2015 novella, Penric’s Demon.

Penric is a lesser son of impoverished bluebloods, a harmless fellow whose greatest value to his family is marital: he can score some much-needed dosh by marrying Prieta, the daughter of a wealthy cheese merchant. This is a pleasant enough prospect. Not only will the marriage restore a measure of financial stability to the House of Jurald, but Prieta is herself a charming armful, someone with whom Penric can easily see himself spending a happy life.

Alas, there will be no curvaceous cheese merchant’s daughter for Penric and no financial windfall for the House of Jurald — Penric is sabotaged by his own good nature.

It begins with a dying woman by the side of the road. 

Read more ➤

Salla Simukka’s 2015 As Black as Ebony is the third and (if trilogy is to retain any meaning) final book in her Snow White Trilogy¹.

Lumikki Andersson has returned from a diverting summer holiday in Prague to her parents and home in Finland. Her attempts to lose herself on the stage and in the arms of her new boyfriend Sampsa are doomed before they begin. She is haunted by the mystery she encountered in Prague: how can an only child like Lumikki have had a sister? Why can’t Lumikki remember her? Why are there no photos of the sister? Why have her parents never mentioned her? 

And, of course, there’s the lunatic stalking Lumikki. 

Read more ➤