James Nicoll Reviews

My terrible confession: until now, despite buying Jo Clayton’s novels with the intention of reading them at some point, despite being aware enough of her work to have picked up significant details of the Diadem series through cultural osmosis, I have a horrible feeling that this is the first Clayton I have actually read.

Jo Clayton (1939 – 1998) was, I believe, another one of Donald Wollheim’s discoveries. Her debut novel, 1977’s Diadem from the Stars, was the 235^th book DAW published [1]. The Diadem universe books made up a large fraction of her output and are probably her best known works. That said, the Diadem books were not the whole of her thirty-five book bibliography. The book I have in hand, 1982’s Moongather, first in the Duel of Sorcery trilogy, is completely unrelated to the Diadem series. It is a fantasy rather than science fiction.

It begins with a shocking betrayal 

Read more ➤

One of my minor hobbies is keeping an eye out for new examples of unabashedly SFnal entry-level SF, the stuff that draws new readers in and guarantees that there will be an SF of a particular sort decades down the road. While it’s true the young adult genre is filled with clearly SFnal novels, it seems to me that many publishers market Young Adult fiction as its own category, not as science fiction, while bookstores are careful to shelve YA well away from SF. I don’t think it is because they are afraid SF will catch YA cooties. I think the truth is much less complementary to SF: YA is too successful right now to risk it being associated with SF, which only accounts for some 2% of fiction sales. 

IMHO, 2014’s Tin Star is in many ways the sort of book SF needs. Think of it as the juvenile SF novel an inexperienced C. J. Cherryh might have written if she’d decided to go full-bore Heinlein juvenile. It’s not a perfect book by any means, but the problems that bugged me could be easily corrected if the author could be convinced that correcting them would be worth her time. As it is, this is still worth consideration as a gift for young proto-SF readers. 

Read more ➤

I’ve missed a couple of weeks worth of translated works; I need to catch up. On the other hand, people seem to enjoy my Tears reviews. Here is one intersection of the two types of review.

Perry Rhodan: Peacelord of All the Planets! Unifier of Earth! Guardian of the Galaxy Milky Way! A character who makes me wonder if the German language lacks a word for the concept of subtext! 

The first weekly Perry Rhodan novella appeared in 1961; the ongoing series passed the 2700-episode mark in 2013. Obviously, Perry Rhodan is the Coronation Street of large-scale space opera. 

What it isn’t is … much good, 

Read more ➤

C. J. Cherryh was one of Donald Wollheim’s discoveries; DAW published Cherryh’s debut novel Gate of Ivrel in 1976. Wollheim being Wollheim, he not only insisted she be C. J. (and not Carolyn Janice), he added an H to her surname, Cherry, so it would not seem too girly. 

Works like Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth won her the Campbell in 1976 and her short story ​“Cassandra” won her first — but not last! — Hugo Award in 1979. She is still a prolific and popular author. If SFWA were in the habit of giving the Grandmaster award to women, I would say Cherryh had an inside chance of winning it at some point. 

~oOo~

1982’s Merchanter’s Luck is a sequel to her 1981 Hugo winner, Downbelow Station. Downbelow Station introduced readers to the Company War, a long, bitter war of independence pitting an avaricious Earth Company against a malevolent Union; hapless smaller merchants were caught in the middle. As this book begins, the war has concluded and most of the survivors are ready to set old grudges aside to begin rebuilding the interstellar economy.

For Sandor Kreje of Le Cygne, that’s an impossible task. 

Read more ➤

1961’s Catseye takes us to the Dipple on Korwar, a slum filled with refugees and their children, despised reminders of the pointless but vastly destructive War of Two Sectors. There are very few ways out of the Dipple and someone trapped there, someone like Troy Horan, might go to any extreme to escape. 

They might even agree to work at a pet store. 

Read more ➤

In Brackett’s version of the Solar System, Venus, the second world out from the Sun, is not the hellworld scientists now know it to be. Brackett’s Venus, while hostile to human life, is home to a wildly diverse assortment of life forms. Maybe too diverse from the point of view of desperate Terrans and Martians hoping to find new homes on an eternally shrouded, fervid swamp world. As a general rule, if something isn’t trying to eat you on Venus, it’s trying to run you through with a spear.

Read more ➤

2014’s Silver Bullet is the third novel in Scott and Graham’s Order of the Air series. The Great Depression is three years old and President Roosevelt’s victory over Hoover has taken place just three days before the book opens. As a result, some Americans are filled with hope and others with a grim, fanatical rage. 

Thanks to the events of the previous novel, the gang at Gilchrist Aviation (Alma Gilchrist, Mitch Sorley, Lewis Segura, Jerry Ballard, and recent hire Stasi Rostov) are more financially secure than many Americans. The prize money they won, as well as their alliance with millionaire Harry Kershaw, mean that none of them are wondering where their next meal is coming from … though they do have to budget carefully. 

Harry seems to have given up collecting eldritch artifacts of mystical doom. This time, our gang is threatened only by weird super-science machines and roving gangs of armed fascists.

Read more ➤

I don’t generally do autobiographies¹ and I don’t generally do books on religion², which makes 2010’s I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed, an autobiography of a woman raised in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, an odd fit for me. Still, I found this an interesting read. Some of this is specific to Jehovah’s Witnesses, but a lot of this is universal.

The cover tells us right off that Kyria Abrahams became disenchanted with her family’s religion. No suspense there. What one might wonder is how this unfolded. As I see it, there are a few likely ways one might react to religious disillusionment: anger at being duped, sorrow at the loss of faith, or amusement at one’s own folly. Abrahams opts for the third.

Mind you, it’s a bitter amusement.

Read more ➤

The fact I own this book shows that my terrible memory, while often a bother, can sometimes work in my favour. I was aware of Bester as the author of two classic novels The Demolished Man, which I had read, and The Stars My Destination, which I had not read. Until I picked up this collection I had never knowingly read his short fiction. The only reason I bought this collection was because I had a vague memory of having read the title story and liking it. I thought there was a chance I would like the rest of his work just as well.

I soon realized that I was actually thinking of another story entirely, Mark Clifton’s ​“Star Bright”. (Clifton, author of the Hugo-award-winning novel They’d Rather Be Right, seems likely to be mentioned a lot in the next few days.) Clifton and Bester sold to some of the same markets, but the two authors were as unlike each other as chalk and cheese a cynical, witty drunk sneering at some kid’s bad taste. Of course, in the good old days of the1970s there wasn’t all that much SF being published. We didn’t abandon a book just because it turned out not to be the sort of book we expected. Fans of the 1970s weren’t delicate flowers who had to retreat to their languishing couches whenever confronted with novelty. 

Read more ➤

“This is the Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone. Mayday, Mayday.”

If roleplaying games had made it out to Waterloo Oxford District Secondary School in the 1970s, nobody told me. My first exposure to RPGs (or rather, the fact that RPGS even existed) was 1979’s [1]“On Tabletop Universes,” an essay by a then twenty-year-old John M. Ford, published in Asimov’s. I thought the whole idea sounded pretty stupid.

Actual exposure to RPGs had to wait until fall 1980 and my first year in university, when I was introduced to Game Designers Workshop’s [2] Traveller. I blame this game for the thirty-plus years I’ve spent playing the damn things, not to mention the twenty-plus years I spent and working in various capacities in the RPG industry.

And the three little black books looked so innocent.…

Read more ➤