James Nicoll Reviews

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s 1976 Inferno is the first installment in their Inferno series. 

Allen Carpentier’s unremarkable science fiction career ends when an attempt to win the love of fans ends with a drunken plummet from an open window to the sidewalk waiting below. 

Allen is very, very dead. He is also still conscious, which is something of a surprise to this agnostic SF writer.

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Harry Harrison’s 1970 One Step from Earth is a science fiction collection. All the stories involve matter transmission. 

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John Varley’s 1980 The Barbie Murders (later re-published as Picnic on Nearside) is a collection of science fiction stories. Most but not all of them are set in Varley’s Eight Worlds milieu. 

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Madeleine L’Engle 1965’s The Arm of the Starfish is the first of the Poly (later, Polly) O’Keefe quartet. Alternatively, it is an offshoot of the Time Quintet series (which began with A Wrinkle in Time).

Promising biology student Adam Eddington earns a summer tour working for renowned scientist Calvin O’Keefe on the isolated Portuguese island of Gaea. Sounds like a delightful summer? Not so fast. 

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Jim Kjelgaard’s 1951 Fire-Hunter is a prehistoric adventure.

Hawk is his tribe’s master spear-maker. He doesn’t hunt; that’s dangerous and his skills are too valuable to lose. So sayeth the tribe. They’re a conservative bunch. They live on the edge of survival and cling to the old, tried-and-true methods. 

Hawk, however, is an innovator. He sees an exciting new way to cast spears and cannot resist testing it. The new method works until it fails spectacularly, leaving a hunter dead on a woolly rhino’s horn. 

The tribe expels Hawk and wanders off in their nomadic way. 

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Robert W. Prehoda’s 1980 Your Next Fifty Years sketches out a possible future for 1979 – 2029. While 2029 is still some time off, we’re far enough into this period that we can judge if he got it right. 

Spoiler: no.

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L. Sprague de Camp’s 1963 The Search for Zei / The Hand of Zei is the Ace Double edition of the second book in de Camp’s Krishna planetary adventure series.

Krishna! Exotic planet of adventure! A place that has little day-to-day relevance to ghostwriter Dirk Barnevelt, living as he does a life of quiet oppression under the iron rule of his mother on Earth, twelve light-years away. The closest Barnevelt gets to adventure is writing up the exploits of interplanetary explorer Igor Shtain.

Then Shtain vanishes.

(On the one hand, spoilers; on the other, this book is ancient.)

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Jerry Pournelle’s 1974 2020 Vision is a themed science fiction anthology. That theme is ​“life in the year 2020.”

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1962’s Worlds of the Imperium is the first of Keith Laumer’s Imperium novels.

American diplomat Brion Bayard is stalked through the streets of Stockholm. Brion’s efforts to elude his pursuers are energetic but unsuccessful. He is overpowered and carried off. Nobody on Earth will ever see him again.

Nobody on his Earth, that is….

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Stephen Robinett’s 1976 Stargate is a standalone SF novel set in the same universe as his short piece ​“Jenson’s Folly.” It was originally serialized in Analog under Robinett’s pen-name Tak Hallus. It is one of three SF novels Robinett wrote.

Downsized engineer Robert Collins needs a job. Co-worker Bernie Mitchel, also downsized, has found a senior engineering spot at Merriweather Enterprize [sic], but cannot accept it due to a heart condition. He cedes the opportunity to Robert. 

The job turns out to involve cutting edge technology, corporate espionage, murder, and quite possibly the destruction of the entire Solar System.

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