James Nicoll Reviews

Bob Shaw’s 1977 Who Goes Here? Is the first of his Warren Peace comedic SF novels. It is also the first Bob Shaw novel I ever read. 

Warren Peace is utterly untroubled, perfectly content. This is because he is an amnesiac. Warren remembers nothing because his memories have been artificially removed. His memories were removed by the Space Legion at his request. In return, Warren signed up for a thirty-year¹ tour of duty with the Space Legion.

Why Warren did this is a mystery to Warren. Amnesia. His new employers don’t care, not least because they suppose that if Warren wanted to erase all his memories, he must have been a complete monster. 

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G. Harry Stine’s Shuttle Down is a standalone near-future science fiction novel, published under his Lee Correy pen name. First serialized in Analog from December 1980 to March 1981¹, it saw print in mass market paperback form in 1981².

Dateline: Tomorrow AD! The space shuttle Atlantis launches from Vandenberg AFB to deliver a Landsat satellite to orbit. A premature main-engine cut-off leaves the shuttle with insufficient velocity to reach orbit. The shuttle must manage to return to the Earth’s surface, using only the limited propulsion provided by its orbital maneuvering system.

Inconveniently for the shuttle and its crew — Frank King, Jacqueline Hart, Lew Clay, and George ​“Hap” Hazzard — Landsats live in sun-synchronous polar orbits. Rather than the abundance of potential emergency landing strips an equatorial orbit offers, most of the Earth’s surface under the shuttle’s path is ocean. 

With one very small exception: Rapa Nui, also known as Isla de Pascua or Easter Island. Providentially, the island’s runway is long enough that a shuttle can make an emergency landing. Once the Atlantis is down, however, significant logistical challenges present themselves.

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Ursula Le Guin’s 1971 The Lathe of Heaven is a standalone science fiction novel.

Despite the distractions of a polluted, overpopulated world forever on the brink of final war, Dr. William Haber does his best to diligently perform his duties. The task at hand: to assist seemingly unremarkable drug abuser George Orr deal with his crippling fear of dreams, Haber plans to use hypnotherapy and his own invention, the marvellous dream-inducing Augmenter. 

Haber soon learns that Orr is anything but unremarkable. Orr is a living wish machine, a genie in a bottle that Haber is uniquely qualified to open.

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Eric Frank Russell’s 1939 Sinister Barrier is a standalone Fortean novel.

2015! The distant future! Bill Graham, a liaison officer handling relations between scientists and the U.S. Department of Special Finance, is alarmed at a recent wave of deaths amongst America’s top geniuses. Some died of what seems to be natural causes, others by suicide. Graham is convinced someone is murdering the USA’s brain trust. 

Graham is on the right track but he does not grasp the scale of the crisis. The culprit isn’t the Soviets, the Asian Combine, or even some sort of sinister world-spanning conspiracy like Hydra, Thrush, Spectre, or the Phone Company, but something far more ominous. The target is not merely the United States of America. It is humanity as a whole.

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Sam Nicholson’s 1980 The Light Bearer is a standalone science fiction novel. It was Nicholson’s only novel and as far as I can tell, this was its only edition in any form.

Sam Nicholson is a pseudonym; the author is said to have been a certain Shirley Nikolaisen, about whom we know almost nothing. We don’t know why she stopped writing.

Stumbling over a planet populated by Bronze Age primitives, the so-called Space Givers saw only a world of rustics who would no doubt be overjoyed to be raised up to the galactic level. In short order the Space Givers discovered that the locals saw them not as paragons to be emulated but as sheep to be shorn. Having retreated to their orbital complex, the Space Givers embarked on a lengthy attempt to gradually civilize a world that considered Space Giver ideals laughable at best. 

Many years later, at the great city of Mus-al-ram, Zeid the Light-Bringer offers the Space Givers hope that their project is finally bearing fruit.

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Brian Daley’s 1977 The Doomfarers of Coramonde is the first of two books in the Coramonde series.

Springbuck, rightful heir to the throne of Coramonde, is going to have problems taking power. He’s short-sighted and a bit timid, neither of which is a plus in the combat-oriented culture of Coramonde. Also, most everyone at court is conspiring against him, in cahoots with malevolent sorcerer Yardiff Bey. 

Providentially, stalwart warrior Duke Hightower appears to save Springbuck! Less providentially, the Duke is almost immediately killed, while Springbuck is temporarily imprisoned.

Meanwhile, in Vietnam, American soldier Gil MacDonald and the crew of the APC Lobo are busy saving the Asian nation from the Communist menace. 

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John Brunner’s 1980’s The Infinitive of Go is a standalone science fiction novel. 

Cold War paranoia provided the funds to finance Justin Williams and Cinnamon Wright’s revolutionary teleporter. The ​“poster,” as the device is innocuously dubbed, seems to work perfectly. Preliminary tests show that inanimate and animate payloads arrive intact. 

The first long-range human test seems to have gone perfectly until courier George Gunther demands a countersign. Since no such countersign had been arranged, it cannot be given. Gunther immediately kills himself while destroying the documents he was conveying.

Something has clearly gone wrong, but what?

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Peter S. Beagle’s 1960 A Fine and Private Place is a standalone modern fantasy. 

To paraphrase Dickens, Michael Morgan was dead. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the appropriate authorities. Michael was as dead as a door-nail.

But Michael Morgan was not quite gone.

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Lee Killough’s 1980 The Monitor, the Miners, and the Shree is a standalone hard SF novel. 

Unlike the Galactic Union, the Sodality that has replaced the Union has a strict no-contact rule where pre-spaceflight worlds are concerned. Thus, when the Sodality discovered that there was a previously unnoticed low-tech species on planet Nira, they forced the Megeyn mining company to shut down operations on Nira and leave the native Shree to develop in isolation.

The Sodality likes to keep an eye on developing worlds. Once every five hundred years, the Department of Surveys and Charters (DSC) dispatches a team of scientists to secretly monitor the Shree. Newly minted monitor Chemel Krar is in charge of the latest team. It is her task to ensure that the scientists hired by DSC do not violate the no-contact rule while spying on the natives. 

The expedition goes wrong surprisingly quickly.

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Jayge Carr’s 1979 Leviathan’s Deep is a standalone science fiction novel. 

The Kimassu Lady, Consecrate in the House of Equity, serves her people by doling out justice according to need. Few are in more need of justice than the meddling Terrens. With a little orange skin dye the Terrens can pass for Delyene, but their ways are quite alien.

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