James Nicoll Reviews

Joseph Green’s 1976 Star Probe is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

In the far-off year of Two! Thousand! Eleven! an alien starship moving at 8,000 kilometers/second¹ is detected at the edge of the Solar System. Its path will take it past Earth, by which time the actively decelerating probe will have slowed to a comparatively sedate 400 kilometers per second. Even that speed is far above Solar escape velocity at 1 Astronomical Unit. If nothing is done, the visitor will continue on its way out of the Solar System.

The only impediments standing between humanity² and interception of the visiting Probe are technological and political.

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1980’s Watchstar is the first volume of Pamela Sargent’s Watchstar young-adult science fiction trilogy¹.

Daiya AnraBrun’s people are joined in a single community by their mental links. Their lives are made easier by their telekinetic gifts. They are comforted by the knowledge that one day they will leave their bodies to become part of the Merged Ones. Life is perfect.

If pressed, Daiya might admit she chafes under the relentlessly enforced conformity and finds the frequent infanticide (for eugenics reasons) distasteful. But these things may not bother Daiya for long, as she faces a rite of passage from which she is unlikely to return.

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1973’s Ultimatum is the first of two Robert Porter novels by Canadian author Richard Rohmer.

Newly elected Canadian prime minister Robert Porter (party unspecified) receives a phone call from American president Howard. The Texan-born Democrat faces the challenge of reelection in just one month. He has a bold stratagem to achieve a second term, one in which Canada will play a central role.

Whether Canada wants to or not.

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Spider Robinson’s 1980 The Best of All Possible Worlds is a science fiction and fantasy anthology. It is, I believe one of just two anthologies¹ edited by Robinson and the only such work for which he has a solo editor credit².

The anthology has a rather cunning conceit.

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1979’s The Status Civilization and Notions: Unlimited is a Disco-Era omnibus of two Robert Sheckley books, the 1960 novel The Status Civilization and the 1960 collection, Notions: Unlimited.

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Wilson Tucker’s 1974 Ice and Iron is a stand-alone time travel story.

Earth is cooling. The higher latitudes are becoming increasingly uninhabitable, year by year. In North America, Canada is lost. the northern states of the US cannot be far behind.

Fisher Yann Highsmith’s days are taken up with the investigation of sixteen mysterious corpses.

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1976’s Stellar Short Novels is an ancillary volume to Judy-Lynn del Rey’s Stellar Science Fiction anthologies¹. By ​“short novels,” del Rey meant novellas. All are original to this anthology.

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Paul Ernst’s 1939 The Sky Walker is the third volume in the Avenger series. The Sky Walker was published under the Kenneth Robeson house name.

One day the glasses in Chicago’s Mike’s Bar begin to sing, then shatter for no obvious reason. The mysterious phenomenon is accompanied by a seemingly causeless droning from the sky.

Chicago is distracted from the mystery by real tragedy. A pavilion collapses, killing seventeen people. The cause appears clear: substandard steel used in the supports, no doubt thanks to a greedy contractor. 

But this is not the cause at all. Evil! Evil is the cause! It’s up to Richard ​“the Avenger” Benson and the increasingly large staff of Justice, Inc to reveal what is really going on.

[Standard ​“fair for its day” vocabulary choice warning]

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Sheila Sullivan’s 1975 Summer Rising is a stand-alone post-apocalypse science fantasy novel.

Humanity was denied the finality of a dramatic, swift nuclear holocaust. Rather, decades of economic, technological, and social mismanagement have caused a slow, inexorable collapse across the planet. By the 2040s the United Kingdom is united no more. Instead, it is a patchwork of rundown communities forced back into a primitive agrarian lifestyle.

Bara has the misfortune to be pretty. She catches the eye of White Michael, lord of the so-called Outlanders. One rape later and Bara is pregnant with White Michael’s son. She names the boy Con.

Con is destined to be an important man, if he can elude his father and if he can somehow reach the far-off land where his destiny waits.

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Gertrude Friedberg’s 1966 The Revolving Boy is a stand-alone near-future juvenile SF novel.

Derv Nagy was born with an infallible sense of direction. This knack comes with a cost. Derv’s parents fear their son has not yet discovered the full extent of that cost.

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