James Nicoll Reviews

Hal Clements’ 1950 Needle is a science fiction mystery. 

In hot pursuit of a killer, the Hunter and his quarry crash land on Earth. The Hunter survives the landing. It must assume the criminal did as well. Determined to catch the criminal, the Hunter must turn to local allies for help. 

The catch? Earth has never been contacted by anything like the Hunter and its prey. The Hunter must manage not just detection, but first contact.

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Ursula Le Guin’s 1972 The Word for World Is Forest takes place in her Hainish setting, during the League of Worlds period.

Three million years before the current era¹, the Hain scattered humans across a swath of near space. Now after a long hiatus, various worlds have rediscovered nearly-as-fast-as-light star travel. Earth promptly applies its new NAFAL technology to colonialist exploitation.

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James E. Gunn’s 1972 The Listeners is a collection of related stories pitched as a novel. All concern the search for extra-terrestrial life through the means of radio telescopes.

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Poul Anderson’s 1966 The Trouble Twisters is a collection of three stories, all set in Anderson’s Polesotechnic League, all featuring young David Falkayn. 

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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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