James Nicoll Reviews

1979’s Murder and Magic collects four of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy alternate-universe fantasy mysteries.

As a surprising number of characters find cause to ponder, Richard the Lionhearted’s change of heart following his near-death on the battlefield led to eight centuries of success for the Plantagenets. Another consequence was the codification of magic, which led to a powerful Angevin Empire spanning France and England, a New World dominated by the Angevins, and a Europe torn between the noble Angevins and the expansionistic Poles.

Humans of our technological, scientific 1964, as well as humans in Garrett’s feudal, magical 1964, display all of the usual human vices. When these lead to murder, it is the task of investigators like Lord Darcy to uncover the villains. And perhaps to see justice done.

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1978’s Lifeboat Earth is the second volume in Stanley Schmidt’s Kyyra series. Whereas the first volume was a novel, Lifeboat Earth is a fix-up, composed primarily of novelettes.

With the wavefront from the Milky Way’s exploding core only eighteen years from Earth, the only way out is to equip Earth with a propulsion system provided by the alien Kyyra and flee for the Andromeda Galaxy.

The plans exist! The technology exists! The only impediment is the inefficient governments running the Earth. By the time the dithering officials make a decision, the Earth will be dead.

Clearly the only reasonable solution is for Henry Clark, the World Science Foundation’s Lieutenant Commissioner of Grants, to appoint himself Earth’s supreme autocrat.

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“Breakaway” was the debut episode of the first season of the science fiction television show, Space 1999. Directed by Lee H. Katzin and written by George Bellak, ​“Breakaway” aired 4 September 1975.

John Koenig (played by Martin Landau) is dispatched by the World Space Commission to Moonbase Alpha to ensure that the upcoming Meta probe is launched on schedule. The rogue planet Meta will not be in reach of terrestrial spacecraft for long, and certain telemetry signals demand investigation.

The impediment Koenig has sent to resolve is a viral outbreak. As he will soon discover, the problems plaguing the Meta program are far more serious than a simple disease outbreak.

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1977’s Some Summer Lands is either the fourth or the fifth book in Jane Gaskell’s Atlan series^1. Either way, Some Summer Lands is the final book in the series².

Cija! As alluring as Helen of Troy, innocent and ignorant, she is fated to be her kingdom’s doom. So far in this series, doom hasn’t arrived.

At least not until this volume.

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Again, Dangerous Visions is the second installment in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions original speculative fiction series.

Again, Dangerous Vision’s remit was to reprise Dangerous Visions’ remit: present readers with stories that could not be published in the staid magazines and anthologies of the era. ADV would do this on a vaster scale than Dangerous Visions.

Having not read Again, Dangerous Visions since 1979 or 1980¹, I had only the vaguest of memories of this work. The reread was a journey of rediscovery.

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Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Spring 1977 was the debut issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. The editor was George H. Scithers, with Asimov providing the name of the magazine and editorial columns.

Asimov’s is still being published, five editors¹ and almost half-a-century later. What did that first issue look like?

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Jean Sutton and Jeff Sutton’s 1967 The Beyond is a stand-alone juvenile SF novel.

Starship Cosmic Wind snuck down to Engo’s surface, hoping to trade necessities for contraband. Captain Gordon Cromwell witnesses something he should not have seen. Worse, once back in civilization, he talks about what he has seen.

Enter the secret police.

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a science fiction novel set in her Hainish setting.

Shevek is his generation’s most brilliant physicist. For reasons that will become clear, Shevek makes the momentous decision to pursue his research not on his native moon Anarres. Rather, he takes what he hopes is just a sabbatical in A‑Io on Urras, the world about which Anarres orbits.

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Philip Wylie’s 1954 Tomorrow! is a cautionary tale… ABOUT TOMORROW!

Sure, the Communist Russians and their Chinese pawns hate goodness, peace, freedom, and probably puppies as well, and every promise they’ve made in the past turned out to be a barefaced lie. Is that any reason to doubt their current offers of peace? More importantly, suppose the Russians are lying, even though the odds of a thousandth falsehood following nine-hundred-and-ninety-nines lies seems to violate the laws of probability. What can anyone do to blunt the fury of atomic Armageddon if war comes?

Green Prairie, Missouri, arrives at one answer to that question. River City, across the state line in Kansas, embraces its opposite.

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Poul Anderson’s 1965 Agent of the Terran Empire is a collection of Dominic Flandry stories. Agent can be designated the first Flandry collection¹. That is at least open to question and might well be wrong.

Dominic Flandry! A man as skilled with a blaster as he is with subterfuge, a man as profoundly depressed at the state of the decadent Terran Empire as he is unable to imagine better alternatives. A man who can therefore be depended upon to do the necessary thing, even when it is the wrong thing, because the only other options are worse.

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