James Nicoll Reviews

Lt. General¹ Daniel O. Graham​’s 1983 High Frontier is a substantially expanded version of his 1982 High Frontier. Graham’s book shares a title with Gerard K. O’Neill’s High Frontier; they differ in that O’Neill was interested in the civilian uses of space, whereas Graham’s topic is the military use of space. More specifically, ballistic missile defense or BMD. You may be more familiar with his proposal as the Strategic Defense Initiative (as its fans called it) or Star Wars (as its detractors called it).

Is there an alternative to Mutually Assured Destruction that does not involve capitulating to Communist Russia? Graham believes that there is.

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1985’s Child of Fortune is the second book in Norman Spinrad’s Second Starfaring Age science fiction series. As both books stand alone, one need not have read the first book, The Void Captain’s Tale, before reading Child.

The Jump Drive transformed the human-settled worlds. Travel no longer demanded decades. Instead, the trip was no more demanding than an intercontinental airplane trip centuries ago. The cultural effects were profound.

For teenage Moussa, the most relevant consequence is the wanderjahr.

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Gordon R. Dickson’s 1983 The Man From Earth is a collection of short science fiction stories.

1983! Tor Books was a brand-new company, which although nowhere near the behemoth it is today, was busy hoovering up famous… well, established, at any rate… authors. Gordon R. Dickson was one such.

Dickson was one of young me’s go-to SF authors. Early Tor was already on my buy list. So was anything with Jim Baen’s name on it; the title page identifies The Man From Earth as a Jim Baen Presentation.

You’d think I would have read this collection before 2024. I did not. There’s a very good reason for that and that reason is named Donald Allen Wollheim.

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George R. R. Martin’s 1982 Fevre Dream is a stand-alone (but see footnote one) historical horror novel.

1857: Abner Marsh is a steamboat entrepreneur without steamboats. An unusually cold winter saw the Mississippi freeze solid, crushing all but one of March’s precious riverboats like eggs. His remaining paddle-wheeler, the Eli Renolds, being seven years old and surely on its last legs, Marsh faces the end of his Fevre River Packet Company.

Enter Joshua York, a wealthy man with a need for a steamboat and a partner who understands the Mississippi. York offers to finance a splendid new paddle-wheeler, the Fevre Dream, to Marsh’s specifications. The deal seems too good to turn down. Marsh accepts his new business partner.

Only after the Fevre Dream begins plying the Mississippi does Marsh begin to suspect he should have asked more questions about York.

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1986’s When the Wind Blows is a Jimmy-Murakami-directed animated film of the Raymond Briggs nuclear war graphic novel of the same title. The score is by Roger Waters.

Retirees Jim (voiced by John Mills) and Hilda (voiced by Peggy Ashcroft) live in a picturesque cottage in rural England. Presumably, their marriage vows included the traditional promise of life-long partnership. Thanks to the rapidly warming Cold War, that promise will be fulfilled.

Note: this is not a feel-good movie.

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Phyllis Eisenstein’s 1989 In the Red Lord’s Reach is a secondary-world fantasy fix-up. Red Lord is the second and to-date-final published book in her Tales of Alaric the Minstrel series.

Having escaped his family (as detailed here), Alaric sets his eyes on the north. What wonders are hidden beyond the forbidding mountains between Alaric and the semi-legendary Northern Sea?

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Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh’s 1983 Starships is a science fiction anthology on the theme of starships.

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1988’s The Crystal Palace is the second volume in Phyllis Eisenstein’s secondary universe fantasy Book of Elementals series. I reviewed the first volume, Sorcerer’s Son, here.

Having vanquished Sorcerer Rezhyk, nothing remains for sorcerer Detivev Ormoru and her son Cray but to live happily ever after. Easy enough for Detivev, who has her doting demon lover Gildrum. Easy enough for all the demons liberated by the relentless Cray. But where is Cray’s happily ever after?

The answer begins with a magic mirror.

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1982’s The Cyborg and the Sorcerers, also published as The Cyborg and the Sorceress, is the first volume in Lawrence Watt-Evans’ War Surplus science-fantasy duology.

Six months after a cyborg, Slant, was dispatched to infiltrate and reconnoiter rebel planets, the rebel alliance’s ships pierced Solar defenses and obliterated Earth and Mars. Whether this means that the rebels won is unclear. What is clear is that Earth lost… decisively.

Slant is programmed to carry out his mission despite the fall of Earth.

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1989’s Nightside City is the first of Lawrence Watt-Evan’s Carlisle Hsing hard-SF mystery novels, which are in turn a subset of Watt-Evan’s Shining Steel Universe.

Down-at-heel private detective Carlisle Hsing cannot be choosy about which cases to accept. Nevertheless, the case offered to her by Zarathustra Pickens is a new low. Not only is the pay laughably small, the case itself makes no sense. Why would someone be buying up doomed real estate?

But first! An infodump about the exoplanet on which the story is set.

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