James Nicoll Reviews

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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Lawrence Watt-Evans’s 1985 The Misenchanted Sword is the first in a series of secondary-universe fantasy novels set in Watt-Evans’ Ethshar.

Cut off from his fellow Ethsharite soldiers by an unexpected northern empire attack, Valder flees enemy soldiers determined to kill him. In his panic, Valder does something that will shape the rest of his quite possibly short life: he annoys a wizard.

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Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold’s 1986 Borderland is the first volume in the Chronicles of the Borderlands modern fantasy shared universe.

The Borderland is the region between Faerie and the human world (1), a region where neither elf magic nor human technology is reliable. Governed by neither side, the Borderland becomes a refuge for society’s outcasts: artists, criminals, and teenagers.

Extensive ISFDB digression warning.

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Connie Willis’ 1987 Lincoln’s Dreams is a standalone contemporary speculative fiction novel.

Jeff Johnson works as a researcher for historical novelist Broun. His job is to run down answers to questions, some questions significant and some trivial. Broun is an enthusiastic over-thinker and compulsively tinkers with manuscripts already in galley form. Which means that the novelist keeps Jeff busy tracking down historical minutiae. It’s too bad that Jeff is really not all that informed about the history he is researching. This makes his job difficult and his hours long. He doesn’t need any distractions.

But he’s distracted by troubled Annie and her perplexing dreams.

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Charles V. De Vet and Katherine MacLean’s 1981 Second Game is a stand-alone interstellar espionage novel.

Having discovered to their astonishment that they share the galaxy with another starfaring race, the Ten Thousand World Federation¹ attempted to open diplomatic relations with the Veldqans. Rebuffed by the aliens, the Federation dispatched a fleet to underline the benefits of friendly relations. That fleet having been annihilated through mysterious means, Master Spy Leonard Stromberg is dispatched to the alien home world to take a closer look.

Key to his efforts: a board game.

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Stanley Schmidt’s 1988 Unknown¹ is an anthology of fantasy stories first published in Unknown magazine.

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1989’s Being Alien is the second volume in Rebecca Ore’s Becoming Alien trilogy. The first volume, Becoming Alien, was reviewed here.

Tom Gentry has been recruited to serve the galactic polity, the Federation. He has been given a new name, training, and employment in the Federation’s monitoring and first contact bureaucracy.

For the most part, Tom has adjusted well. 

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1983’s The Anubis Gates is the first of Tim Powers’ Anubis Gates series¹.

1801: Determined to make Egypt great again, magicians Doctor Romany and Amenophis Fikee travel to England to conduct a ceremony which, if successful, will sweep the British Empire and its loathsome peers from the face of the Earth, then restore the old Egyptian gods in their full glory. The result is a catastrophe whose effects are felt across time.

Having failed again to sabotage the British Empire, the surviving schemers turn to other plots.

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Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s 1988 The Healer’s War is a stand-alone military fantasy novel.

Following an error of judgment that leaves a girl dead, military nurse Lt. Kitty McCulley is transferred to orthotics. Serving as she does in Vietnam during wartime¹, she is too valuable to send home.

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