James Nicoll Reviews

Angela Mi Young Hur’s 2021 Folklorn is an up-coming contemporary fantasy novel.

Else Park splits her time between stalking the wild neutrino in desolate Antarctica and doing physics research in Sweden. She’s aiming at professional success — which will be hers if her hypothesis is supported by experimental evidence — and also at emotion management: putting thousands of kilometres between her and her family back in America. 

Turns out that this isn’t far enough.

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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s 2020 The Salvage Crew is a standalone science fiction novel. 

Centuries in the future, the United Nations (UN) and its rival, the Outer Reaches Colonial Association (ORCA), are busily spreading humanity and its creations across the nearer stars. The distances are formidable, the challenges of alien worlds more so. Truly, shaping human destiny is the work of heroes!

Unfortunately for Overseer AMBER ROSE 348 and its salvage team, the cost-conscious UN opted to go with the lowest bidder. Thus, Planetary Crusade Services got the contract to check an ancient crash site for salvage. Thus, AMBER ROSE finds itself headed to an alien world with a crew the AI would not have selected had it had any say in the matter.

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2021’s Soulstar is the third book in C. L. Polk’s Kingston Cycle.

Newly crowned King Severin of Aeland inaugurates his ambitious reign by abolishing the misleadingly named Witchcraft Protection Act. Witches will no longer be dragged off to asylums for brutal (often lethal) exploitation and those in asylums will be permitted to leave. All across Aeland, people are reunited with loved ones they had had no hope of ever seeing again. It’s a happy end to a tragic era.

As Robin Thorpe, recently reunited with her witch spouse Zelind, could tell Severin, the situation cannot be resolved with a quick decree.

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Aliette de Bodard’s 2021 Fireheart Tiger is a standalone secondary-universe fantasy.

Princess Thanh was dispatched to Ephteria as a child; the least favourite child, she was the natural choice to send as hostage to the powerful faraway country. As a young woman she has returned to her homeland, Bình Hải. Her experiences changed her in ways that she is reluctant to reveal.

There was a fire. There are fires.

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