James Nicoll Reviews

2021’s The Unbroken is the first volume in C. L. Clark’s Magic of the Lost series.

Touraine might have grown up an uncivilized believer in gods and magic had the Balladairans not taken her from her native Qazāl to educate her in Balladairian ways. She then sent to serve as a Sand, a conscript¹ soldier. No other choices offered.

Balladair has enough faith in their training that they do not hesitate to send Touraine and her fellow Sands to El-Wast, in subjugated Qazāl. Back to her home country, to put down a rebellion. 

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2012’s The Apocalypse Ocean is the fourth volume in Tobias S. Buckell’s Xenowealth series¹.

Bred by the alien Nesaru to manage other human slaves, Kay survived the slaughter that ensued when humans liberated Nesaru-dominated Okur. As the book opens, Kay has found her way through the wormhole network to backwater Placa del Fuego, where the determined sixteen-year-old set out to conquer the world. Or at least the underworld. 

There is a small sticking point: the Doaq.

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Premee Mohamed’s 2021 These Lifeless Things is a near-future cosmic horror novella.

Eva is fortunate enough to witness humanity’s first contact with otherworldly intelligences. More exactly, she is part of the very small fraction of the human population to survive Them.

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2020’s Warchild (Monstress, Volume 5) collects issues 25 to 30 of Marjorie Liu’s ongoing cosmic-horror-fantasy-war comic series. Art is by Sana Takeda.

The previous war between the Federation of Man and the Arcanic Empire ended when the city of Constantine was annihilated, taking over a hundred thousand people with it. The Federation credited the weapon used to the Arcanics — inaccurately, although the Arcanics were in no hurry to correct the error — and lacking their own equivalent, backed down to regroup. 

When the Federation’s holy city of Aurum is obliterated by a seemingly similar weapon, the logical inference is that the Arcanic Empire is to blame. They are not but the war is back on regardless.

High on the Federation’s to-conquer list: the city of Ravenna.

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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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