James Nicoll Reviews

2025’s Murder by Memory is the first of Olivia Waite’s Dorothy Gentleman science fiction mysteries.

Ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman wakes. This is a surprise as she intended to remain as stored memory for the time being. This is simply the first of a series of surprises, the next one being that she is in the wrong body.

But first! Background exposition!

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Chana Porter’s 2020 The Seep is a stand-alone science fiction novella¹.

A world ended the day the aliens arrived². A new world began.

Surviving the end of a world gave Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka valuable coping skills she will need the next time her world ends.

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2025’s Foxfire, Esq. is an on-going legal drama web-novel by Noa (October).

Naomi Ziegler used to be an unwilling superhero, Foxfire. Naomi Ziegler is now a lawyer. Therefore, Naomi is the logical choice when her employer, Bierman Viskie & Schotz, is retained for a case involving a superhero.

A wrongful death case.

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Lois McMaster Bujold’s 2018 The Flowers of Vashnoi is a novella set in her Vorkosigan universe. While series protagonist Miles Vorkosigan appears briefly, the focus is on his wife Ekaterin. When Ekaterin married Miles, she married into wealth and status. However, she also married into stewardship of the Vashnoi exclusion zone.

A lifetime ago Cetaganda’s attempt to annex Barrayar ended in abject defeat for the invaders. Among the Cetagandans’ lasting legacies, the Vashnoi exclusion zone, radioactive courtesy of a nuclear strike aimed at resistance leaders. Only time could deal with the contaminants. Having no other choice available, the Barrayarans (or rather, the Vorkosigans, whose land it is) marked off the radioactive zone and discouraged settlement.

Visionary scientist Enrique Borgos offers a method to speed up decontamination.

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Premee Mohamed’s 2025 One Message Remains is a collection of secondary-universe fantasy short stories.

Poor Seudast! So far from God, so close to Treotan.

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Samantha Harvey’s 2023 Booker-winning Orbital is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

The Internation Space Station orbits slightly over 400 kilometers¹ above the Earth. What is a day in the life of its crew like?

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Katherine Addison’s 2025 The Orb of Cairado is a stand-alone academic mystery novella. Orb is a Chronicles of Osreth work.

For most people, the destruction of the airship Wisdom of Choharo was significant because the emperor and all but one of his heirs died with the airship. Disgraced scholar Ulcetha Zhorvena’s best friend Mara perished with the Wisdom of Choharo. For Ulcetha, what was for everyone else a national tragedy was a very personal one.

Mara’s death has consequences Ulcetha could not foresee.

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David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021’s The Dawn of Everything is, as its subtitle proclaims, a non-fiction book presenting A New History of Humanity. Although really, what they offer is a new interpretation of history. Which would not be as snappy a subtitle.

There is a standard version of the progression of technology and civilization that many of us learned in school: a long uncharted stone age of wandering tribes leading simple, boring, uniform lives, the domestication of plants and animals, the rise of towns and cities, the creation of centralized states, and finally after some fuss, Canada. Whether or not all that was good is open to debate, but there is a certain degree of inevitability about it all. A leads to B leads to C and so on, each stage bringing additional complexity and challenges.

It would be disturbing if the facts did not to line up nicely with the model. Graeber and Wengrow suggest that they don’t.

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Riley Black’s 2025 When the Earth Was Green is, as the subtitle proclaims, about plants, animals, and evolution’s greatest romance: the one between plants and animals.

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Rebecca Fraimow’s 2024 Lady Eve’s Last Con is a stand-alone science fiction caper novel.

Confidence agents Ruth Johnson and her sister Jules have made a tolerable living bilking gullible rich travelers plying the interstellar lanes. Jules made the mistake of falling for her latest mark, Esteban Mendez-Yuki. Jules ended up dumped, heartbroken, and pregnant.

Ruth is determined to provide Jules’ kid with a nest-egg and Jules with revenge by proxy. Victory seems assured! How hard could it be to con one rich egghead?

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