James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s Warped State is the first book in Jo Miles’ The Gifted of Brennex series.

Ravel Corporation is the very model of a modern major corporation. It maximizes shareholder value and CEO compensation, while paying the minimum possible to its employees (who are expected to be grateful for having a job at all). Only a wild-eyed political extremist would see this arrangement as anything other than just … even nigh-utopian.

But Brennex is a planet inhabited by wild-eyed political extremists who have driven Ravel off their world. Few are as wild-eyed or politically extreme as Jasper Wilder, field agent for the Cooperative, that cabal of willful labor organizers.

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Jane Gaskell’s 1957 Strange Evil is a stand-alone free love portal fantasy.

Professional model Judith Henderson is enormously put out to discover that her cousin Dorinda has invited herself to stay with Judith. This is the first Judith has heard of Dorinda, Dorinda’s mother having vanished following a scandalous marriage to an Italian aristocrat. Judith has little choice but to host Dorinda while Dorinda visits her mother’s birthland.

Judith soon discovers that there’s an upside to the unwanted guest. The guest has brought her fiancé, Zameis, with her. Judith is immediately besotted with Zameis.

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Catherynne M. Valente’s 2014 Six-Gun Snow White is a stand-alone retelling of the Snow White folktale.

History says that famed mine entrepreneur Mr. H had one wife and one son. History lies. Before he met and married Mrs. H, Mr. H met and became infatuated with a Crow woman, Gun That Sings. Consequences followed, most of them unhappy.

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2020’s Young, Gifted & Queer is the second volume in SJ Whitby’s Cute Mutants series. The first volume was reviewed here.

Imbued with superhuman powers, Dylan ​“Chatterbox” Taylor and her friends saved New Zealand from a supervillain. Collateral damage was light: only a few lost limbs. Their exploits were sufficiently public and their efforts to conceal their identities sufficiently inept that the government easily tracked down the so-called Cute Mutants to offer them a choice: submit to sanctioned training or face prison.

Dylan and the Cute Mutants chose training. It’s not clear that this was the correct choice.

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Arkady Martine’s 2023 Rose/House is a stand-alone near-future science fiction novella.

As another author might have said, silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Rose House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. Underestimate Rose House’s taste for solitude at one’s own risk.

Just ask the dead man whose corpse is slowly decaying within Rose House.

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S. J. Klapecki’s 2023 Station Six is a near future science fiction novella.

Lunar Module Construction — LMC — offers the army of workers on Station Six the opportunity to work hard enriching CEO Maximilian Ashe and LMC shareholders. In return they get almost enough money to sustain worker life. Life is tenuous at best. It’s about to get even worse. Impending automation will render most of the workforce redundant.

The workforce will probably be moved to another LMC station. The next location could very easily be worse. What are powerless workers to do?

Organize!

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2020’s Mutant Pride is the first novel in SJ Whitby’s Cute Mutant superhero series.

Teen Dylan Tayler has always felt like a screw-up. Now it’s worse. Her pillow is talking to her. Other inanimate objects are waking up around her, suddenly becoming animate and chatty¹. As this continues, Dylan (a long-time fan of X‑Men comics) is becoming increasingly sure that she’s a mutant and must have a superpower.

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Philip Wylie’s 1972 The End of the Dream is a stand-alone ecological disaster novel.

The date (Old Calendar) was June 6, 2023, and the place, Faraway, New York, again in the Old Geography. 

The 2020s are an age of hope. To reach that point, however, despair and calamity came first. This is why for every hundred people alive in 1970, only one still lives in 2023.

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Mammoths at the Gates is the fourth installment in Nghi Vo’s Singing Hill’s Cycle. Reviews of the previous three stories may be found here, here, and here.

Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills abbey. Some say one can never go home again. In the case of Cleric Chih, one can go home. Sometimes, however, there is a pair of royal mammoths waiting for one.

Royal mammoths being able to easily flatten the gates and the monastery within, their presence is a matter of concern.

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The Iron Children by Rebecca Fraimow is a stand-alone science fantasy novella.

Having tolerated Cesteli independence for decades, the Levastani empire is determined to reabsorb their break-away province. Cesteli is sparsely populated and their resistance seems doomed to failure. But … Cesteli has a supply of godstone. Godstone makes command plates possible; command plates allow a commander of a squad of metal-skinned cyborg soldiers — Dedicates — to act as one. Dedicates deal handily with opposition. Cesteli may be able to win this war.

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