James Nicoll Reviews

Thanks to my interest in audio SF, I have listened to a fair selection of Clarkesworld​’s material. I am not really in their target market but I do find them worth my attention. It was with some interest that I followed a link to Neil Clarke’s recent piece ​“The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews.”

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Once upon a time Margarita Luisa ​“Maggie” Chascarrillo dreamed of being a ​“pro-solar mechanic”; her pulp-SF adventures took her around the world. In 2011’s Esperanza, the fifth volume of the Locas stories of graphic novels, Maggie is a middle-aged apartment complex manager. Her best friend and occasional lover Esperanza ​“Hopey” Glass is studying to be a teacher’s assistant, while doing her best to ignore the slow erosion of her relationship with her current lover, Rosie.

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It may seem a little odd to publish a cyberpunk anthology a quarter century after American cyberpunk devolved into an aggregation of simplistic conventions ¹. But sub-genres may die in some cultural environments and thrive in others. American ² cyberpunk may be a shambling zombie (even post-cyberpunk is pretty wheezy), but as 2015’s Cyberpunk: Malaysia proves, in Malaysian hands cyberpunk is alive and well. 

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2010’s Skye-Object 3270a is a late addition to Nagata’s Nanotech Chronicles¹. While it shares a setting with 1998’s Deception Well, this book can be read as a standalone. It is explicitly intended for a younger audience than Vast. 

Despite the ​“object” in her name, Skye-Object isn’t a what but a who, a young woman. 

Her odd name is a reminder of her history; she was found, as a toddler, in suspended animation in a starship’s lifeboat. The astronomer who first noticed it had tagged it as Sky Object 3270a. Skye’s rescuers were never able to determine the lifeboat’s origin or Skye’s original name. They were kind enough to give Skye a new home in the city of Silk. 

The rescuers can make an educated guess as to why Skye’s parents cast her into the deeps of space. Unfortunately, that guess is … incomplete. 

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I’ve reviewed Hughes here before and I will review him again in the future.

Although he is perhaps best known for his Vancian Archonate stories, those do not make up the entirety of his work. Devil or Angel & Other Stories collects sixteen of his non-Archonate stories [1], written deliberately in what the cover calls ​“old-style.” Which is to say that it would not come as a surprise to find that these stories had been published in such magazines of yore as Unknown, Galaxy, or even the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Except that they weren’t [2].

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I got inexplicably not named Ia(i)n Christopher Brookmyre’s 1999 standalone novel One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night for my 40 birthday many years ago; it seems like yesterday! 

William Conner is a career soldier turned mercenary turned, finally, criminal and goon wrangler for Dawson, whose current scheme requires a small band of hard bastards. Called in at the last moment, Conner has assembled a small army on the coast of Scotland near the unremarkable town of Auchelea. 

It’s not the town that has soldier-for-hire Dawson’s attention. It’s the oil platform converted into a lavish holiday resort floating offshore of Auchelea. Though not quite finished, the resort is said to be playing host to a group of wealthy venture capitalists, who would be well worth the gang’s time to kidnap. 

The idea that they are all billionaire entrepreneurs would be a hell of a surprise to the former students of Auchelea’s St. Michael’s high school, the people who are actually using the converted platform/resort for their school reunion. 

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Amanda Downum’s 2009 debut novel The Drowning City, first of the Necromancer Chronicles, takes us to the exotic city of Symir, a city balanced between ocean, river, and volcano. As the city’s sobriquet ​“The Drowning City” suggests, water has a slight edge over fire at present. To necromancer Isyllt Iskaldur, who has spent three weeks sailing from her homeland of Selafai, the Drowning City is exciting and novel. Most importantly it’s a potentially useful catspaw in the ongoing struggle between Selafai and the Assari Empire.

For the people who live in Symir, the city isn’t exotic at all. It’s home. And as convenient as it would be for Isyllt and her spymaster boss if the Symirians were willing to become naive pawns in the Selafian plots, the Symirians have their own complex relationships with the Empire of which they are a reluctant part. They have no intention of playing along with Isyllt’s cunning plans. 

In fact, the locals have their own cunning plans and Isyllt will be doing quite well to survive contact with them.

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The unfortunates in 2015’s The Fifth Season live on a world almost as active as Jupiter’s moon Io, a world constantly rattled by tremours and reshaped by volcanoes, a world where geological and historical timescales are the same. 

Embracing whimsical gallows humour, they call their single landmass ​“The Stillness”. 

Any particular community on this world can be certain that, in time, it will be wiped out by earthquake, tsunami, acid rain, or abrupt climate change. Humanity as a whole survives on the Stillness because until now, no calamity massive enough to kill absolutely every human has happened. 

Thanks to the forward-thinking social policies of the Sanze Empire, humanity’s run of luck is about to end. 

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“I’m the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.” 

No, he hasn’t. And thanks to Malign Hypercognition Syndrome, Doctor Impossible won’t. Probably can’t. When his old foe CoreFire vanishes, CoreFire’s old teammates don’t take long to decide that even though Doctor Impossible is in prison, he is the logical suspect.

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Even by 2005, when Carrie Vaughn’s [1] Kitty and the Midnight Hour was first published, I had read a great many urban fantasies/paranormal romances (courtesy of Andrew Wheeler at Bookspan), I had read enough of these to understand that although the Kitty Norville books share many of the surface features common to the genre, the series is more than a little different under the hood.

When we first meet her, Kitty Norville is a late-night radio DJ on Denver’s radio K‑NOB; she is obscure and seemingly fated to stay that way. This changes dramatically when she more or less by accident discovers a brand new niche for late-night call-in shows: the Midnight Hour becomes the show you call if you’re a werewolf, a vampire, or a vampire’s thrall, and you need to talk to someone about the unusual demands your condition imposes on you.

Kitty understands because Kitty is herself a werewolf.

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