James Nicoll Reviews

Sam Mills’ The Watermark is a stand-alone literary fantasy.

Jaime Lancia’s BA did not lead to full-time employment; his thesis is not progressing; and his pizzeria boss steals Jaime’s tips. As for Jaime’s relationship with Rachel Levy, Rachel might as well have fallen off the face of the planet. Thus, when offered a chance to interview the extremely reclusive author Augustus Fate, Jaime embraces the opportunity.

Foreboding sentence here.

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Benjamin Rosenbaum’s 2021 The Unraveling is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

A mere 550,000 years from now, humans and their creations have spread out into the galaxy, into an oblate spheroid a thousand light-years across¹.

This book is about one such world, one that is so utterly indifferent to all worlds save their own that in the tens of millennia they’ve occupied their planet, they’ve never bothered to name the world. Why bother, when it is the only planet that matters?

They are confident that their society is the best of all possible societies. One citizen of this planet, a certain Fift, isn’t so sure that this is true.

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John Schlesinger and Malcolm Bradbury’s 1995 Cold Comfort Farm is a period-piece movie, a comedy based on the Stella Gibbons’ 1932 novel of the same title. Cold Comfort Farm features many actors now stars, Kate Beckinsale, Joanna Lumley, Ian McKellen, and Rufus Sewell among them. I suspect that many weren’t as well known in 1995 as they are now.

Orphaned, having inherited only enough £ for a meager allowance, Flora Poste decides not to look for job and puts off marrying her eminently suitable suitor, Charles. Instead, she seeks out relatives off whom she can sponge. The least unpromising kin are the Starkadders, who live in Howling, in far-off Sussex. Off to Sussex Flora goes.

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Stella Gibbons’ 1932 Cold Comfort Farm is a comic science fiction (if only just) novel. It is the first of Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm works.

Orphaned shortly after the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1946, young Flora Poste discovers that her negligent parents have left her a meager inheritance of just one hundred pounds per year¹. Having little taste for work, Flora has but one option: find a suitable relative off whom to sponge.

Alas, Flora’s selection of relatives is dismal. In the end, she settles for the Starkadders, who live on Cold Comfort Farm, in darkest Sussex, not far from Howling. Not the most promising of destinations. Flora can only hope there isn’t a Seth or a Reuben Starkadder.

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2013’s Nebula nominee¹ The Golem and the Jinni is the first volume in Helene Wecker’s Golem and the Jinni series.

1899: America’s New York City is home to legions of immigrants from across the world. These newcomers are of every sort one could imagine, but Chava and Ahmad are perhaps the oddest.

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2021’s Madison Square Murders is the first book in C. S. Poe’s Memento Mori police procedural series.

A storm upending a tree in New York City’s Madison Square Park isn’t all that unusual. What is unusual is that the upended tree reveals interred human remains, accompanied by a death mask. Clearly, this is a job for the Cold Case Squad. Specifically, Everett Larkin.

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2023’s Dragonfired is the third installment in J. Zachary Pike’s Dark Profit secondary-universe fantasy series.

Good has triumphed over evil and the universally acclaimed hero Johan is king! His beloved Marja is queen! All shall celebrate! The humans and other Lightling races because they’re on board with Johan’s glorious plans (or at least the version Johan is sharing). The gnolls, trolls, and other Darkling races pretend to celebrate because the price of open dissent is death.

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Alfred Hitchcock’s Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery is an anthology of ghost stories targeted at school-age readers. Ghostly Gallery was illustrated by Fred Banbery.

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2024’s Usurpation is the third volume in Sue Burke’s Semiosis science fiction series.

Starfarers returning from the distant planet Pax brought with them the so-called Rainbow Bamboo. The unsuspecting Terrestrial humans didn’t know that Rainbow Bamboo is intelligent.

Another big win for the humans messing up Earth’s ecology.

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2023’s Infinity Gate is the first volume in M. R. Carey’s Pandominion paratime series.

The universe-spanning Pandominion is vast, wealthy, and powerful. The Pandominion’s power rests in part on control of Stepping, controlled travel between timelines. Unsanctioned Stepping is investigated.

Hadiz Tambuwal, formerly of Lagos’ Campus Cross, discovered Stepping too late to save her Earth. Stepping allows Hadiz to relocate to a nearby but less doomed Lagos, where her research continues. Consequences ensue.

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