James Nicoll Reviews

2010’s A Most Improper Magick is the first volume in Stephanie Burgis’ middle-grade Kat, Incorrigible historical fantasy series. The 2011 US printing retitled the novel with the series name: Kat, Incorrigible.

Hoping to save her oldest sister Elisse from an unfortunate marriage, fourteen-year-old Kat Stephenson embarks on a bold venture to find her fortune as a boy. She makes it almost to the end of the family garden before being foiled by observant Elisse.

How, then, to save Elisse?

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2015’s The Just City is the first volume in Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy.

Astonished to discover that some of the women who flee from him flee because they most sincerely do not want to have sex with him, the god Apollo partakes in a social experiment with his wiser sister Athene. They will set up Plato’s Just City and see how it plays out.

Athene prudently remains a god. Apollo, wanting to better understand the human condition, willingly becomes a mortal for the duration of a lifetime.

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2013’s The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic is the first volume in Emily Croy Barker’s Real Magic series.

Facing abject failure in both personal and academic life, Nora seeks distraction. Setting off on a walk in the woods, Nora becomes disoriented and hopelessly lost.

Ilissa is happy to offer Nora hospitality. Nora would have been better off in the earthly wilderness.

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2023’s Menewood: A Novel is the second volume in Nicola Griffith’s historical sequence, Light of the World¹.

Centuries after the Roman exit, Britain is a violent, chaotic land, overrun by waves of continental invaders, beset by ambitious petty kings. Some might dream of a heroic king to unite the land. Certainly some dream of being that king.

Hild on the other hand is a realist who accepts and understands the world around her as it is. War will come. It is Hild’s task to make sure that those about whom she cares will survive it. She cannot expect total success, but she will do her best.

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Jennifer Stevenson’s 2004 Trash, Sex, Magic is a stand-alone modern fantasy novel.

Atlas Properties executive John Fowier has a simple dream: sell every unit in the Berne, Illinois, Foxe Parke Townhouses. To sell the townhouses, the townhouses need to be built. To build the townhouses, the land bordering the Fox River has to be cleared. To clear the land, Atlas needs unquestioned title to the land.

The only impediment is a small ramshackle trailer community located next to the river. Still, how hard could it be to convince no-account poor people to sell out, or if they refuse, find a legal pretext to drive them out?

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Sleyca’s Super Supportive, first launched in 2023, is an on-going LitRPG superhero serial novel.

In 1963 alien space-wizards offered humanity a literally wonderous technology. A chosen few are imbued with superhuman abilities. In return for this, superhumans may be called on to assist Artonans off-world. Almost everyone benefits!

Young Alden wakes in pain; he has become collateral damage in a superhuman battle. Aghast, the superheroes manage to save Alden. Nothing can be done for his parents, both killed in the early stages of the fight.

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Thomas M. Disch’s 1972 334: A Novel is an examination of a small American community: the residents of 334 East 11^th Street.

In 1972, this was a futuristic work set in a New York City of the mid-2020s. What unparalleled wonders, novel freedoms, and bewildering prosperity awaited Americans in that far-off era, so distant from 1972 that conventional dating can barely encompass it?

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Stephen Embleton’s 2020 Bones & Runes is a stand-alone modern fantasy novel.

Mlilo, an isangoma, is ambushed and mugged. The attackers do not seek mere money. They steal Mlilo’s sacred amathambo (bones used in sacred rites).

Mlilo has a good idea where his relics were taken. It’s not somewhere prudent living mortals venture alone. Or really, at all. Mlilo’s relics are in Abaphansi, the world of the heavens. 

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2023’s The Hexologists is the first volume in Josiah Bancroft’s Hexologists secondary-world fantasy-mystery series.

Isolde ​“Iz” Wilby and Warren ​“War” Wilby are professional problem-solvers, using hexology and a bewilderingly wide assortment of magical artifacts to deal with the vexing challenges so common in their modern magical industrial revolution world.

The Wilbies are very much not monarchists. Bad news for the royal representative determined to hire the pair.

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Melissa Scott’s 2023 Fallen is the second book in her Firstborn, Lastborn space opera series. It shares no characters with the first book, Finders, and is set in a different period. More on that second detail later.

The invention of nigh-godlike AIs provided the Ancestors with everything they could have wanted… until they found themselves at war with the AIs. Civilization collapsed. Centuries later, civilization has recovered, although at a lower tech level than the Ancestors enjoyed.

Luckily for the revived civilization, space is littered with Ancestor relics. A few of these relics aren’t existential threats.

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