James Nicoll Reviews

1995’s The Bohr Maker was Linda Nagata’s debut novel, followed eight months later by Tech Heaven, which shares a common background with The Bohr Maker. Two strong novels in the course of a year is an effective way to get my attention; how annoying that I would then have to wait until 1997 for her third novel.…

Many are those who revere Kirstin Adair, Chief of the Commonwealth Police, for her unending efforts to protect Mother Earth from the threats posed to Gaea by modern nanotechnology (or makers). Few of those admirers revere her quite as energetically as Kirstin adores herself. 

Nikko Jiang-Tibayan is an outlier. Even though he sometimes shares Kirstin’s bed, he is not among those who admire her ideals. He himself is an example of just the sort of tampering in god’s domain that the Commonwealth’s laws were intended to eradicate. 

And while Nikko was temporarily granted a waiver allowing him to exist at all, that waiver had a time limit — and that time limit is about to run out.

Not to worry! Nikko has a cunning plan.

Read more ➤

In L. Shelby’s 2014 Fealty’s Shore, the third and (probably) final volume in the Across a Jade Sea series, Batiya Dachahlra finally gets to meet her father-in-law. She has accompanied her husband, Chunru Dachahl Pralahnru, to his distant homeland, the vast and wealthy Changali empire — a powerful nation whose customs, laws and language are all quite unfamiliar to Batiya.

A powerful nation whose crown prince is none other than Chunru Dachahl Pralahnru, and whose emperor does not look kindly on the whirlwind romance between his son and heir and an odd-looking barbarian engineer with an unpronounceable name. 

Of course, there’s an obvious way for the emperor to deal with his son’s inconvenient foreign wife. He can simply have her assassinated.

Read more ➤

1993’s Cold Allies was the late Patricia Anthony’s debut novel. It was followed by six more novels over the next five years: Conscience of the Beagle (1993), Happy Policeman (1994), Cradle of Splendor (1996), God’s Fires (1997), and Flanders (1998). After Flanders, silence save for one short story, 1999’s ​“Mercy’s Children”, and one posthumous novel, The Sighting, published by Wildside in 2015.

Cold Allies introduces us to a 21^st century transformed by abrupt and dramatic climate change. Desperate economic migrants flee across North America only to find themselves confined to camps or worse. In the Old World, new armies follow ancient invasion routes to win a new homeland for themselves.

Climate change, agricultural collapse, and invasions are only part of the story. There are also the aliens.…

Read more ➤

As far as I know, 1990’s Governor-General-Award-winning Possible Worlds is my first exposure to the works of playwright and mathematician John Mighton. This is also my first review of a play. 

Read more ➤

When 2015’s Touch begins, things are not going well for protagonist Kepler, who has just been shot twice by a complete stranger. Things are worse for Kepler’s host, Josephine Cebula, She is trapped in her own dying body; Kepler can escape into any living body within arm’s reach.

Kepler has no idea why the stranger attacked. The body-hopper does know that, for some reason, killing Josephine appeared to be as or more important than killing Kepler. Possessing the killer is easy enough, which gives Kepler the killer’s effects to rummage through for clues but that turns out to be just the first and least step on the way to finding Kepler’s real enemy.

Read more ➤

The author lurking behind the pen name T. Kingfisher is perhaps best known for routinely kicking me out of the #2 position on Livejournal. She is also a Hugo-winning author whose books are well worth sampling. Case in point: 2015’s Bryony and Roses.

When we first meet Bryony, she’s finally found something that distracts her from a recent avalanche of catastrophe: 

• her mother died;
• her father indulged in ill-conceived schemes to marry off his three daughters, showing total indifference to their feelings in the matter; 
• he fell into debt;
• he was murdered; 
• the sisters fled from the city into impoverished rustic seclusion. 

Bryony’s current predicament is the ultimate distraction: she is freezing to death in an unexpected spring blizzard. 

She is saved when she finds a manor house where no manor house was before or should be now. Inside, she finds no visible host or servants, but she does find food, warmth, and shelter from the storm. 

But of course there’s a catch. 

Read more ➤

I am continually surprised at the depth and width of my ignorance. Case in point: Virginia Hamilton, an award winning author who was previously unknown to me. I got to be one of yesterday’s lucky ten thousand; now you can be too [1].

Like most adolescents, Justice Douglass — ​“Tice” to her parents and friends, ​“Pickle” to her brothers Thomas and Levi — has to deal with change. In particular, Justice finds herself resenting her mother’s late-blooming college career. Each hour her mother invests in schoolwork is an hour less for Justice and her brothers.

It eventually becomes clear that Justice is worrying about the wrong thing. She should be paying more attention to her twin brothers. Thomas and Levi are mirror twins. They may look alike, but one is right handed, one left, one is a leader, one a follower, one is a victim and one … one is a monster.…

Read more ➤

Ann Sterzinger’s 2011 novel NVSQVAM (nowhere) establishes its protagonist Lester Reichartsen as a rather unlikable fellow on its very first page. If asked, Lester would doubtless explain that he’s prickly because he is suffering. Cue litany of woe: a decade ago he was kicked out of his band; he had to marry his pregnant girlfriend Evelyn (so self-centered that she refused an abortion!); he can’t stand the resulting kid; he isn’t keen on his faculty colleagues; he hates his thesis topic, the students he has to teach, and the southern Illinois town where he and his family live; he hates his dad; and he’s not fond of the family cat. 

Read more ➤

While she had been actively publishing at shorter lengths, Susan Palwick’s 2005 book The Necessary Beggar ended a thirteen year novel publication drought, a return to longer form her fans certainly appreciated. Inexplicably, despite counting myself among those fans, this is the first time I have ever read this novel [1]. Having finally read it, I regret having delayed gratification so long. 

No one in Lémabantunk knows why Darroti murdered Mendicant Gallicina; Darroti won’t explain and of course Gallicina cannot. Darroti’s punishment is the harshest the city can exact: exile through a one-way gateway to another universe, to an alien nation calling itself America. 

Read more ➤

Following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, Russian-born American author Isaac Asimov turned his energies to educating the American public. By the time of his death he had produced non-fiction books in every category of the Dewey Decimal system save the 100s. This came at the expense of his science fiction. Between 1959 and 1972, he published only one novel (a movie tie-in) and a comparative handful of short stories. 

Asimov’s 1972 novel The Gods Themselves, his first in thirteen years, must therefore have seemed to many science fiction fans as the return of a giant. But not to me, because I was an eleven-year-old still reading through his entire back list to date; from my point of view there was no hiatus at all. Given the context, I can see why Asimov’s fans went gaga over this novel. I am not entirely certain what I was thinking beyond ​“yay, another Asimov!”

Asimov’s return to novel-length SF was an ambitious one.…

Read more ➤