James Nicoll Reviews

My terrible confession: until now, despite buying Jo Clayton’s novels with the intention of reading them at some point, despite being aware enough of her work to have picked up significant details of the Diadem series through cultural osmosis, I have a horrible feeling that this is the first Clayton I have actually read.

Jo Clayton (1939 – 1998) was, I believe, another one of Donald Wollheim’s discoveries. Her debut novel, 1977’s Diadem from the Stars, was the 235^th book DAW published [1]. The Diadem universe books made up a large fraction of her output and are probably her best known works. That said, the Diadem books were not the whole of her thirty-five book bibliography. The book I have in hand, 1982’s Moongather, first in the Duel of Sorcery trilogy, is completely unrelated to the Diadem series. It is a fantasy rather than science fiction.

It begins with a shocking betrayal 

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One of my minor hobbies is keeping an eye out for new examples of unabashedly SFnal entry-level SF, the stuff that draws new readers in and guarantees that there will be an SF of a particular sort decades down the road. While it’s true the young adult genre is filled with clearly SFnal novels, it seems to me that many publishers market Young Adult fiction as its own category, not as science fiction, while bookstores are careful to shelve YA well away from SF. I don’t think it is because they are afraid SF will catch YA cooties. I think the truth is much less complementary to SF: YA is too successful right now to risk it being associated with SF, which only accounts for some 2% of fiction sales. 

IMHO, 2014’s Tin Star is in many ways the sort of book SF needs. Think of it as the juvenile SF novel an inexperienced C. J. Cherryh might have written if she’d decided to go full-bore Heinlein juvenile. It’s not a perfect book by any means, but the problems that bugged me could be easily corrected if the author could be convinced that correcting them would be worth her time. As it is, this is still worth consideration as a gift for young proto-SF readers. 

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C. J. Cherryh was one of Donald Wollheim’s discoveries; DAW published Cherryh’s debut novel Gate of Ivrel in 1976. Wollheim being Wollheim, he not only insisted she be C. J. (and not Carolyn Janice), he added an H to her surname, Cherry, so it would not seem too girly. 

Works like Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth won her the Campbell in 1976 and her short story ​“Cassandra” won her first — but not last! — Hugo Award in 1979. She is still a prolific and popular author. If SFWA were in the habit of giving the Grandmaster award to women, I would say Cherryh had an inside chance of winning it at some point. 

~oOo~

1982’s Merchanter’s Luck is a sequel to her 1981 Hugo winner, Downbelow Station. Downbelow Station introduced readers to the Company War, a long, bitter war of independence pitting an avaricious Earth Company against a malevolent Union; hapless smaller merchants were caught in the middle. As this book begins, the war has concluded and most of the survivors are ready to set old grudges aside to begin rebuilding the interstellar economy.

For Sandor Kreje of Le Cygne, that’s an impossible task. 

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2014’s Silver Bullet is the third novel in Scott and Graham’s Order of the Air series. The Great Depression is three years old and President Roosevelt’s victory over Hoover has taken place just three days before the book opens. As a result, some Americans are filled with hope and others with a grim, fanatical rage. 

Thanks to the events of the previous novel, the gang at Gilchrist Aviation (Alma Gilchrist, Mitch Sorley, Lewis Segura, Jerry Ballard, and recent hire Stasi Rostov) are more financially secure than many Americans. The prize money they won, as well as their alliance with millionaire Harry Kershaw, mean that none of them are wondering where their next meal is coming from … though they do have to budget carefully. 

Harry seems to have given up collecting eldritch artifacts of mystical doom. This time, our gang is threatened only by weird super-science machines and roving gangs of armed fascists.

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I don’t generally do autobiographies¹ and I don’t generally do books on religion², which makes 2010’s I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed, an autobiography of a woman raised in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, an odd fit for me. Still, I found this an interesting read. Some of this is specific to Jehovah’s Witnesses, but a lot of this is universal.

The cover tells us right off that Kyria Abrahams became disenchanted with her family’s religion. No suspense there. What one might wonder is how this unfolded. As I see it, there are a few likely ways one might react to religious disillusionment: anger at being duped, sorrow at the loss of faith, or amusement at one’s own folly. Abrahams opts for the third.

Mind you, it’s a bitter amusement.

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Zen Cho, a Malaysian author living in London, is familiar from the late, lamented World SF blog, the 2013 Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2015 IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award (a literary award given to a writer whose first fantasy book was published during the preceding 18 months) but I do not think I had actually read anything of hers before I started the work under review [1], Cho’s 2014 collection Spirits Abroad. Not to leave you in suspense or anything, I liked it a lot and hope to read more of Cho’s work.

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Second in the Order of the Air series, 2013’s Steel Blues revisits the protagonists of 2012’s Lost Things. Henry Kershaw, a flamboyant plot-enabler, also turns up again. 

It is two years into the Great Depression. Nothing President Hoover has done has helped. One of his measures, pulling all the air mail contracts from the small carriers and consolidating the contracts with just four large carriers [1], threatens Gilchrist Aviation, the small company run by Alma Gilchrist and Mitchell Sorley. Hoover has yanked their mail routes and Gilchrist Aviation is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

There is one faint hope on the horizon. 

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2014’s Serendipity’s Tide is the first volume in Shelby’s Across a Jade Sea trilogy. I am not quite sure how to categorize it. Secondary world historical adventure, perhaps, related to historicals as Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise is related to futuristic science fiction. I can say I enjoyed reading Serendipity’s Tide.

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Andy Weir’s The Martian was self-published in 2011 and then published through more conventional routes in 2014 . I got sent an MS in late 2013 and … heck, I will just quote from the review I wrote for the Science Fiction Book Club:

I started reading this at about 8 PM last night, intending to knock off a few chapters and then stop. I ended up reading it cover to cover over the next few hours. More like this, please. 

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December 2014’s Elysium, Or, the World After is Jennifer Marie Brissett’s debut novel. This work impressed enough readers that it was nominated for the Philip K Dick Award [link ] mere weeks after being published. 

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