James Nicoll Reviews

Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2009 The Windup Girl is an award-winning cli-fi novel.

The end of cheap oil combined with rampant climate change have brought nation-states and international trade to their knees. This has not prevented giant agribusiness from extending their power across the planet. As engineered blights obliterate public domain plants, the hungry masses are forced to embrace copyrighted, genetically-engineered crops.

Plucky little Thailand is one of the few holdouts. It’s Anderson Lake’s task to crush Thai intransigence.

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Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2012 2312 is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

KRS fans may want to consider the significance of this being reviewed under What’s the Worst That Could Happen.

Three centuries from now, humans have spread across the Solar System. Every wonder from Disco-Era Co-Evolution Quarterly space articles has been realized and while not every space community is a paradise, those of the Mondragon Accord are marvelous indeed.

Too bad the entire arrangement is more fragile than it appears.

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2006’s Empire is the first volume in Orson Scott Card’s Empire series.

America! The greatest nation to have ever existed, with the greatest president ever. Not that you’d know that if you listened to unpatriotic liberals or ungrateful latte-sipping French intellectuals, all of whom would have been speaking German or maybe Russian if it weren’t for America.

Having served bravely in The War on Terror, TWOT-warrior Reuben Malek is reassigned to stateside duty in the Pentagon. There Malek will face new challenges, not least of which is workplace friction.

Oh, and also the Second American Civil War. That’s important, too.

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2003’s The Pixel Eye is probably the third book in Paul Levinson’s Dr Phil D’Amato SF mystery series (although some sources claim it is the fifth).

America is about to pay the price for its excess of civil liberties and due process. The police may pursue criminals, the intelligence agencies chase conventional spies, but who exactly is keeping an eye on the greatest menace to America? I speak, of course, of

SQUIRRELS.

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Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s 2006 Catalyst: A Novel of Alien Contact is a science fiction novel of alien contact. No doubt some might slide Catalyst over into the YA SF category, but I myself would not be putting this particular novel into little Timmy or Tammy’s Christmas stocking.

Thanks to his father’s involvement in illegal schemes, Kaslin’s family had to flee. Flight led the family to Chuudoku, a world whose Gini Coefficient is high and whose absence of the rule of law is utter. Impoverished Kaslin was attracted to wealthy, alluring Histly Mapworth. To quote:

Kaslin saw Histly and thought, yum. Histly saw Kaslin and thought, prey. After that first day, Kaslin saw Histly and thought, run.

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Dan Simmons’ 1985 Song of Kali is a World-Fantasy-Award-winning horror novel.

Post‑9/11, Simmons outed himself as a virulent Islamophobe. Was this a reaction to second-hand trauma or did it bring out something that had been lurking there all along, unnoticed? Or did it cast light on something that had been obvious from the beginning? Consider Dan Simmon’s debut novel, Song of Kali.

Calcutta, city of pure, unredeemable evil!¹

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Spider Robinson’s 1985 Night of Power is a mercifully stand-alone near-future race war novel.

Aging dancer Dene Grant can hardly turn down an offer to dance at the Joyce Theatre. She, her husband Russell, and Russell’s their thirteen-year-old mixed-race daughter from a previous marriage Jennifer make the trip from Halifax, Nova Scotia¹ to New York City, center of American publishing, finance, and simmering interracial conflict about to boil over.

Scarcely has the family entered New York City when a gang of African American youth criminals descends on them with robbery, murder, and worse in mind.

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Hayden Howard’s 1967 The Eskimo Invasion is a fix-up of several satirical Population-Bomb science fiction stories.

The Eskimo Invasion isn’t so much an infamously bad science fiction work as it is an infamously obscure award-nominated science fiction work. Readers, fannish and professional, liked the series of short works enough to nominate the novelette The Eskimo Invasion for both the Hugo¹ and the Nebula². The fix-up was nominated for a Nebula². However, the book went out of print almost immediately. The only time I’ve ever seen it discussed is in this Revisiting the Hugos thread. Therefore, stumbling across a reasonably priced MMPB, how could I not read it? How bad could it possibly be?

Former Director of Oriental Population Problems Research Dr. Joe West steals into Canada’s Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary.

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Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 Farnham’s Freehold is a stand-alone post-holocaust novel.

Middle-aged contractor Hugh Farnham and wife Grace host a bridge party for their son Duke, daughter Karen, and Karen’s friend Barbara. Also in attendance, the Farnham’s African American houseboy Joe. The party is marred by alcoholic Grace’s behavior¹, for which Duke blames Hugh’s obsession with nuclear war.

The massive Soviet nuclear attack that ensues lends credence to Hugh’s concerns about nuclear war. Luckily for the Farnhams, Karen, and Joe — perhaps less luckily for the reader — Hugh’s preparations include a well-prepared subterranean shelter.

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L. Neil Smith’s 2001 The American Zone is the fifth and final book in Smith’s North American Confederacy series, which is set in a libertarian utopia.

About ten years after the events of The Probability Broach, PI Win Bear, political refugee from a statist timeline, is distracted from a potentially vexing case¹ by the bombing of the Old Endicott building.

This will not be the last terrorist outrage². News pundit Jerry Rivers blames exochronic refugees (like Bear) for the crime. Has nativism come to the North American Confederacy?

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