James Nicoll Reviews

May 2026

22 works reviewed. 11 by women (50%), 11 by men (50%), 0 by non-binary authors (0%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 9 by POC (41%).

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Harbour of Hungry Ghosts by Eliza Chan (July 2026)

“My name is not Kim, it’s Kiamling. It means Sword Spirit. I was forged to cut down the undead. Demons and monsters aren’t just in your storybooks, they walk among us.”

The Au family serve the people of Hong Kong: blessing shrines, honouring the dead and dealing with dangerous monster incursions. The expectations on eldest daughter Kiamling are high, which is not something her strict grandmother will let her forget.

When the British disrupt the Hungry Ghosts festival and her grandmother is seized by a strange new monster, Kiamling must step up and lead the search. She is aided by unexpected allies: Archie, an earnest civil servant, Hoi gor, childhood sweetheart turned merchant-pirate and Jingling, her younger sister keeping secrets of her own. Kiamling must figure out who is behind the incursion and more importantly, how to defeat them.

With British fables mingling with local Chinese monsters, can Kiamling prove herself, when the old rules no longer seem to apply?

Babel meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer—a family of demon hunters find their hands full when unfamiliar monsters start stalking the streets of Opium War-era Hong Kong, in this historical fantasy adventure from No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller Eliza Chan.

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A Dance of Burning Blades by M. H. Ayinde (April 2026)

The epic second book in M. H. Ayinde’s relentlessly gripping Invoker Trilogy, following the Sunday Times bestselling debut A Song of Legends Lost. 

Tension simmers across Nine Lands. In the capital, the people of Lordsgrave seethe with resentment after the horrors of the greyblood attack. Clan Adatali are in open rebellion against the king. And as war in the Feverlands rages on, a humble tree feller who looks a lot like missing invoker Jinao Mizito, has not forgotten the promise he made to avenge his brother. 

Meanwhile, in the shadows, the king’s daughter Lyela continues to move her pieces across the board. Will the people of Nine Lands reclaim their stolen history and unlock the secrets that have been kept from them for centuries? A Dance of Burning Blades is a sweeping epic of revenge and rebellion set in a richly drawn world of warring clans and ancestor magic. 

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To paraphrase¹ Wikipedia, Pringle’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, An English-Language Selection, 1949 – 1984 is

a nonfiction book by David Pringle, published by Xanadu in 1985 with a foreword by Michael Moorcock. Primarily, the book comprises 100 short essays on the selected works, covered in order of publication, without any ranking. 

I’ve reviewed many but not all of the books on that list. A patron is paying me to review all of the Pringle books as yet unreviewed. At my current pace, I think this will take me about 14 months.

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If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Cho-yeop (April 2026)

From Korean science fiction author Kim Cho-yeop, a stunning and poignant collection of literary speculative fiction stories that explore the complexities of identity, love, death, and the search for life’s meaning, perfect for fans of Exhalation and The Paper Menagerie. 

In If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Korean science fiction superstar Kim Cho-yeop leads us to places we never thought we’d reach, imagining worlds galaxies away and unfamiliar lifeforms with near-dizzying humanity. 

An elderly woman stranded in a defunct space station recounts her life story to a visitor as she waits for a vessel that may never arrive. A man comes across a company called Emotional Solids that sells emotions as material products — love as a piece of chocolate, sadness as a smooth stone, anger as a glass paperweight — and tries to understand why people would want to purchase any negative emotions. When an enigmatic artist reveals long-forgotten messages from beyond through her wildly original paintings portraying a planet from a time long before humanity formed, a team of researchers investigate if this planet truly existed and if so, how did this artist know of it? After a pregnant woman’s estranged mother dies suddenly, her avatar disappears from the library of lost souls where the digital minds of the deceased are stored — and the woman is forced, for the first time, to endeavor to understand her mother. In a future utopian society where gene selection has been made uniform and all those with imperfections are cast aside, one woman seeks the truth about the history of her isolated world. And when a young woman undertakes a never-before-accomplished journey through a wormhole, she must reckon with the legacy of her aunt, who vanished mysteriously days before she was meant to begin the same pilgrimage. 

Traversing the bounds of imagination with an ethereal incisiveness, Kim Cho-yeop’s stories dismantle the borders between normal and abnormal, material and abstract, earthly and otherworldly. With unforgettable inventiveness and pathos, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light heralds the arrival of an essential voice in contemporary fiction. 

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This is Free Trader Beowulf by Shannon Appelcline (2024)

This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone … Mayday, Mayday.

A box emblazoned with those words went on sale for the first time on July 22, 1977, at the Origins III Game Fair, heralding the advent of the Traveller roleplaying game from GDW. It wasn’t the first science-fiction roleplaying game, but through its innovative design and through the development of its evocative universe of Charted Space, it would become the longest running SFRPG in the industry.

However, its path would not be simple. After Traveller reached its early apogee just four years in, it would face decades of increasing problems, raising many questions. Why did GDW decided to shatter their Imperium? What led them to seek outside help to produce the second edition of the game? Why did they abandon the Traveller game system with their next revision? How could such a popular publisher face bankruptcy just two decades on? Similarly, what happened to Imperium Games, QuikLink Interactive, and others who followed in GDW’s footsteps as the inheritors of the Traveller legacy? And finally, how did Mongoose Publishing reach into the past and bring Traveller back to its position as the industry’s best-loved SFRPG?

This volume answers those questions and more. It tracks Traveller from its inspirations in the early ​’70s, though its initial publication, and across seven distinct editions of its original 2d6 gaming system. It reveals the stories of Traveller’s three major publishers; GDW, Imperium Games, and Mongoose, as well many licensees. Most importantly, it tells how Traveller fell into increasing darkness before descending into a Long Night, and how it rose again as a phoenix.

From the author of Designers & Dragons, which told the story of the entire roleplaying industry, comes the intimate history of a single roleplaying game, culled from hundreds of primary sources and interviews.

A Designers & Dragons System History

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