James Nicoll Reviews

Lee Hoffman’s 1970 Always the Black Knight is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

One bad decision and Kyning fled Earth forever¹. Kyning plays a special role in Deptfort’s historical reenactment troupe: Kyning is always the black knight, always the villainous loser. In his time with Deptfort, Kyning has passed from idealism, to burnout, to self-loathing acceptance.

One accident changes all that.

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Yume Kitasei’s 2025 Saltcrop is an upcoming¹ stand-alone science fiction novel. 

Nora, Carmen, and Skipper Shimizu are winners in the streamlined USA of tomorrow². They didn’t starve during the Blight-driven famines, they weren’t washed away in the climate-change-driven floods, they haven’t been murdered or worse by pirates, and Carmen is only slightly terminally ill. The future is so bright, they need sunglasses³.

Life would be perfect if only Carmen and Skipper had some idea where Nora was.

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Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2025 Shroud is a stand-alone science fiction novel. It is also a rare example of me getting around to reading a new Tchaikovsky close to the actual publication date (or one of them).

Special Projects Administrator Juna Ceelander is living the dream, as long as the dream is working as hard as she can as one insignificant worker for the Concern, and being put into cold storage whenever her expertise is not required.

The interstellar cancer known as the Third Stage Commercial Expansion has just metastasized to Prospector413. Now all that remains is to strip the system of its resources.

Prospector413 has a resource not encountered before.

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Editor/translator Xueting Christine Ni’s 2021 Sinopticon is, as the subtitle ​“A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction” hints, a celebration of Chinese science fiction. Specifically, it is an anthology of Chinese science fiction or as the Chinese call it, ​“kehuan.”

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Walter Jon Williams’ Facets is a collection of science fiction short works.

The horrible truth about writing short works — novellas, novelettes, and short stories — is that focusing on them is a fine way to swiftly starve to death. Maybe authors could manage it back in the days when a single word bought a whole candy bar, but in this era, you’d need to sell a whole sentence or more. Better to focus on novels and draw out one’s demise from malnutrition and exposure.

Despite this irrefutable economic logic, Williams does from time to time write short pieces. Facets collected nine of them.

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Mary E. MacEwen’s 1963 Stories of Suspense is a collection of suspenseful stories.

While schools in the 1960s and 1970s weren’t exactly keen on speculative fiction, there was a publisher schools saw as safe: Scholastic Books¹. Therefore, science fiction, fantasy, or adjacent genres published by Scholastic had pretty good odds of ending up in a classroom library.

In the case of MacEwen’s Stories of Suspense, that classroom was in Wilmot Senior Public School, New Hamburg, on Bleam’s Road².

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Tashan Mehta’s 2023¹ Mad Sisters of Esi is a stand-alone science fantasy novel.

The whale of babel is a baby universe inside our own². Even a baby universe is very large. The whale of babel contains whole worlds, worlds whose inhabitants may well be ignorant of other worlds or the fact they live inside a vast, whale-shaped universe.

Myung and Laleh are well aware that they live inside the whale of babel, that they were created by the whale’s former lone companion Wisa when Wisa realized that the whale had grown too big for Wisa to comprehend on her own. For years, the sisters traveled together, exploring a small fraction of the realms inside the whale.

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Pauline Ashwell’s 1995 Project Farcry is a stand-alone science fiction fix-up.

Dr. Jordan is not the first human to visit Lambda, a planet thirty light years from Earth. The expedition of which he is a part is the second expedition to Lambda. Dr. Jordan is the first human to bring his son to Lambda.

This is not because Dr. Jordan is a doting father. It is because his ex-wife Cora is a terrible mother.

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2020’s Steel of the Celestial Shadows, Volume One is the first tankōbon of Daruma Matsuura’s historical fantasy manga series. The 2024 English translation is by Caleb D. Cook.

A samurai should be skilled at their designated role or they should at least die magnificently trying to do their duty. Ryudo Konosuke can do neither. He has been reduced to begging for work and selling off the last few family heirlooms, while slowly succumbing to malnutrition and starvation.

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William H. Patterson’s 2010 Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 1: Learning Curve (1907 – 1948) and 2014 Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better (1948 – 1988) form a two-volume hagiography of famed science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein (1907 – 1988).

The first of these two volumes was released with what I remember as considerable fanfare on the tor dot com site. The second, so far as I remember, was not¹. Why the difference? A cynic would say that by the time The Man Who Learned Better appeared, people had read and commented on Learning Curve.

It is quite clear that Patterson held Heinlein in very high regard.

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