James Nicoll Reviews

1971’s Cold War in a Country Garden is the first novel in Lindsay Gutteridge’s Dilke series.

Mathew Dilke, code name 00.25÷1! Not only does that provide him a unique monicker, it is also his height in inches.

Britain has won the shrinking people race! Now her Majesty’s government plans a little field-testing before deploying the results of the research.

The field in which Dilke is to be field-tested is his own garden.

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Adam Johnson’s 2025 The Wayfinder is a historical fantasy novel.

Kōrero’s people found freedom from Aotearoa’s endless strife, warfare, and slavery on the nameless island to which their canoe was swept after a great storm. Freedom, however, had a steep price: slow extinction.

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1994’s Summer of Love is the first book in Lisa Mason’s Zhu Wong¹ time travel series.

Chiron travels from the nigh-utopian San Francisco of 2567 back to 1967 to experience the Summer of Love firsthand. More importantly, he is there to preserve history by protecting the Axis on whom subsequent events depend.

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Choi Jin-Young’s 2021 To the Warm Horizon is a dystopian apocalypse novel. Soje’s English translation also came out in 2021.

Coping with our ordinary civilization can be both challenging and tedious: looking for jobs and housing, searching for relationships, raising children with unreliable social support. The great pandemic freed the masses from all that!

For most folks, it ushered them through the gate of death.

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Sangu Mandanna’s 2025 A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping is a stand-alone contemporary fantasy.

Sera Swan is a powerful British mage, the most powerful since the legendary Albert Grey. Having cast at age ten a spell that most adult witches could not cast, she was inducted into the Guild — not entirely or really, even a little voluntarily — and placed under the mentorship of the aforesaid Albert Gray.

In the eyes of most Guild members, Sera committed the egregious sin of being born to a foreign (Icelandic) mother and a very foreign (Indian) father. In the eyes of Albert Gray, Sera committed the far more serious faux pas of potentially rivalling him. However, Sera’s gift is too valuable for the Guild to squander.

Squandering her gift is Sera’s job. Which gets us to the dead woman in the garden.

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David Gerrold’s 1972 Space Skimmer is a touchy-feely space opera.

Dissatisfied with his home world, Streinveldt, for reasons he does not care to articulate, Mass sets out to find the answer to a question: whatever happened to the empire¹?

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Vandana Singh’s 2022 Utopias of the Third Kind is a diverse collection.

Utopias of the Third Kind is the truncated title. The full title is

Utopias of the Third Kind Plus Lamentations in a Lost Tongue Plus Arctic Sky and Much More

which is a very long title for a very short book, only 123 pages (including ancillary material).

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2025’s A Mouthful of Dust is the sixth volume in Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills secondary-universe fantasy series.

Cleric Chih of Singing Hills and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant traverse the Singing Hills in search of stories. These are carefully recorded and preserved for the edification of those to come.

Even the unpleasant stories, such as those from Baolin’s great famine.

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Felix Salten’s 1928 Bambi, a Life in the Woods (German: Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde) is a coming-of-age novel. The Jack Zipes English translation came out in 2022. Illustrations are by Alenka Sottler.

Bambi’s life is full of wonders… because Bambi is a newborn fawn and the full horror of woodland existence has yet to be made clear to him.

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1984’s Chanur’s Venture is the second volume in C. J. Cherryh’s Chanur science fiction series. Venture is also the first volume in the trilogy made up of the second, third, and fourth books in the five-book series. More on that later.

Having successfully resolved the matter of the human Tully, now living on The Pride of Chanur, Pyanfar Chanur is free to continue her unremarkable and entirely trouble-free life as the captain of the interstellar trading vessel, Pride. Or she would be, except for all the cascading effects of the earlier conflict.

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