James Nicoll Reviews

2010’s Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is the first of Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lost Souls contemporary fantasy novels¹. The 2025 English translation is by Yuki Tejima.

What would you do if you could meet a dead loved one one last time? Ayumi Shibuya can make that happen. Not simply by channelling a ghost. Clients meet their loved ones face to face.

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Blish’s The Star Dwellers is up for a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. As I have already reviewed The Star Dwellers, I cannot, alas, review it now. However, there’s another work that exemplifies Blish’s cluster of political insights (which this review assures us are all ​“libertarian”).

James Blish and Norman L. Knight’s 1967 A Torrent of Faces is a fascist utopian fix-up novel.

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1975’s The Compleat Enchanter collects the first three stories in L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Incomplete Enchanter isekai series. I’d love to credit the magazine in which these stories appeared, but the ISFDB assures me it is unknown¹.

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Abeni and the Kingdom of Gold is the second volume in P. Djèlí Clark’s Abeni’s Song young-adult secondary-universe fantasy series.

Having rescued some but not all of her people from doleful servitude to the Witch Priest, Abeni will not rest. That one small victory did not halt the Witch Priest’s relentless expansion. Abeni and her companions must continue to oppose him.

From the Witch Priest’s POV, this is intolerable. The Witch Priest’s adopted daughter Fulan is dispatched to deal with Abeni.

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Katie Waitman’s 1997 The Merro Tree is a stand-alone space-opera novel.

Performance master Mikk of Vyzania’s commitment to his craft is relentless. Even the threat of legal sanctions cannot stop him. This is why Mikk is on trial for his life.

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Princess Jellyfish, Volume One is the first tankōbon for Akiko Higashimura’s manga series. Kuragehime in the original Japanese, Princess Jellyfish was serialized in Kiss from October 2008 to August 2017.

Jellyfish-obsessed Tsukimi Kurashita arrived in Tokyo to find herself surrounded by glamourous and (in Tsukimi’s opinion) far more attractive women. The easily intimidated woman found safe haven at Amamizukan. Not only is Amamizukan an all-woman apartment, all of its eccentric residents have some consuming passion as intense as Tsukimi’s for jellyfish.

Which is to say, they’re all otaku.

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Algis Budrys’ 1993 Hard Landing is a stand-alone contemporary science fiction novel.

There are oxygen-breathing and methane-breathing interstellar civilizations; both of them are monitoring Earth. The economics of interstellar travel being what they are, conquest is unworkable. Therefore, the Galactics wait patiently for the day when Earth is worth trading with.

Luckily for Hanig, Ravashan, Joro, Mullica, and Selmon, they all breathe oxygen. Therefore, they do not perish immediately after making a forced landing on Earth.

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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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