James Nicoll Reviews

Claire North’s 2025 Slow Gods is a stand-alone space opera.

The United Social Venture, AKA the Shine, promises its people prosperity in return for hard work. What the masses get is mounting debt and ruthless exploitation at the hands of entrenched oligarchs, who cheerfully lie while blatantly cheating.

Mawukana na Vdnaze (“Maw”) should have had an unremarkable if unpleasant life. Maw did not. Thank the apocalypse.

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2025’s Ichi the Witch, Volume 1 is the first tankōbon for Osamu NIchi and Shiro Usazaki’s Ichi the Witch secondary-universe fantasy manga. Ichi has been serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine since September 2024. The 2026 English translation of Volume 1 is by Adrienne Beck.

The path to magic is as easy as falling off a log. First, one must be an ambitious woman or girl. Second, one must seek out Majiks, living embodiments of arcane power. Third, one must complete an arduous trial. Success confers the Majik’s particular knack on the witch.

Ichi is not a woman, is content with his lot, and has no particular interest in or knowledge of magic. Ichi lives to hunt.

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Poul Anderson’s 1956 short story, The Man Who Came Early, is a Morganade.

Other Icelanders might rebuke, drive away or even kill a visiting Christian missionary. Ospak Ulfsson of Hillstead has a more open mind. After all, Ospak has an idea how the next thousand years will play out.

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Alfred Bester’s 1953 The Demolished Man is a stand-alone science fiction police-procedural novel.

Monarch Utilities & Resources is an established but declining commercial concern. Owner Ben Reich knows who to blame: Craye D’Courtney, whose D’Courtney Cartel routinely eats Monarch’s lunch.

Determined to save Monarch, Reich proposes a merger with D’Courtney. To Reich’s fury, when he deciphers D’Courtney’s coded reply, he sees rejection. The only reasonable course of action is for Reich to murder D’Courtney.

Nobody has successfully gotten away with premeditated murder in the last seventy-nine years. That won’t stop Reich from trying.

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2021’s Arsenic and Adobo is the first volume in Mia P. Manansala’s Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery cozy mystery series.

Having discovered her fiancé in bed with her neighbour, Lila Macapagal dumped him and returned to Shady Palms, Illinois. There she hopes to rebuild her life while helping out at her aunt Rosie’s restaurant.

Her aunt’s failing restaurant.

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2024’s New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 3 is the fourth¹ issue of the Oliver Brackenbury-edited sword and sorcery magazine².

Why review Volume 1, Number 3 and not, say, the first issue or the most recent issue? Because this is the issue³ with the redhead on the cover.

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2021’s Night of the Living Cat, Volume 1 is the first tankōbon for Hawkman and Mecha-Roots’ feline-apocalypse comedy-horror manga series.

A virulent pandemic has struck down almost everyone in Japan and perhaps across the world as well¹. Only a few lucky survivors, such as Kunagi and his friend Kaoru, remain. Hope is dead, for who can expect to elude the relentless doom that is—

THE COMMON HOUSE CAT!

Perhaps some exposition is in order.

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2025’s Scarlet Morning is the first volume of ND Stevenson’s Scarlet Morning middle-grade secondary-world fantasy duology.

Orphans fifteen-year-old Wilmur and fourteen-year-old Viola live together in the tiny, declining island of Caveat. Caveat has little to recommend it. Whatever interest it might have had to the shipping trade has evaporated, thanks to the ongoing apocalypse¹. Ships no longer put in at Caveat. Escape appears impossible.

One day, the Calamary Rose arrives under the command of Cadence Chase.

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Isaac Asimov’s 1959 Nine Tomorrows¹ is a collection of late 1950s works. Nine Tomorrows is mostly, but not quite entirely, science fiction.

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C. L. Clark’s 2025 Fate’s Bane is a secondary world fantasy novella.

Most people captured during a clan raid are enslaved. No so Agnir. Agnir has a special fate, as the guarantor of peace. She is the first-born child of Garadin, leader of Clan Fein. Thus, she becomes Clan Aradoc’s chief Pedhri’s ward. Or less kindly, hostage.

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