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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-12-01 10:59 am
Entry tags:

Clarke Award Finalists 2024

2024: Scutigera coleoptrata become established in the UK, a Trident missile suffers performance anxiety during a test and refuses to leave its sub, and Labour sweeps to victory in the General Election, with surprising little effect on the subsequent frequency of cruel and vindictive legislation.


Poll #33896 Clarke Award Finalists 2024
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 1


Which 2024 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
0 (0.0%)

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
0 (0.0%)

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner
0 (0.0%)

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
1 (100.0%)

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
1 (100.0%)

The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
1 (100.0%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2024 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-12-01 08:59 am
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December 2025 Patreon Boost



Impress your friends and potential significant others! Join the legions of James Nicoll Reviews supporters! James Nicoll Reviews is the only SF review that promises to be pyroclastic flow-free!

December 2025 Patreon Boost
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-30 10:29 am
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November 2025 in Review



21 works reviewed. 11 by women (52%), 10 by men (48%), 0 by non-binary authors (0%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 by POC (38%).

Book by book, closer to aleph null.

November 2025 in Review
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-30 09:17 am
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
Denise ([staff profile] denise) wrote in [site community profile] dw_news2025-11-30 02:42 am

Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means [staff profile] karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.
sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-11-29 02:17 pm

And me? Well, I'm just the narrator

If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there'd be a dot somewhere on the screen. You'd never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you'd start to see this shape, because every dot will be inside the shape of this leaf. It wouldn't be a leaf, it would be a mathematical object. But yes. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can't even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993)
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-29 08:58 am
Entry tags:

Books Received, November 22 — November 28



Eight books new to me. Five fantasy, one horror, two science fiction, of which two are series and six may not be.

Books Received, November 22 — November 28



Poll #33890 Books Received, November 22 — November 28
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 60


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Kill All Wizards by Jedediah Berry (June 2026)
20 (33.3%)

The Franchise by Thomas Elrod (May 2026)
10 (16.7%)

Carry Me to My Grave by Christopher Golden (July 2026)
3 (5.0%)

Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer (June 2026)
28 (46.7%)

Inkpot Gods by Seanan McGuire (June 2026)
20 (33.3%)

Cursed Ever After by Andy C. Naranjo (June 2026)
7 (11.7%)

For Human Use by Sarah G. Pierce (February 2026)
3 (5.0%)

The War Beyond by Andrea Stewart (November 2025)
10 (16.7%)

Some other option (see comments)
1 (1.7%)

Cats!
43 (71.7%)

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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-28 11:38 pm

I seem to be batting above average wrt unconscious people

But this time, I managed to wake her up without help. Go me.
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-28 09:19 am

James and the Commute Home

Well, that was more close brushes with performing CPR than I consider ideal for a commute...

Read more... )
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-28 09:18 am
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-28 08:58 am
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-11-27 10:48 pm

I'd marry her this minute if she only would agree

I had a small but very successful Thanksgiving with my parents, with both of my husbands, and with [personal profile] nineweaving. I have been supplied with all the ingredients for a turkey terrific and a whole lot of apple crumble that doesn't need to be reconstructed into anything except me. My mother taped the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I leaned back into [personal profile] rushthatspeaks while we talked books and movies and theatrical stories. The photo was taken by [personal profile] spatch for [personal profile] selkie in condolence for the stressors of her holiday for which she was not the responsible party. The Sallust is from 1886, but I work with what I've got.

sovay: (Morell: quizzical)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-11-27 09:44 am

This is what I get for being civilized

Despite my best intentions of routine insomnia, I was awake too late because I fell into a 1990 BBC Radio 3 production of Michael Frayn's Benefactors (1984) which I had never read and barely heard of and if I had a nickel for every play by Michael Frayn which dips in and out of the fourth wall of the timestream as its characters post-mortem how it all went wrong in those complicated spaces between them so many years ago, I still wouldn't be able to afford a cup of coffee at these prices even if I could drink it, but since I've seen two productions of Copenhagen (1998) and heard a third, I still think it's funny. Benefactors is harder-edged as its Brutalist architecture, more pitilessly patterned, the structure of a double-couple farce where the doors all slam with a bleak wince: still a memory play of ideas without answers, still the lacuna of human actions radiating at its heart. "But then you look up on a clear night and you'll see there's only a dusting of light in all creation. It's a dark universe." If I have to be thankful for something at this miserable moment of history, the accessibility of art is a strong contender. Also cats.
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-27 09:40 am
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Nicked by M. T. Anderson




A pious monk is dispatched on a mission about which he has serious reservations: steal the bones of St. Nicolas.

Nicked by M. T. Anderson
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-26 09:11 pm

Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, An English-Language Selection, 1949–1984

Pringle's book was referenced on Bluesky and since I couldn't read the images, I looked it up on Wikipedia.

The List

Read more... )
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-26 02:08 pm
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Bundle of Holding: SR5 Essentials (from 2019)



The core rules plus essentials for the 2013 Fifth Edition of Shadowrun, the cyberpunk-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Catalyst Game Labs.

Bundle of Holding: SR5 Essentials (from 2019)



Eighteen setting sourcebooks for Shadowrun 5th Edition.

Bundle of Holding: SR5 Universe Mega
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-26 11:11 am

Well, crap

It was just pointed out to me that SF artist Stephen Fabian died age 95 back in May.
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-26 08:53 am

7thgarden, volume 1 by Mitsu Izumi



If you can't trust a scantily-clad demon to aid you in your war with heaven, who can you trust?

7thgarden, volume 1 by Mitsu Izumi
sovay: (Renfield)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-11-25 05:27 pm

Is your heart hiding from your fire?

I had just been thinking about Jack Shepherd because he was one of the founding members of the Actors' Company which had sparked off in 1972 with Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge, whose memoir I was re-reading last night. He'd left the company by the time of their adaptation of R. D. Laing's Knots (1970) and thus does not appear in the 1975 film which seems to have been their only moving picture record, leaving me once again with strictly photographic evidence of this sort of reverse supergroup experiment in democratic theater. (Shepherd at far right resembles a pre-Raphaelite pin-up in jeans, but I like to think if I had Caroline Blakiston's arm round my shoulders I wouldn't look that brooding about it.) Then again, I missed most of his film and famous television work, too: my reaction to his death is derived entirely from his astonishing Renfield in the BBC Count Dracula (1977), who holds more than a candle to the icons of Dwight Frye or Pablo Álvarez Rubio, a heartbreakingly weird and human performance of a character who may not be entirely sane in a world with vampires in it, which doesn't mean he's not to be trusted about them. I loved how much of his lucidity slides between his Victorian hysteria and his careful impersonation of a reformed lunatic which is not always and for good reason convincing. I loved his kiss of Judi Bowker's Mina, not his master's initiatory drink, but a damned soul's benison, the offering of his life. Not just because he became my default horror icon on this site, I thought about him more than any other character from that sometimes surprisingly faithful adaptation. His bare wrists, his shocked hair. His actor had such a knack in the role for the liminal, death seems on some level too definite to believe.