James Nicoll Reviews

James Nicoll is a Waterloo-area writer and reviewer. Based on his web site, I think he may have read just about every major piece of science fiction ever written, and then taken the time to review it. He currently publishes reviews on tor.com as well as his site. If you're looking for a review of a science fiction novel, be it current or classic, check him out.

I was especially taken with his reviews of Andre Norton's novels and Heinlein's juveniles, compared and summarized neatly in this article on tor.com.

More significant: inclusivity. Heinlein was prone to carefully coded, deniable gestures of inclusivity—a character who was clearly Jewish, say, in a novel where the word “Jew” never appears. Careless readers could overlook their presence entirely. Norton, on the other hand, wrote books like Galactic Derelict and The Sioux Spaceman where the leads were explicitly not white. In the case of The Sioux Spaceman, white people were entirely absent, thanks to their enthusiasm for nuclear warfare.

Norton was also more inclusive when it came to class. Heinlein for the most part preferred to focus on middle-class boys who would grow into sensible middle-class men. Norton preferred to write about outcasts and the desperately poor. A Heinlein character might become a community leader or a promising officer. Norton protagonists like Troy Horan (Catseye) and Nik Kolherne (Night of Masks) do well to graduate from hunted criminals to marginal respectability. This may be due in part to Norton’s choice of settings: hers tended to be bleak. Sometimes there is no middle class—just the elite and the oppressed.