james_davis_nicoll | Old Tea Leaf Reviews 4: 1984 Locus Poll Best First Novel

Cut for length:

Best First Novel

1 Tea with the Black Dragon                  R. A. MacAvoy

        This was a charming first novel about a man who is really a
dragon and how he helps a woman look for her missing daughter in
then-modern day America.

        I think that MacAvoy had a novella published last year but
there was a long dry spell between that and the previously published
work, WINTER OF THE WOLF (1993).


2 The Blackcollar                            Timothy Zahn

        If I read this, I forgot it.

        Zahn is prolific and successful to this day.


3 A Rumor of Angels                          Marjorie B. Kellogg

        I did not read this.

        Kellogg doesn't seem to have been particularly prolific but
she is still being published.


4 King's Blood Four                          Sheri S. Tepper

        One of a vast number of Tepper books that I have not read.
My impression is that Tepper's core market is not male SF readers
like myself.

        There are many people who can be described as "not a male
SF reader like James Nicoll" and so Tepper has enjoyed at least
a quarter centuy of success to date.


5 Starrigger                                 John DeChancie

        When humans reach Pluto, they discover something like a Tipler
device [1] on its surface, left there by advanced aliens who knew how
to handle all of the technical issues that you will spot after you look
at the article I linked to. Our hero is an interstellar trucker who
learns that a lot of nasty people believe that he has a map to the
interstellar road system.

        This was good dumb fun (the trucker really is literally a
trucker) but the second book in the series ends on an infuriating
cliffhanger. His comic fantasy never did anything for me so while
he has lots of books out, I have only read a few of them.

        His most recent material appears to be Witchblade tie-ins.
Ah, well, better that than TAROT: WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE tie-ins
(Don't google that from work).

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipler_device


6 The Shadow of the Ship                     Robert Wilfred Franson

        This was an odd book about a human starfarer marooned
on an alien world whose inhabitants have a low tech method for
traversing interstellar distances. He joins a caravan travelling
from planet to planet.

        If he ever had a second SF novel, I did not see it.


7 Harpy's Flight                             Megan Lindholm

        I did not read this.

        My impression is that Lindholm's fiction did not sell all
that well and that she was forced to rebrand herself as Robin Hobb.
I prefer her Lindholm books.


8 Anvil of the Heart                         Bruce T. Holmes

        Is this the one where muscular but not necessarily
all that bright humans overcome their inhumanly intelligent
post-human offspring?

        As far as I know, Holmes is a successful musician but
this was his only SF novel.


9 The Forest of App                          Gloria Rand Dank

        I did not read this.

        Dank does not appear to have had any other books published


10 Ratha's Creature                          Clare Bell

        I also did not read this.

        Bell's career as an SF writer is on-going.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Campbell nominees for 1984:
Joseph H. Delaney
Lisa Goldstein
R. A. MacAvoy
Warren Norwood
Joel Rosenberg
Sheri Tepper

James, I am noticing that you are less likely to have read novels by female authors in these retrospectives. Is this still true with your current reading diet? Is this a conscious choice?

Megan Lindholm and Robin Hobb are the same person? I love Lindholm and had been ignoring Hobb assuming she was Yet More Fantasy. We have some of her books in the house (Hobb, that is; Lindholm wasn't a question), maybe I should give them another look.

Ratha's Creature is a YA book about an intelligent wildcat who discovers fire. I loved it as a kid (and own a copy on my shelf which I refuse to reread as to not destroy the memories).

MacAvoy apparently has CFS. Sigh.

Also, where did this novella appear, do you recall?

*edit* On Amazon (dot com)! Ok then.

Edited 2008-06-18 17:28 (UTC)

I don't consciously avoid women but if women tend to write fantasy rather than SF, I am less likely to pick up their books because I strongly prefer SF to fantasy. No offense to fantasy writers but it just doesn't scratch the same itch for me that SF does.

There was a time in the 1970s where it seemed like all the interesting new SF authors were women.

I do seem to have a talent for missing first novels by women: I own a lot of Pat Murphy's books, for example, but not her first one (I thought the one she did for Carr was her first one). Similarly, I've read Tepper but not the one mentioned in a previous entry and I've read Lindholm but not the one mentioned here. I've read a fair amount of Kress but not her first book.

The "women write fantasy" seems to be less true today. At least to me. With the likes of Lois McMaster Bjold, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Moon, and CJ Cherryh producing some very fine work.

...is one of those "lightning in a bottle books": it's really good, and that author would never do anything remotely approaching it.

I sped through the very mediocre sequel and the _Damiano_ trilogy wondering if she'd ever find the magic again. Nope. (Though the trilogy has its moments.)

TWtBD is still a book to hang on to, though, and to lend to /trusted/ friends.

Doug M.

Three of those four have produced significant fantasy.

I've never found a translation of Cherryh into English that I liked and I've never found copies in the original Knnn. I do own a shelf of her books, though. I think I bailed on her somewhere in Foreigner because the protagonist was an imbecile.

I like Bujold, find Kress' SF like fingernails down a chalk board and I wish someone would take Moon aside and assure her that it would be OK if her next book did not have a baby-eating, kitten-stomping villain in it.

Really? Everyone seems to write fantasy these days, male and female. It's very frustrating for me.

True, but they have also produced SF.

Fair enough.

By the way, Elizabeth Moon has a livejournal, you could tell that to her yourself:

e_moon60

I guess I should have said "women write only fantasy" Not that that was ever true.

Lindholm and Hobb are the same person, but that doesn't mean you'll like Hobb's fantasy trilogies. They often begin well, but they consistently blow out their endings in a stale, directionless gust of ad hoccery.

Her other trilogy (the one starting with Lens of the World) also has its moments. It might actually be very good, but I found myself understanding what she was getting at less and less the further I got into it. This might well be my fault.

My impression is that Lindholm's fiction did not sell all
that well and that she was forced to rebrand herself as Robin Hobb.
I prefer her Lindholm books.

I completely agree. I very much enjoyed Harpy's Flight and almost all of her other books as Megan Lindholm (I avoided her heroic caveman books, because that genre bores me to tears), but despite several tries, I've never managed to finish a book that she wrote as Robin Hobb.

Hobb's Liveship books (starting with Ship of Magic) are chock-full of eight trilogies' worth of cool worldbuilding, to the point that it got almost exhausting, in an exhilarating kind of way, to see it all coming together in books 2 and 3.

The True Game books are in a very different mode from much of the rest of Tepper, at least in my opinion. But they are sort of more fantasy than not (I suspect they are technically 'science fiction' in that 'we have science fiction backstory to justify our fantasy world', much like Pern, but that's as makes no difference, really), so I'm not sure you'd care about that distinction.

I haven't read them in a while.

I always wondered why Bertie McAvoy never had another really good book after Tea and "The Book fo Kells." I loved both of those.

"Starrigger" still has fond memories for me I read it on a trip out to BC so I was reading a road trip story while on a road trip. I met DeChancie later and mentioned it was one of my favourites but he did not seem that impressed with his own book.

I read "Blackcollar" as a Baen e-book last year. Pretty good military stuff.

I've read Tea With the Black Dragon and King's Blood Four. I've read other books by Zahn, Tepper, and Lindholm.

The True Game books from Tepper have an SF base, but the feel, particularly of the first trilogy (there's three trilogies), is RPG.

I've read four of these, some of them years after they came out.

I've read some of Zahn's work, but it came across as bland.

Tepper is someone I know I should read, for example Grass which is available as an SF Masterwork, but I've not got round to trying her out just yet.

The McAvoy sounds interesting from the title alone.

Actually, Tepper's True Game books are the ones you are likely to enjoy the most, I would suggest.

If you like superpowers and chess that would be an advantage, too. :)

The Starigger trilogy. It gets a bit weak, but I can never forget what happens when you say "sic 'em, fido" in that car...

Old Tea Leaf Reviews 4: 1984 Locus Poll Best First Novel

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Tea With the Black Dragon...

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