James Davis Nicoll (born March 18, 1961) is a Canadian freelance game and
speculative fiction
Speculative fiction is a term that has been used with a variety of (sometimes contradictory) meanings. The broadest interpretation is as a category of fiction encompassing genres with elements that do not exist in reality, recorded history, na ...
reviewer, former
security guard
A security guard (also known as a security inspector, security officer, or protective agent) is a person employed by a government or private party to protect the employing party's assets (property, people, equipment, money, etc.) from a variety ...
and
role-playing game
A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of player character, characters in a fictional Setting (narrative), setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within ...
store owner, and also works as a
first reader A publisher's reader or first reader is a person paid by a publisher or book sales club to read manuscripts from the slush pile
In publishing, a slush pile is a set of unsolicited query letters or manuscripts that have either been directly sent ...
for the
Science Fiction Book Club. As a
Usenet personality
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. Since its inception ...
, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted
epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek "inscription" from "to write on, to inscribe", and the literary device has been employed for over two mille ...
on the English language, as well as for his accounts of suffering a high number of accidents, which he has narrated over the years in Usenet groups like rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.sf.fandom. He is now a
blogger on
Dreamwidth
Dreamwidth is an online journal service based on the LiveJournal codebase. It is a code fork of the original service, set up by ex-LiveJournal staff Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith, born out of a desire for a new community based on open access, tr ...
and
Facebook, and an occasional columnist on
Tor.com. In 2014, he started his website, jamesdavisnicoll.com, dedicated to his
book reviews of works old and new; and later added ''Young People Read Old SFF'', where his panel of younger readers read pre-1980 science fiction and fantasy, and Nicoll and his collaborators report on the younger readers' reactions.
Background
Nicoll was born March 18, 1961 and grew up in rural
Ontario. He wrote on Usenet that "
fore it exploded one night, I went to a four grade, two room schoolhouse and we had textbooks from the 1940s." He attended
Waterloo-Oxford District Secondary School
Waterloo-Oxford District Secondary School is a high school just outside Baden, Ontario, Canada operated by the Waterloo Region District School Board. It opened in 1955 and is one of two rural high schools in Waterloo Region, the other being Elmira ...
, which he described as "a very rural high school, where 'alternative life style' meant 'Not Old Order Mennonite'".
Influence on SF genre
In addition to his influence as a
first reader A publisher's reader or first reader is a person paid by a publisher or book sales club to read manuscripts from the slush pile
In publishing, a slush pile is a set of unsolicited query letters or manuscripts that have either been directly sent ...
for the
Science Fiction Book Club, a book reviewer for ''
Bookspan
Bookspan LLC is a New York–based online bookseller, founded in 2000.
Bookspan began as a joint endeavor by Bertelsmann and Time Warner. Bertelsmann took over control in 2007, and a year later, sold its interest to Najafi Companies, an Arizo ...
'', ''
Publishers Weekly'' and ''
Romantic Times'', and a juror for the
James Tiptree, Jr. Award
The Otherwise Award, formerly known as the James Tiptree Jr. Award, is an American annual literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one's understanding of gender. It was initiated in February 1991 by science f ...
,
Nicoll often offers ideas and concepts to other writers, primarily through the medium of
Usenet. After winning the 2006
Locus Award for his novella ''
Missile Gap'',
Charles Stross thanked him, writing that Nicoll "came up with the original insane setting—then kindly gave me permission to take his idea and run with it."
"The Purity of the English Language"
In 1990, in the Usenet group rec.arts.sf-lovers, Nicoll wrote the following
epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek "inscription" from "to write on, to inscribe", and the literary device has been employed for over two mille ...
on the English language:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.
(A followup to the original post acknowledged that the spelling of "riffle" was a common misspelling of "rifle".)
Over the years it has spread over the internet, often misattributed to other individuals including
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American c ...
and a nineteenth-century painter also named
James Nicoll
James Davis Nicoll (born March 18, 1961) is a Canadian freelance game and speculative fiction reviewer, former security guard and role-playing game store owner, and also works as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club. As a
Usene ...
. In recent years however the epigram has also been quoted, with proper attribution, in books by professor of
rhetoric
Rhetoric () is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate parti ...
and
communication design
Communication design is a mixed discipline between design and information-development which is concerned with how media communicate with people. A communication design approach is not only concerned with developing the message in addition to the ...
Randy Harris. Amateur linguists Jeremy Smith,
Richard Lederer, the Chinese newspaper
Ming Pao and
Anu Garg
Anu Garg (born April 5, 1967) is an American author and speaker. He is also the founder of Wordsmith.org, an online community comprising word lovers from an estimated 195 countries. His books explore the joy of words. He has authored several book ...
have also referenced Nicoll's quote.
Professional linguists who have referenced the quotation online include Professor of
Linguistics Mark Liberman of the
University of Pennsylvania and ''
Language Log
''Language Log'' is a collaborative language blog maintained by Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania.
Most of the posts focus on language use in the media and in popular culture. Text available through Google Search fr ...
''; Associate Professor of Linguistics Suzanne Kemmer of
Rice University, who also posted her research into the quote at the ''
LINGUIST'' mailing list; and
Second Language Acquisition
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...
Ph.D. student Rong Liu. There are also amateur philologists who have used the quote, including journalist
Suw Charman
Suw Charman-Anderson (born 15 April 1971) is the former Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, a campaign group based in London. She is also a journalist, social software consultant, blogger and public speaker. Named one of the "50 most i ...
and journalist Vale White.
"Nicoll events"
Nicoll relates a number of life- and/or limb-threatening accidents that have happened to him, which he has told and retold on various
science fiction fandom–related newsgroups. Over the years these stories have also been collected into Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll events.
Inspired by Nicoll's collection of accidents, as well as his tendency to take in any stray cat that comes knocking,
fantasy author
This is a list of fantasy authors, authors known for writing works of fantasy, fantasy literature, or related genres of magic realism, horror fiction, science fantasy. Many of the authors are known for work outside the fantasy genres.
A
...
Jo Walton wrote him a
poem in 2002.
"Brain eater"
A post on soc.history.what-if credits Nicoll with coining the phrase "brain eater" which is supposed to "get" certain writers such as
Poul Anderson and
James P. Hogan. Nicoll claims the 'brain eater' affected Hogan, because of Hogan's expressions of belief in
Immanuel Velikovsky's version of
catastrophism
In geology, catastrophism theorises that the Earth has largely been shaped by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope.
This contrasts with uniformitarianism (sometimes called gradualism), according to which slow increment ...
, and his advocacy of the hypothesis that
AIDS
Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual m ...
is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than
HIV (see
AIDS denialism). The term has been adopted by other Usenet posters,
as well as elsewhere on the Internet and use of the term within Usenet has been criticised.
Nicoll-Dyson Laser
Nicoll proposed the Nicoll-Dyson Laser concept where the satellites of a
Dyson swarm
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its solar power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to explain how a spacefaring civilization would meet ...
act as a
phased array
In antenna theory, a phased array usually means an electronically scanned array, a computer-controlled array of antennas which creates a beam of radio waves that can be electronically steered to point in different directions without moving th ...
laser emitter capable of delivering their energy to a planet-sized target at a range of millions of
light years.
E. E. Smith
Edward Elmer Smith (May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965), publishing as E. E. Smith, Ph.D. and later as E. E. "Doc" Smith, was an American food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and science-fiction author, best known for the '' ...
first used the general idea of concentrating the sun's energy in a weapon in the
Lensman series when the
Galactic Patrol
The Galactic Patrol was an intergalactic organization in the ''Lensman'' science fiction series written by E. E. Smith. It was also the title of the third book in the series.
Overview
In the Lensman novels, the Galactic Patrol was a combination ...
developed the
sunbeam
A sunbeam, in meteorological optics, is a beam of sunlight that appears to radiate from the position of the Sun. Shining through openings in clouds or between other objects such as mountains and buildings, these beams of particle-scattered sunl ...
(in ''Second Stage Lensmen''); however, his concept did not extend to the details of the Nicoll-Dyson Laser. The 2012 novel ''
The Rapture of the Nerds
''The Rapture of the Nerds'' is a 2012 novel by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. It was released on September 4, 2012 through Tor Books and as an ebook, DRM free, under the CC BY-NC-ND. The book can also be downloaded for free.
Synopsis
The no ...
'' by
Cory Doctorow and
Charles Stross uses the Nicoll-Dyson Laser concept by name as the means by which the Galactic Federation threatens to destroy the Earth.
Science-fictional Lysenkoism
In a discussion on rec.arts.sf.written about why Golden Age science fiction so often uses aliens said to derive from short-lived but well-known stars such as
Rigel whose lifespan is probably too brief to ever allow the rise of life due to the long-established
mass-luminosity relationship for
main-sequence stars
In astronomy, the main sequence is a continuous and distinctive band of stars that appears on plots of stellar color index, color versus absolute magnitude, brightness. These color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams afte ...
, Nicoll identified what he termed the "SFnal
Lysenkoist Tendency when actual, tested science contradicts some detail in an SF story, attack the science." He expanded on this idea in an article for online science fiction and fantasy magazine
Tor.com.
Awards
Nicoll was a finalist for the 2010, 2011, 2019, and 2020
Hugo Awards for
Best Fan Writer.
[
He served as a judge for the 2012 James Tiptree Jr. Award.]Down Under Fan Fund
The Down Under Fan Fund, also known as ''DUFF'', was created in 1970 for the purpose of providing funds to bring well-known and popular members of science fiction fandom familiar to fans on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
History
DUFF was create ...
, to visit science fiction fandom in Australasia as a representative of their North American counterparts.
References
External links
*
More Words, Deeper Hole
James Nicoll's DreamWidth
Dreamwidth is an online journal service based on the LiveJournal codebase. It is a code fork of the original service, set up by ex-LiveJournal staff Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith, born out of a desire for a new community based on open access, tr ...
weblog
James Davis Nicoll
James Nicoll's public review site
Nicoll's columns for Tor.com
* Nicoll's Usenet posts in Google Groups
since 20002000–11996–91990–2
A series of reviews by James Nicoll of science fiction books set in the year 2000.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nicoll, James Davis
1961 births
Businesspeople from Kitchener, Ontario
Canadian businesspeople in retailing
Canadian literary critics
Canadian speculative fiction critics
Living people
Science fiction critics
Science fiction fans
Security guards
Usenet people