James Davis Nicoll (born March 18, 1961)[1] is a Canadian freelance game andspeculative fiction reviewer, formersecurity guard androle-playing game store owner, and five-timeHugo nominee, who also works as afirst reader for theScience Fiction Book Club.[2][3] As aUsenet personality, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quotedepigram 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 ablogger onDreamwidth andFacebook, and an occasional columnist onTor.com. In 2014, he started his website, jamesdavisnicoll.com, dedicated to hisbook reviews of works old and new; and later addedYoung 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.
Nicoll was born March 18, 1961, and grew up in ruralOntario. He wrote on Usenet that "[b]efore it exploded one night, I went to a four grade, two room schoolhouse and we had textbooks from the 1940s." He attendedWaterloo-Oxford District Secondary School, which he described as "a very rural high school, where 'alternative life style' meant 'Not Old Order Mennonite'".
In 1990, in the Usenet group rec.arts.sf-lovers, Nicoll wrote the followingepigram 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.[7]
(A followup to the original post acknowledged that the spelling of "riffle" was a common[8] misspelling of "rifle".[9])
Nicoll relates a number of life- and/or limb-threatening accidents that have happened to him, which he has told and retold on variousscience fiction fandom–related newsgroups. Over the years these stories have also been collected into Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll events.[23]
Inspired by Nicoll's collection of accidents, as well as his tendency to take in any stray cat that comes knocking,fantasy authorJo Walton wrote him apoem in 2002.[24]
A post on soc.history.what-if credits Nicoll with coining the phrase "brain eater"[25] which is supposed to "get" certain writers such asPoul Anderson[26] andJames P. Hogan.[27] Nicoll claims the 'brain eater' affected Hogan, because of Hogan's expressions of belief inImmanuel Velikovsky's version ofcatastrophism,[28] and his advocacy of the hypothesis thatAIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather thanHIV (seeAIDS denialism).[29] The term has been adopted by other Usenet posters,[30][31][32] as well as elsewhere on the Internet[33][34][35] and use of the term within Usenet has been criticised.[36][37]
Nicoll proposed the Nicoll-Dyson Laser concept where the satellites of aDyson swarm act as aphased arraylaser emitter capable of delivering their energy to a planet-sized target at a range of millions oflight years.[38]
E. E. Smith first used the general idea of concentrating the sun's energy in a weapon in theLensman series when theGalactic Patrol developed thesunbeam (inSecond Stage Lensmen); however, his concept did not extend to the details of the Nicoll-Dyson Laser. The 2012 novelThe Rapture of the Nerds byCory Doctorow andCharles Stross uses the Nicoll-Dyson Laser concept by name as the means by which the Galactic Federation threatens to destroy the Earth.
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 asRigel whose lifespan is probably too brief to ever allow the rise of life due to the long-establishedmass-luminosity relationship formain-sequence stars, Nicoll identified what he termed the "SFnalLysenkoist 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 magazineTor.com.[39]
Nicoll was a finalist for the 2010, 2011, 2019, 2020, and 2024Hugo Awards forBest Fan Writer.[40][41][42]He served as a judge for the 2012James Tiptree Jr. Award.[42]In 2021 and 2022, he was nominated for theAurora Award for Best Fan Writing and Publication, for the series "Young People Read Old SFF" published on his review website.[43][44]
Nicoll has also been a Fan Guest of Honor (GoH) atSF conventions, includingConFusion 2013 in Detroit[45]andArisia 2014 in Boston.[46] In 2020, he was nominated for theDown Under Fan Fund, to visitscience fiction fandom in Australasia as a representative of their North American counterparts.[47]
^Nicoll, James Davis (2022-01-31)."Five Flawed Books That Are Still Worth Rereading".Tor.com.Archived from the original on 2022-02-01. Retrieved2022-02-01.Most importantly for me at the time, the paperback fit nicely in my security-guard uniform's inside pocket and helped me stay awake through long night shifts.
^Harris, Randy (2004).Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Speech Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann. p. 55.ISBN1-55860-768-4.
^Garg, Anu (2005).Another Word A Day: An All-New Romp through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English. New York: Wiley. p. 111.ISBN0-471-71845-9.
James Nicoll, 2001 photo
