James Davis Nicoll (born March 18, 1961)
Background
Nicoll was born March 18, 1961, and grew up in rural
Ontario. He wrote on Usenet that "before 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, 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 for the Science Fiction Book Club, a book reviewer for
Bookspan,
Publishers Weekly and
Romantic Times, and a juror for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award,
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 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
The epigram has also been quoted, with proper attribution, in books by professor of rhetoric and communication design Randy Harris.
Professional linguists who have referenced the quotation online include Professor of Linguistics Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania and Language Log;[; ] Associate Professor of Linguistics Suzanne Kemmer[ ] who also posted her research into the quote at the LINGUIST List mailing list;
"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 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,
and his advocacy of the hypothesis that
AIDS 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 act as a
phased array laser emitter capable of delivering their energy to a planet-sized target at a range of millions of
light years.
E. E. Smith first used the general idea of concentrating the sun's energy in a weapon in the Lensman series when the Galactic Patrol developed the sunbeam (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 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, Nicoll identified what he termed the "SFnal
Lysenkoism 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, 2020, and 2024
Hugo Awards for Best Fan Writer.
[
He served as a judge for the 2012 James Tiptree Jr. Award.]
Nicoll has also been a Fan Guest of Honor (GoH) at science fiction conventions, including ConFusion 2013 in Detroit
External links
