Cambias, James L
Entry updated 5 May 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1966- ) US game designer and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Diagram of Rapture" in F&SF for April 2000, having already begun to work on projects like the GURPS Role Playing Game system; he has continued to work as a games designer. His first sf novel is the complex A Darkling Sea (2014), parts of the tale being based on an earlier story, The Ocean of the Blind (April 2004 F&SF; 2006 ebook). It shows in its worldbuilding – and in the intricately depicted lifelikeness of the two Alien races involved with humans on a planet under dispute – the beneficial influence of authors like Vernor Vinge. Of the two alien races, the blind cold-adapted Ilmatarans, whose appearance is crustacean, are the more interesting, and their movement towards awareness of other species and of a huger universe they could not have easily imagined, conveys a strong Sense of Wonder. Less engaging perhaps are the aspirational humans and the minatory high-Technology Sholen, who are determined that the Ilmatarans not be communicated with directly (see Prime Directive). The novel itself is ambitious, in some contrast to Cambias's second tale, Corsair (2015), a Hard SF romp in a Near Future world some of whose material needs are supplied from space, with Computer-controlled shipments dropping down the gravity well to Earth. But piracy is rife.
Cambias's first series, the Billion Worlds sequence beginning with The Godel Operation (2021), is set eight millennia hence in a very heavily populated Solar System, with various species – Homo Sapiens in the fore – inhabiting planets, asteroids, Space Habitats, Macrostructures. the action, and the gear required to carry the plot forward, very faithfully evoke the broad-screen Baroque Space Opera that flourished in the 1990s (see Clichés); the complicatedly described AI evokes more recent imaginings. [JC]
see also: Castle Falkenstein.
James L Cambias
born 11 September 1966: New Orleans, Louisiana
works
series
The Billion Worlds
- The Godel Operation (New York: Baen Books, 2021) [The Billion Worlds: hb/Kurt Miller]
- The Scarab Mission (New York: Baen Books, 2023) [The Billion Worlds: pb/Dominic Harman]
- The Miranda Conspiracy (New York: Baen Books, 2025) [The Billion Worlds: pb/]
individual titles
- A Darkling Sea (New York: Tor, 2014) [hb/Thom Tenery]
- Corsair (New York: Tor, 2015) [hb/]
- Arkad's World (New York: Baen Books, 2019) [hb/Dave Seeley]
- The Initiate (New York: Baen Books, 2020) [hb/Alan Pollack]
collections and stories
- The Ocean of the Blind (place not given: Fictionwise, 2006) [story: ebook: first appeared April 2004 F&SF: na/]
- Balancing Accounts (Wildside Press, 2021) [story: ebook: first appeared February 2008 F&SF: in the publisher's Paul Di Filippo Presents series: na/]
links
previous versions of this entry