May 30 2026

Cinder House by Freya Marske

I should have caught on much faster than I did that this novella is a retelling of Cinderella. I mean, “Cinder” is right there in the title, and the story’s very first word is “Ella,” as in “Ella’s father died of the poison in their tea.” Ella drank less tea and might have survived, except that the whole house gave a shudder when its master died, and that was exactly the moment when Ella, weak and dizzy from the poison, stood at the top of the stairs. She fell and cracked her skull on the seventh step.

Cinder House by Freya Marske

People who picked up on the retelling faster than I did — or who read any description of the book at all — may have wondered how a dead girl is supposed to dance with a prince. Therein, of course, lies the tale. Ella’s stepmother, who poisoned the tea, is sufficiently wicked for any fairy tale. Marske makes her motivation understandable by showing her as a shrewd businesswoman who is terrified of falling back into the poverty from which she rose, but she seems to take murder in stride so that while she is understandably wicked, wicked she remains. Marske also suggests that Ella’s mother did not die a natural death, and so perhaps these two fairy-tale parents were well matched in their wickedness. At any rate Marske does not show any scenes of the marriage prior to the fatal tea-time; she is interested in examining and upending only certain parts of the Cinderella story, and what the parents got up to is not one of them.

The step-sisters are not yet as wicked as their mother, although one of them clearly has ambitions. Ella, for her part, is surprised to be a ghost, though returning to consciousness and manifesting take a bit of time. As Marske explains

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May 28 2026

Hugo Awards 2026: Best Poem

Honestly grateful to the Hugo Awards for continuing this category after last year’s trial balloon, and thereby forcing me to think more about and read more poetry.

I’ve discovered that, generally speaking, there are two kinds of poetry I enjoy. One is the story in verse, structured much like a short story but with far stricter word choices. The other is the imagist poem, which attempts to capture a moment in the proverbial thousand words or less. Both categories are represented here, with some poems attempting both, to varying degrees of success.

Closer to the story side was my personal favorite of the bunch, Jennifer Hudak’s The World To Come. Since I generally read the list of nominees in alphabetical order (if I hadn’t encountered them in the wild already,) hers came last, and I’ll freely admit that I was perhaps a little dejected by the time I got to it. None of the other poems had really wowed me, and when I opened this file, I was less than convinced that a poem that began with a verse from Isaiah would manage it either. But this meditation on resurrection was beautiful and subversive and perfectly speculative, and was by far my top choice for this year’s award.

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May 27 2026

To The Last Gram by Shreya Davies & Vanessa Wong

I am a naturally vindictive person, but disordered eating is a hell I wouldn’t wish on even my worst enemy.

To The Last Gram tells the story of Divya, who realizes from an early age that she isn’t as petite as most of the other girls around her. Perhaps shockingly for an Asian kid growing up in Singapore, neither her parents nor her friends try to shame her into being skinnier: society does that all on its own. After the government, via her secondary school, essentially tells her that she’s fat and needs to manage her weight with the help of an obesity clinic, Divya develops an eating disorder. Her parents do their best to try to help her be healthy, but they’re woefully unprepared to deal with the psychological challenge; and no shade to them because it is A Lot.

This book chronicles Divya’s struggles to get back to healthiness, and is so rawly told, so intimate in the details, that it’s hard to believe it’s entirely fiction. Divya takes great pains to exonerate her parents of any blame, squarely and correctly placing the responsibility for her sickness on a society that drums into the heads of its citizens — and especially young people — an irrational fear of being anything but skinny. Gaining weight is too often seen as a moral failing that opens you up to public ridicule worse than actually committing any crimes. Physical health is given less importance than aesthetics.

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May 26 2026

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

I was feeling very intellectually chipper last week and decided to get a head start on some of my Hugo 2026 Awards reading, beginning with a nominated novella from a podcaster I adore.

Automatic Noodle is the story of a restaurant’s robot employees in a California that has successfully seceded, at some cost, from the United States. As the book opens, all the store’s robots have been deactivated. Flooding reawakens the emergency protocols of the manager, who was formerly a soldier in the war. As he tries to figure out what’s happening, he awakens the rest of his staff. Soon, they discover that the restaurant chain that owned them decided to close their location and shut them down in the process. Unwilling to disband, they decide to take over running the restaurant for themselves, meeting all of their challenges head-on in a heartwarming story of the American dream, more or less.

It’s clear that this is meant to be an allegory for immigration and civil rights. Trouble is, you have to buy in first to the (unfortunately inconsistent) depiction here of Artificial Intelligence being so far advanced as to have granted robots enough sentience that they’ve developed free will and earned a limited form of citizenship. Perhaps this story would have landed better in a time frame where generative AI isn’t busy dismantling the livelihoods of millions worldwide, solely for the purpose of enriching the already wealthy. It’s just hard for me as a reader (and a member of an ethnic minority, and someone whose career was made precarious by gen AI) to mentally traverse robotics’ uncanny valley and accept the humanity of created objects that are also somehow fully autonomous of their investors.

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May 22 2026

Tantalizing Tales — May 2026 — Part Four

Woof, living with autoimmune disease is tough. At least I’m starting to recognize when I’m having a bad day early on, so I don’t collapse halfway through my scheduled activities and take even longer to recover. It’s been particularly brutal to me in that it’s also affecting my reading and writing — I sleep A LOT more these days — but at least there are a bunch of awesome books to keep me interested and entertained when I am awake and energized.

Such as F T Lukens’ upcoming speculative YA novel, The Last Best Quest Ever. This charming romantasy revolves around seventeen year-old Ellinore, who is the best quester her kingdom has ever seen, better even than her brooding royal rival Aven. So when she announces her retirement at a royal feast, the entire kingdom is shooketh.

Her twin brother Zig, however, is so confident in her abilities (and willingness to get back in the game) that he bets his very life on her ability to retrieve the horn of the mythical Elder Beast, a creature no one knows for sure is even real. In order to save him, Ellinore has to return to the spotlight, embarking on one last quest with Zig, Aven and a ragtag crew of other questers looking for fortune and glory.

Trouble is, Ellinore’s a fraud. All her kills were staged and her quest rewards planted. She quit because she couldn’t take the pressure of lying any more… and now her idiot brother’s life is on the line. Will Ellinore be able to save him, and maybe save her own soul in the process?

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May 21 2026

Hold by Randy Ribay & Zeke Peña

What a charming throwback this is to the days when my young children would fixate on a seemingly simple thing and take it to often hilarious extremes!

A child and their dad are getting ready to leave the house when Dad makes a seemingly innocuous request, extending a water bottle to Child and saying, “Hold, please.” Soon, the child wants to hold eeeeeeeverything and take it with them on their walk, from expected things like stuffies to less common choices like their long-suffering cat.

Even when they go outside, Child wants to hold a tree and a plane and someone else’s baby, leading Dad to have to come up with acceptable substitutes (and head right back indoors.) The real challenge tho happens when Child realizes that they can’t hold everything… but maybe they can hold the most important thing.

This is a very cute story with terrific art that perfectly evokes the madcap emotions of toddlerhood. Child is incredibly expressive as they realize that there are so many things they could hold. Dad’s resigned expression is hilarious… tho if I’m being completely honest, it’s also a little bewildering.

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May 20 2026

Shadows Over Innsmouth edited by Stephen Jones

I’m gonna be so for real with y’all, idk if I would have picked this up had I known it was a reprint from 1994. Which I also only realized after riffling through the Contributor’s Notes at the back of the book and finding that the authors here are, as far as I could tell, almost exclusively white cis men. I suppose that given the preponderance of that demographic in the appreciation of HP Lovecraft — and the fact that a push for reinterpreting his works from a minority lens didn’t really happen till the 2010s — this shouldn’t be so surprising, or even inexcusable.

But what really strikes me after reading this book is how good the original novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth actually is. Sure, Mr Lovecraft might have hated minorities with a superciliousness that positively glowers through his prose — with a healthy soupcon, granted, of self-loathing — but there’s no denying that the story itself is engaging, inventive and utterly fresh even almost a century on. The novella feels both original and complete in a way that irrevocably establishes his status as a master of the horror genre. He may have been an unpleasant person, but there’s no denying that the man could write.

The rest of the sixteen stories in this volume are directly inspired by that original tale. In my opinion, the ones that attempt to insert themselves into the narrative voice of their inspiration are the least successful. But the stories that approach the setting with verve rather than attempting (and too often failing) to ape Mr Lovecraft’s curious balance of dry analysis and gooey horror make for genuinely interesting reading.

One of these standouts is Jack Yeovil’s terrific Los Angeles noir pastiche The Big Fish. When a 1940s private investigator is hired to look into the disappearance of a Hollywood bigwig by his potentially jilted love interest, all hell breaks loose — or nearly enough to count. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood is a perfect breeding ground for Innsmouth-derived cultists looking to spread their influence. And, lol, while I was researching this review, I discovered that “Jack Yeovil” is actually a pen name of Kim Newman, whose irreverent A Quarter To Three is another highlight of this collection. Both stories tackle the solemn themes of TSoI with humor and wit as a deft counterbalance that keeps the heavy material lively.

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May 19 2026

ARSENAL HAVE WON THE PREMIER LEAGUE!!!

I had something else scheduled for today but nothing else matters, really, because the team I’ve supported since first learning about and watching and falling in love with them in 1997 (after having loathed football since experiencing nothing but boredom in my first full game, the ’94 World Cup final,) my team THE MIGHTY ARSENAL, have today won the Premier League for the first time in 22 years! And I was okay, I was happy, there in my kitchen in the cherry print shirt I promised football chat I’d wear in support of Bournemouth who, if they defeated or drew against our hated rivals in this penultimate game of the season, would ensure that we won the league after a grueling campaign that saw us secure our own necessary victory yesterday. And the valiant Cherries held on to a draw, and I gleefully celebrated with my friends online while finishing up some work in the kitchen, and then Arsenal posted this video to their Instagram:

Y’all, I bawled. Sitting there at my kitchen table, seeing the proud face of Arsène Wenger — the man who made me understand that football at its best is nothing less than art — as he congratulated the team on our victory, I finally broke down crying. I haven’t really stopped since. I’ve loved this club for well over half my life. Perhaps oddly, it has provided the kind of community and stability for me that religion does for most other people. In the social media era, it’s been easier too to connect with new friends who also care about the club… and unfortunately to be exposed to haters who have nothing better to do with their miserable lives than to troll us true believers. I’ve been with this club through thick and thin, and these past few decades, there’s been a lot of thin. Now, however and once more, we feast on victory.

But you know, this is primarily a book site, so I’m gonna recommend some books about Arsenal and football for those of you who want to get to know the Arsenal better, whether you’re new to the sport or a life-long fan (tho these books will probably be old hat to the latter category):

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May 18 2026

Hugo Awards 2026 Chat

Here at The Frumious Consortium, we are always excited to scrutinize the list of Hugo Finalists!

Doug: I’ve read one of the Best Novel finalists! And one in Novella! And I think I tried to read one in Best Short Story. I’ve forgotten whether I bounced or just suffered tab overload and closed that one out. Yay! Inventing the Renaissance made it in Best Related Work! My copy of that has so many Post-It flags. I had intended to write a multi-part thingie for Frumious; maybe I will revisit as part of Hugo season.

Ooh, Sinners did make the list in Best Dramatic Presentation, but that’s a tough, tough field this year. The notes for the category say that the top choice got 313 nominations out of 650 ballots cast. Anyone want to hazard a guess which one that was?

And a third Murderbot episode would have been a finalist in Short Form of Dramatic Presentation, but for the limit of two episodes per show. I’m so glad the years when this category was Best Episode of Doctor Who have passed.

Emily: I’m surprised that I haven’t read any of the short stories this year!

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May 16 2026

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Here are some of the good bits from the new Murderbot novel, Platform Decay. I’m leaving out context, so I hope no big plot points are revealed.

I looked at Farai, and she said, “They’re looking for rogue SecUnits. Rogue SecUnits are always alone.”
Well, fuck. I hate it when the humans are right. I sent two of my intel drones to cover Naja and Sofi, and we started to walk. (p. 147)

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Speaking of rogue SecUnits,

I sent: I don’t have a governor module and if you fuck up my retrieval I will fucking tear you apart, now get the hell out of here you asshole. I included a packet with some of my basic codes (fooling weapons scanners, taking control of cameras and drones, the original version of walk-like-a-human, etc.) And find some different clothes! (p. 95)

When things are getting a little feisty:

“SecUnit.” I thought Farai was going to tell me not to use violence, or don’t kill humans who are trying very hard to kill us or something. Mensah’s family had never really understood … anything about me.
Instead, Farai said with grim conviction, “I want you to do whatever you have to to keep those motherless shits away from my daughter.”
Fuck yes. (p. 119)

And while this episode in SecUnit’s life is particularly sweary, or at least seemed that way to me, it hasn’t lost its knack for understatement.

In front of the station, my hauler bot had run into the armored vehicle so successfully, it had decided to repeat the experience several times. (p. 201)

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