Writer, editor, translator, project manager, reformed bookseller. Currently based in Berlin, following stints in Moscow, Tbilisi, Munich, Washington, Warsaw, Budapest and Atlanta. Also blogs at A Fistful of Euros, though less frequently than here these days.
Most commented posts
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison — 9 comments
- White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies — 7 comments
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire — 6 comments
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch — 6 comments
- The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin — 6 comments
Author's posts
After tangling things forwards and backwards in A Trail Through Time, Jodi Taylor offers more straightforward adventures for the historians of St Mary’s in No Time Like the Past. Which is to say, there are calamities, dangers expected and otherwise, narrow escapes, and scuffles with university bureaucracy. I would say that Dr Madeleine Maxwell, first-person …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/16/no-time-like-the-past-by-jodi-taylor/
How does Count Zero, William Gibson‘s second novel, hold up more than 35 years after its publication? That’s what I was thinking about, re-reading the book for the first time in at least a decade. At the end of Neuromancer, Gibson’s first, genre-defining novel, something happened to the AIs and the entirety of cyberspace, something …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/15/count-zero-by-william-gibson/
“Sleeping Beauty is pretty much the worst fairy tale, an way you slice it” says Zinnia Gray, first-person narrator of A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow. She adds, “Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.” (p. 2) And there’s the first catch, because Zinnia Gray is dying, victim of a rare genetic defect, most of …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/10/a-spindle-splintered-by-alix-e-harrow/
Becky Chambers dedicates A Psalm for the Wild-Built to “anybody who could use a break,” and the novella is, on the whole, very restful. It’s not without conflict, but it is a break from the grim, from the horrible, and it shows people trying to be their best selves. That’s not easy, and one person’s …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/03/a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-by-becky-chambers/
Further into the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Fritz Leiber tends toward longer stories. Swords Against Wizardry is mainly two tales, “Stardock” and “The Lords of Quarmall.” The other two in the volume, “In the Witch’s Tent” and “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar” are little more than stage directions setting up the …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/02/swords-against-wizardry-by-fritz-leiber/
Across the Green Grass Fields is the first of Seanan McGuire‘s Wayward Children series that I have read that’s entirely waywardness, and I liked it that way. There’s no mention of Eleanor West’s Home, nor do any of the characters from the previous five novellas in the series appear. I didn’t miss them at all, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/21/across-the-green-grass-fields-by-seanan-mcguire/
Elder Race offers an extended meditation on Clarke’s Third Law, some thoughts on cultural contamination that are not new but are important to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s characters, all wrapped up in a fast-paced adventure of swords and sufficiently advanced technology. The novella is set on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humans during the first interstellar …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/12/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/
Forbidden love between two princesses. Forbidden not because they are both women, but because they are princesses, and relations between their two states are tense and unequal. Thanh is a princess of Bình Hải, in the south, nominally superior to its northern neighbor but falling back in relative power because of the neighbor’s greater access …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/11/fireheart-tiger-by-aliette-de-bodard/
Myth, starfaring bots, near-future Nigeria, fell fae, artistic immortals and the magic of the mind all feature in the 2022 Hugo finalists in the category of Best Novelette. “Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer sets its story on a large interstellar ship that just barely survived an encounter with hostile aliens and is …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/09/hugo-awards-2022-best-novelette/
In my fourth time as a Hugo voter, I can see that while I like formal experiments in fiction and am glad to find them as finalists on the ballot, they don’t rise to the very top of my preference list. I’m not sure if that’s because the attention needed — both author’s and mine …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/04/hugo-awards-2022-best-short-story/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire