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
One of the things that science fiction writers have learned how to do in the 206 years since Frankenstein was first published is how to bring their readers along with the new elements of the world that they put into their stories. Most of the time, they take care to make the fantastic elements plausible …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/28/frankenstein-by-mary-shelley-2/
One of the many astonishing things that Richard Rhodes does in The Making of the Atomic Bomb is to match the tone and pace of each of the major sections to their theme. It’s common enough in good novels, but uncommon in non-fiction, and vanishingly rare in a non-fiction work of this size and scope. …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/26/the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb-by-richard-rhodes-pt-3/
Everybody who’s anybody among Berlin’s dead craves an invitation to Frau Altenshul’s salon. She has devoted her afterlife — much as she had devoted her life — to beauty, whether that was beautiful music, beautiful art, or the simple beauty of conversation among like-minded people. Max Liebermann was a painter who had lived a long life, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/21/das-konzert-by-hartmut-lange/
As the fortieth anniversary of its publication approaches, I suppose it’s fair to call Shards of Honor an old-fashioned space opera, although the series it kicked off is open-ended and its most recent work appeared just six years ago. Somehow I missed the Vorkosigan saga when it was becoming a big thing in science fiction …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/14/shards-of-honor-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
The 2024 Hugo Award ceremony is about to start, and I am watching the livestream, so this post is nothing if not timely. Maybe even by the time I have finished it, I will know how my choices compared with those of the other voters. Here are briefish notes on each finalist, in ascending order …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/11/hugo-awards-2024-best-novelette/
Like many children who grow up in peculiar families, Ru does not realize just how peculiar his home life is. As he gets bigger, he starts asking questions. Who am I? Who are we? Where do we come from? The second two are particularly important in in Bowbazar, the Calcutta (the spelling that Das uses …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/04/the-last-dragoners-of-bowbazar-by-indra-das/
Without the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s set of 50 more great novels of the 20th century, it might have been a very long time before I heard of Andrzej Stasiuk, let alone read any of his books. Stasiuk was born in Warsaw in 1960, but he makes his home in a small town in Poland’s furthest southern …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/03/die-welt-hinter-dukla-by-andrzej-stasiuk/
I should have read the description of The Language of the Night more closely because when it arrived I was a little irritated to discover that it’s a collection of essays mostly from the early and mid-1970s, with some footnoted and additional remarks that Le Guin added to a new edition of the book in …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/02/the-language-of-the-night-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
In the first two novellas of Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills series — The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and When the Tiger Came Down from the Mountain — violent conflict is kept at a distance, and much of the tension in the stories arises from the question of whether it can continue to be kept from …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/28/mammoths-at-the-gates-by-nghi-vo-2/
This is the fifth year that I have been a reader and a voter for the Hugo Award, a practice I began when I fulfilled a long-time dream and attended a World Science Fiction Convention. Finances and geography, among other things, have conspired to keep me away in the years since, but maybe I will …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/27/hugo-awards-2024-general-and-some-novellas/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
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Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire