Apr 20 2025
By the year 2248, when Icehenge begins, humanity has long-established settlements on Mars though terraforming is far from complete. Spaceships ply the middle planets, and asteroid mining has been an industry long enough for people to have grown up in it. One of the key differences that has made long-term projects such as terraforming viable …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/20/icehenge-by-kim-stanley-robinson/
Apr 19 2025
This book totally should not work. Scalzi take an absurd premise — the moon suddenly, completely, and for no discernible reason turns into cheese — and then plays it straight for the rest of the novel. The impossible, the inexplicable is implacably real for the characters. The book is hilarious in parts, but it’s funny …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/19/when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-by-john-scalzi/
Mar 23 2025
In some distant and ultimately irrelevant future, humanity has mastered time travel and discovered not a single causal chain through the unity of time and space, but a vast multitude of timelines. They cluster in groups of similar development. In some, humanity spreads to the stars; in others, humanity remains more tightly tied to its …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/23/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-by-amal-el-mohtar-and-max-gladstone/
Mar 16 2025
A City on Mars asks in its subtitle “Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?” When I read part of the book to decide how to vote on its place in the 2024 Hugo Awards category of Best Related Work I thought that the answers were “probably …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/16/a-city-on-mars-by-kelly-and-zach-weinersmith/
Mar 02 2025
Agreeing with Anne Applebaum tends to worry me. Her book Gulag is well regarded (Pulitzer Prize, for example), but I found that the closer it got to the present day and events that I knew a fair amount about, the more tendentious and rightward-slanted I thought her account. That made me uncertain about the earlier …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/02/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum/
Mar 01 2025
Stop in and have some tea with Mma Ramotswe, or maybe head out to the orphan farm for a piece of Mma Potokwani’s fruitcake, or perhaps head into downtown Gaborone for lunch at the President Hotel with a side order of people-watching. In many ways, the books of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/01/from-a-far-and-lovely-country-by-alexander-mccall-smith/
Feb 22 2025
Since Rivers of London was first published in 2011, the series has grown to nine novels, five novellas, and 12 graphic novels. Along the way, Aaronovitch wrote a fair number of shorter stories that were set in the world of the series; sometimes he was asked to write them, as when Waterstone’s published special editions …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/22/tales-from-the-folly-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Feb 08 2025
Ruthanna Emrys joins contemporary authors such as Kij Johnson, Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff in taking up the ideas and storylines of H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror, looking at them with twenty-first-century eyes and writing tales that wind up in very different places. Who would worship the inhuman and often malevolent gods from Lovecraft’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/08/winter-tide-by-ruthanna-emrys/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/04/taking-stock-of-2024/
Dec 28 2024
I have more than a sneaking suspicion that Ben Aaronovitch wrote Amongst Our Weapons to deliver one particular joke. People who recognize the source of the book’s title will expect that some variation on the joke is coming, but they will have to wait until page 287. Nightingale delivers the setup in Latin, though he …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/28/three-in-the-rivers-of-london-series-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire