Jul 03 2022
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/03/a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-by-becky-chambers/
Jul 02 2022
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/02/swords-against-wizardry-by-fritz-leiber/
Jun 21 2022
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, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/21/across-the-green-grass-fields-by-seanan-mcguire/
Jun 12 2022
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/12/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/
Jun 11 2022
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/11/fireheart-tiger-by-aliette-de-bodard/
Jun 09 2022
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/09/hugo-awards-2022-best-novelette/
Jun 04 2022
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/04/hugo-awards-2022-best-short-story/
May 29 2022
I went and checked, and Lewis Shiner never did reconcile with his father. Terrible fathers feature so prominently in several of his novels — Glimpses (1993), Outside the Gates of Eden (2019) and Black & White (2008); maybe also the other three that I’ve read, but it’s been so long that I do not remember for …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/29/black-white-by-lewis-shiner/
May 28 2022
It isn’t true that the full title for When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain was originally meant to be When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain With Her Two Tiger Sisters and Considered Eating Cleric Chih but it could have been. Except that at that point it would have been politic to mention the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/28/when-the-tiger-came-down-the-mountain-by-nghi-vo/
May 27 2022
In Softcore a first-person narrator, annoyingly also named Tirday Zolghadr, relates the weeks and days before the opening of a new and arty nightclub in contemporary Tehran, interspersed with his remembrances of earlier times in and around Iran’s capital city. The book has some funny bits, such as a running gag about the splittist tendencies …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/27/softcore-by-tirdad-zolghadr/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire