Aug 04 2024
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/04/the-last-dragoners-of-bowbazar-by-indra-das/
Aug 03 2024
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/03/die-welt-hinter-dukla-by-andrzej-stasiuk/
Aug 02 2024
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/02/the-language-of-the-night-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
Jul 28 2024
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/28/mammoths-at-the-gates-by-nghi-vo-2/
Jul 27 2024
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/27/hugo-awards-2024-general-and-some-novellas/
Jun 30 2024
The Hugo Award category that’s presently known as Best Related Work began in 1980 as Best Non-Fiction Book, and in 1999 became Best Related Book. In 2010 the name took its modern form, as fans recognized that the field of science fiction and fantasy is a diverse one, and sometimes award-worthy work comes in an …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/30/hugo-awards-2024-best-related-work/
Jun 23 2024
A hotel, especially a grand one in the center of a major metropolis, can be its own world. Vicki Baum opens up one such world in Menschen im Hotel (lit. “People in a Hotel” but published under the better title of Grand Hotel), telling interlocking stories of people in Berlin’s finest hotel over the course …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/23/menschen-im-hotel-by-vicki-baum/
Jun 16 2024
Through most of the first six books in the Rivers of London series, a rogue magician known as the Faceless Man has been leading the mystical branch of the Metropolitan Police on a merry chase. Well, not so merry for his many victims. But he’s a formidable practitioner, and while Peter Grant, Nightingale, and company …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/16/lies-sleeping-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Jun 15 2024
How much fury fits into 142 pages? Monika Maron tells her readers from the very first sentence that Herbert Beerenbaum dies, so a good bit of Stille Zeile Sechs (Silent Close Number Six — “Close” in the sense of a small cul-de-sac street, with six as the house number) is finding out who he his, how …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/15/stille-zeile-sechs-by-monika-maron/
Jun 08 2024
I was glad to see that enough Chinese fans nominated works for this year’s Hugos that a fair number of works and people from China made it to the list of finalists. There are two short stories, one novelette, and two novellas in the long-established fiction categories, plus one in best graphic story, two in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/08/hugo-awards-2024-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