Category: Doug

The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

Nearly a month after reading The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, I am still thinking about what made me uneasy while reading it. The nine interlinked stories themselves are a fabulous artistic achievement. Set primarily in Russia’s far north and far south, an Arctic mining center and Chechnya, they range back and …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/09/the-tsar-of-love-and-techno-by-anthony-marra/

Salvage and Demolition by Tim Powers

Salvage and Demolition is the other Tim Powers novella that I read in an afternoon or so last autumn. It’s a fun mashup of genres: It starts as a noir mystery with a splash of Bukowski and a studied bookishness; it veers [spoilers] into time travel and Lovecraft, with just a little bit of Snow …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/24/salvage-and-demolition-by-tim-powers/

Mussolini’s Italy by R.J.B. Bosworth

I had set aside Mussolini’s Italy for the better part of a year after writing about the first third of it, and then I picked it up again just a few weeks ago. Zeitgeist, I suppose.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/23/mussolinis-italy-by-r-j-b-bosworth/

Nobody’s Home by Tim Powers

Nobody’s Home is subtitled An Anubis Gates Story, which helped to draw me towards reading this story because I had heard good things about The Anubis Gates, although I have not read it. In an alternate nineteenth-century London, ghosts haunt the living, and some magics work, if not routinely then with a certain amount of …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/08/nobodys-home-by-tim-powers/

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

Cauldron is the sixth novel in Jack McDevitt’s series of novels featuring Priscilla Hutchins as a protagonist, and is not a good place to begin reading the series. In fact, it’s chronologically the last novel (to date) in the series, as the seventh book goes back to the very beginning of Hutchins’ career to show …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/28/cauldron-by-jack-mcdevitt/

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

I thought that Lagoon would be the first book I read by Nnedi Okorafor. Or maybe The Book of Phoenix, which a friend had strongly recommended. Turns out the first was Binti, one of a new line of novellas published electronically and on paper by Tor.com. I have it on paper, courtesy of a surprisingly …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/11/binti-by-nnedi-okorafor/

The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein by Thomas Ligotti

One of the advantages of picking up twenty books for about twenty bucks in a Humble Bundle is the chance to get to know new authors at low cost. (I’m a long way from a good lending library in English, so no-cost is not much of an option for me.) The Bundle that I picked …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/10/the-agonizing-resurrection-of-victor-frankenstein-by-thomas-ligotti/

Brayan’s Gold by Peter V. Brett

Brayan’s Gold is a novella that forms part of the back story for the main character in a set of novels by Peter V. Brett, which I have not read. It began as a reference tossed into the first of those, “reminding people that Arlen had a ton of adventures back when he was young …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/09/brayans-gold-by-peter-v-brett/

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

After looking at the power of stories in Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett turns to some of the greatest stories ever told: religions, and, somewhat more incidentally, philosophy. Small Gods, the thirteenth Discworld novel, takes place in and around Omnia, an austere land on the edge of a great desert. The church of the Great God …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/08/small-gods-by-terry-pratchett/

Taking Stock of 2015

In 2015, I decided to read in three major science fiction and fantasy series that I had somehow missed over the previous twenty years or more. While I had been happily reading other things, they had grown into monuments of the field, and I only knew second-hand what they were all about. So I decided …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/01/05/taking-stock-of-2015/