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/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/01/05/taking-stock-of-2015/
Nov 03 2015
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
This book wasn’t for me. I thought it might be — 10 million fans can’t be wrong — I had heard good things about it, the title stayed lodged in my brain, and I thought about buying the book several times over the course of this year. So I picked it up, not entirely on impulse, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/11/03/the-fault-in-our-stars-by-john-green/
Oct 31 2015
Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski
I had been thinking how terribly young the soldiers were that Ryszard Kapuściński wrote about in Another Day of Life when he brought me up short by noting that they were the same age as many of the fighters in the Warsaw Uprising at the end of World War II. Alexander Hamilton raised an artillery …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/31/another-day-of-life-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Oct 29 2015
Remake by Connie Willis
Most of the rest of Connie Willis’ writing would lead a reader to expect that Remake, her tale of Hollywood endlessly recycling classic movies and classic actors through digital magic, would be a screwball comedy that packed an emotional wallop. But no, this is as close to dystopia as Willis gets. As the back cover …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/29/remake-by-connie-willis/
Oct 28 2015
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Between the time when Ryszard Kapuściński saw the revolution in Iran in 1979 and when Shah of Shahs, his book on the subject, was published in 1982, his home country of Poland lived through its own revolution, one that started with strikes at a shipyard in the northern port of Gdańsk but collapsed as the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/shah-of-shahs-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Oct 27 2015
Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has observed that while plot is a literary convention, story is a force of nature. In Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett explores some of the things that can happen when these forces of nature latch on to people in his most unnatural of settings. People think that stories are shaped by people. In …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/27/witches-abroad-by-terry-pratchett/
Oct 21 2015
New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear
There isn’t a zeppelin on the cover to let readers know this is an alternate history, but by way of making up for it, Elizabeth Bear sets the book’s first story on board hydrogen-filled German airship. The Hans Glücker is on its way from Calais to the jewel of British North America, the eponymous New …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/21/new-amsterdam-by-elizabeth-bear/
Oct 19 2015
The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski
By the time Ryszard Kapuściński returned to Ethiopia, the revolution had already swept Emperor Haile Selassie from power. He engaged in something like journalistic archaeology, digging up the people of the Palace from where they had gone to ground to avoid execution in the violence that followed the revolution. The Emperor reads as if it …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/19/the-emperor-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Oct 16 2015
The End of All Things by John Scalzi
In the two most recent books set in his Old Man’s War universe, The Human Division and now The End of All Things, John Scalzi has been busy shaking up the structures that he set up in the earlier books. Briefly, the galaxy is full of starfaring civilizations, most of them relentlessly hostile to each …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/16/the-end-of-all-things-by-john-scalzi/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire