Category: Doug

Od Magic by Patricia A. McKillip

How do you pronounce the first word of the title? I asked a couple of friends who had read Od Magic before me, and their first response was a pause, and then, “Hm.” Online Scrabble has since taught me that “od” is an actual English word, somewhat archaic, meaning “a hypothetical power once thought to …

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Yendi by Steven Brust

Yendi is the second book published in Steven Brust’s long-running Vlad Taltos series. It takes place after the prologue of the first book, Jhereg, and a fair amount of time before that one’s main story begins. As I noted previously, “Vlad’s world is a high-magic setting, with death often no more than an inconvenience (though …

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Lock In by John Scalzi

A long time ago, John Grisham came to the bookstore where I was working to sign copies of his second book from a major publisher, The Pelican Brief. His first, The Firm, had been an enormous hit, and there was every indication that the second would sell in mass quantities as well. No movies had …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/28/lock-in-by-john-scalzi-2/

More concerning The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz

I thought that the next bit I wrote here would be about something lighter, or at least something fictional, but Milosz has well and truly grabbed and held my attention. The middle section that I have just finished, particularly the nearly 100 pages (out of 530 in the main text) Milosz devotes to Polish Romanticism, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/24/more-concerning-the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/

The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz

Every literature should be so fortunate as to have a Nobel laureate write a textbook history of its development. The only down side I can see to The History of Polish Literature — so far, that is, I am up to the middle of the 18th century, although that’s just a little less than the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/18/the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Twenty years and more after reading Stand on Zanzibar for the first time, I was surprised at how vividly its opening had stayed with me. First up the extended epigraph, a quotation from McLuhan, a warning to the unwary about what Brunner is about to spring on his readers, unsuspecting as they may have been …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/16/stand-on-zanzibar-by-john-brunner/

Viva Polonia by Steffen Möller

In the mid-1990s, Steffen Möller went against the usual tide of migration and moved from Germany to Poland. He started with a two-week language course in Krakow, which he found out about from a poster hung in his university’s cafeteria. From such a simple starting point, his whole career grew: first as a student of …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/10/viva-polonia-by-steffen-moller/

Nebula Award winners 2015

The Science Fiction Writers of America announced the winners of this year’s Nebula Awards. Novel Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer [Laura reviewed Annihilation as part of its trilogy, and didn’t like it as much as the SFWA did.] Novella Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress Novelette “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14) Short …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/07/nebula-award-winners-2015/

Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson

Reading Europe In Autumn was more disorienting than usual for an alternate history. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the protagonist of this story set in a slightly-alt near-future Europe could easily have been a slightly-alt me, and not just in the sense that the author had created a sympathetic figure …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/04/europe-in-autumn-by-dave-hutchinson/

Eric by Terry Pratchett

Eric plays on the Faust legend, and it read to me as a slighter work than the Discworld novels that immediately preceded it in publication. Wikipedia tells me that Eric was originally published in a larger format, fully illustrated by Josh Kirby, who did most of the covers of the UK editions of the Discworld …

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