Sep 01 2023
I like seeing writers stretching and trying new things. To date, and in addition to her short fiction which I have not read, Mary Robinette Kowal has published a completed series of five Regency romances with magical elements, an ongoing series of space exploration against the background of an Earth slipping into uninhabitability, a (so …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/01/the-spare-man-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
Aug 27 2023
If you worked for a while in an oil refinery in Louisiana in, say, the mid-1980s (as I did), part of your orientation was hurricane training. The briefing I attended noted that there are two places on earth where the combination of low elevation, coastline shape, concentrated population, limited escape routes, location relative to wind …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/08/27/katrina-a-history-1915-2015-by-andy-horowitz/
Aug 25 2023
Thirty years ago this spring I read half of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) during travels in southern Europe and stopped when I was no longer spending long stretches of time on busses or ferries, waiting for same, or otherwise doing the things that young people do when they have plenty of time and little …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/08/25/der-zauberberg-by-thomas-mann/
Aug 12 2023
Laura B. Eilers, the entirely lovely and often effervescent founder of The Frumious Consortium, died in mid-July — suddenly, absurdly, unexpectedly, and entirely too soon. She built community wherever she went. Frumious began as a project to bring together some of her friends from around the world with a slightly writerly bent, give them a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/08/12/laura-eilers-1969-2023/
Jul 29 2023
One of the ways that the Folly — the secret unit of London’s Metropolitan Police Service that deals with the supernatural — is integrated into regular police work is that they receive reports concerning missing children. Apparently in previous eras, rogue practitioners used to use children for some very rogue practices. And so Nightingale dispatches Peter …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/07/29/foxglove-summer-by-ben-aaronovitch-2/
Jul 23 2023
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes is something of a second-hand autobiography. Wilkins was Pratchett’s personal assistant from 2000 until Pratchett’s death in 2015 of a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s. He was also in possession of the notes toward an autobiography that Pratchett made but never turned into a full manuscript. As time went …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/07/23/terry-pratchett-a-life-with-footnotes-by-rob-wilkins/
Jul 21 2023
S.A. Chakraborty spends the first fifty or so pages of The City of Brass creating an alternative fantasy Cairo that’s so multifaceted, so lively, so enthralling and exciting that I never really reconciled to the characters’ departure. Sure, Daevabad is the fabled City of Brass. It’s full of djinn in all of their different clans; …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/07/21/the-city-of-brass-by-s-a-chakraborty/
Jul 16 2023
This review inevitably has spoilers for Silver in the Wood. Emily Tesh returns to Victorian England to show readers what has happened since the end of Silver in the Wood, and it starts out with a right mess. Henry Silver, fastidious when last seen, has allowed Greenhallow Hall to fall into disrepair, nearly into ruin. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/07/16/drowned-country-by-emily-tesh/
Jun 26 2023
The fourth in Neil Boyd‘s Bless Me, Father series finds the irascible Father Duddleswell laid up with lumbago just as the priest with whom Duddleswell began his career settles in for an extended visit. Father Abe — most definitely not Father Abraham, with seven sons — is getting on in years, but still sly and not …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/06/26/father-under-fire-by-neil-boyd/
Jun 19 2023
By mid-1916, British forces fighting in Europe have mastered the logistics of spiritualism well enough to gain occasional tactical advantages in the never-ending trench warfare of the Western Front. Men die; they report in to the Spirit Corps; the knowledge that they bought with their lives — a sniper’s location here, a hidden advance there, a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/06/19/ghost-talkers-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire