Sep 28 2017
“I only invented the Discworld,” said Terry Pratchett, “Josh [Kirby] created it.” Kirby painted the exuberant, detail-filled covers of the Discworld books that gave the series an unmistakable visual identity, suggesting that there were multitudes of other stories happening on the Disc and that Pratchett just chose some of them to tell. His teeming figures, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/28/the-last-hero-by-terry-pratchett/
Sep 19 2017
Death’s adoptive granddaughter. A perfectionist clockmaker. An unassuming monk. An uncannily talented novice, who’s prone to stealing things. These four form the primary cast of Thief of Time, the twenty-sixth Discworld novel. The conceit of the story is that if time is ever measured with perfect accuracy, it is captured, and stops. Completely. AFTER ONE …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/19/thief-of-time-by-terry-pratchett/
Sep 14 2017
I should say two things right up front about Europe in Winter. First, intermittently during a bicycle tour across one of Europe’s smaller polities that steadfastly refuses to disappear completely is both the right and wrong way to read this book. Wrong, because it surely deserves closer attention that I was sometimes able to give …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/14/europe-in-winter-by-dave-hutchinson/
Sep 12 2017
In Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, things are not as they seem. She and her first-person narrator tell readers that from the novel’s very beginning: “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.” Nor is the valley’s Dragon a dragon — “he may be a wizard and immortal, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/12/uprooted-by-naomi-novik/
Sep 06 2017
I’m not ordinarily a fan of editions that feel compelled to shoehorn critical essays of the novel into the same volume, but I must say that Robert Crossley did provide me with a significant insight into a thing that had been bothering me about the book: Dana’s occasional and exceedingly grating naivete. About 40% of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/06/kindred-by-octavia-e-butler/
Aug 26 2017
I was too busy to do a proper review of the first in the series once I’d finished reading, so this covers both, sorry not sorry. With the help of my local libraries, I’ve decided to read all the Discworld books that I haven’t yet attempted in order. I actually picked up The Color Of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/08/26/the-light-fantastic-discworld-2-rincewind-2-by-terry-pratchett/
Aug 17 2017
You can read the review of my first read-through here It’s weird re-reading books, what you remember and what you don’t. I remembered very vividly the biology and quantum physics of The Way Of Kings, as well as that brutal final battle that had me crying for forty pages straight. I remembered Syl but she …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/08/17/the-way-of-kings-the-stormlight-archive-1-by-brandon-sanderson/
Aug 09 2017
What a hot mess of a book. So here’s the thing: I totally dig the concept. Steven Erikson wants to write a cool fantasy novel essentially viewed from above, with far-removed characters and individual plot threads eventually twisted and pulled together into one place for a climactic battle where All Will Be Revealed. I also …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/08/09/gardens-of-the-moon-the-malazan-book-of-the-fallen-1-by-steven-erikson/
Jul 14 2017
Technology is rising on the Discworld, as surely and erratically as the morning light from the Disc’s sun. Moving pictures appeared briefly in Moving Pictures, but the unreality that they involved kept them from securing a lasting place among the entertainments for the people of Ankh-Morpork. In more recent books, the semaphore “clacks” have come …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/14/the-truth-by-terry-pratchett/
Jun 29 2017
I’ve finished marking up my Hugo ballot for 2017, and I’m satisfied with where my votes have gone. That doesn’t mean I have finished reading everything that’s on the ballot — far from it — but I have done enough in each work that I am going to read to have a sense of how …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/29/hugo-voting-2017/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire