Oct 30 2021
Harrowhark Nonagesimus, generally and more pronounceably known as Harrow the Ninth, is one weird chickadee. Even among advanced necromancers, a company not generally known for bland probity, Harrow stands out. Readers of this book’s predecessor, Gideon the Ninth, know it; anyone wandering in on this book as the starting point in the Locked Tomb series …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/30/premature-evaluation-harrow-the-ninth-by-tamsyn-muir/
Oct 29 2021
My ten year-old brought this home from his school library and recommended I read it, too! Fortunately, he warned me that he hadn’t actually finished it when I handed it back to him, else I would have likely dropped some major spoilers, but I could tell him that it was a fun read with at …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/29/space-case-moon-base-alpha-1-by-stuart-gibbs/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/28/hugo-awards-2021-best-novelette-nominees/
Oct 26 2021
Firefly meets The Expanse is a really good way to describe this solar system-based space opera, as a ragtag crew of outlaws discover sinister secrets hidden from them by their political overlords. Living in SolComm, the solar system community that houses the refugees from a now uninhabitable Earth, is all Gray Lynch has ever known. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/26/stolen-earth-by-j-t-nicholas/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/21/hugo-awards-2021-best-short-story-nominees/
Sep 27 2021
Yooooo. I love any book with an unapologetically, righteously angry female lead and this one did not disappoint! Also, Zetian is a disabled heroine who kicks ass! I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with such positive disability rep, which is partly on me but, let’s face it, mostly on publishing. Add to that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/27/iron-widow-iron-widow-1-by-xiran-jay-zhao/
Sep 24 2021
Harkaway takes the epigraph for Gnomon from The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski. “When the first question was asked in a direction opposite to the customary one, it was a signal that the revolution had begun.” Ethiopia, as portrayed in The Emperor is a land of whispers and intrigues, barely contending with modern technology, shaped by …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/24/gnomon-by-nick-harkaway-pt-2/
Sep 22 2021
Some time past the middle of the twenty-first century, Britain offers its citizens the safest, most democratic, best-adjusted society in human history. Every person under the System is encouraged — though not compelled — to spend a certain amount of time each week voting, and is semi-randomly assigned to decision-making bodies for the duration of their session. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/22/gnomon-by-nick-harkaway-pt-1/
Sep 20 2021
Confession time: Though I have read Dune several times after encountering it at an early and impressionable age, I don’t think that I have read it this century. My recollection is more impressionistic than detailed, and my impression is that the movie got all of the most important parts of the story up on the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/20/from-page-to-screen-dune/
Sep 17 2021
Bluntly, I don’t know anyone working in speculative fiction today who consistently writes such disturbingly weird shit. But not like in a gratuitous way. Aliya Whiteley doesn’t want to shock you, necessarily, but she is unafraid to plumb into the deeper, uglier parts of the human psyche to examine the monstrous and strange, to ponder …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/17/from-the-neck-up-by-aliya-whiteley/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire