Mar 10 2019
Q. Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did The Smoke evolve? A. The Smoke began as the first volume of a trilogy (and I’ve not entirely abandoned the idea even now) set in an alternative 1970s London. Obviously there was something in the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/10/an-interview-with-simon-ings-author-of-the-smoke/
Feb 21 2019
Q. Every series has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did the Embers Of War series evolve? A. The initial idea came when I was reading an article about the Titanic disaster, and idly started wondering what would happen if a star liner crashed in a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/21/an-interview-with-gareth-l-powell-author-of-fleet-of-knives/
Feb 20 2019
There’s a lot of ick in the ten tales that comprise Pump Six and Other Stories. Most of the settings are dystopias of one sort of another — mostly near-ish future, mostly Asian-inflected, mostly involving some sort if environmental collapse — and most of the characters in the stories are either horrible people in and of themselves, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/20/pump-six-and-other-stories-by-paolo-bacigalupi/
Feb 19 2019
Oh, man, Book 3 cannot come fast enough! I readily admit that I don’t remember a whole lot from the first book, which was an intriguing novel of ideas that somehow lacked an ability to engage me emotionally. Fleet Of Knives certainly doesn’t suffer from that problem! We open with Captain Sal Konstanz on a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/19/fleet-of-knives-embers-of-war-2-by-gareth-l-powell/
Feb 10 2019
Don’t Panic, subtitled Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a labor of friendship in 1987 when Nick Landau of Titan Books, which had Adams’ agreement to write a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy companion book, called up Neil Gaiman “and asked if I was interested. I wanted to write this …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/02/10/dont-panic-by-neil-gaiman/
Jan 28 2019
I read a lot of novels and it is perishing rare for me to feel genuinely intimidated by the intellect of an author but here we are! Simon Ings’ terrifying intelligence is palpable throughout the pages of The Smoke, with my only quibble being why London is called such, as the text doesn’t seem to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/28/the-smoke-by-simon-ings/
Jan 26 2019
You know how sometimes you think you’ve read a literary classic but it’s only that (you think) you know the story from sheer media saturation? I thought I’d read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein decades ago, at the very least as an Illustrated Classic, but there were very many scenes completely unfamiliar to me, particularly where Adam …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/26/frankenstein-by-mary-shelley/
Jan 24 2019
It’s interesting how quickly one’s sympathy for a young girl raised to cosset a psychopath plummets as she goes from teaching him social skills to actively enabling his monstrous tendencies. And in this political climate, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for a woman who knows that her man is a shit but feels she …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/24/the-dark-descent-of-elizabeth-frankenstein-by-kiersten-white/
Jan 14 2019
Whereas the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, the darkly beautiful Annihilation stands perfectly well on its own, Authority requires both a lead-in and a follow-up. It’s a creepy ass book about, well, part of the problem is that it’s not really about anything that makes sense independent of Books 1 and 3. Essentially, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/14/authority-southern-reach-2-by-jeff-vandermeer/
Jan 10 2019
Stories of Your Life and Others left me cold, which surprised me for two reasons: first, because he has a reputation as an excellent writer, few stories but nearly every one a contender for major awards and often enough a winner; second, because I had enjoyed The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate so much. (That …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/10/stories-of-your-life-and-others-by-ted-chiang/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire