Sep 24 2019

Firefly – The Big Damn Cookbook by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel

God, this book is just so freaking gorgeous.

So I have a weekly cooking column over at CriminalElement.com called Cooking The Books, where I find mysteries with recipes and cook from them. Aside from your expected culinary cozies, I’ve also worked from the Red Sparrow series (yes, the basis of of the movie starring Jennifer Lawrence) as well as a promotional cookbook tie-in to Louise Penny’s celebrated Inspector Gamache novels, The Nature Of The Feast. This is the first time I’ve been able to cook for work from an honest-to-God hardcover cookbook, however, and what a gorgeous way to start!

The author of this volume, Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, is also the creative force behind The Inn At The Crossroads, a site I’ve admired for years (tho I have yet to try out the recipe for lemon cakes that first brought me there.) When Titan Books offered me a chance to review this cookbook, I leapt at it because also, as you might already know, I’ve long been a fan of the ‘Verse.

And oh, what an utterly rewarding book this is! Aside from being a surprisingly solid cookbook, it’s a love letter to the Firefly fan, digging up recipes even obliquely mentioned in the series and film for our delectation. Bonus: each of the ones I’ve tried so far has been incredibly fuss-free. Ms Monroe-Cassel is not only talented at coming up with recipes based on dialog and the occasional scene alone, but also knows how to write each recipe in a way that is informative and concise, a boon to any cook.

One such is the recipe for Five-Spice Mix, included in the section covering the Basics of cooking in the ‘Verse. In a future as heavily influenced by Earth-That-Was’ Chinese culture as by its Old West, this is an important seasoning used in a bunch of different dishes, including one we’ll try later on in this series of reviews. Oh yes, I’ll be reviewing this book over the course of four weeks, as we explore the different facets of cooking in this setting. So here, a (lightly edited for format) version of Ms Monroe-Cassel’s basic spice recipe:

“““`

Five-Spice Mix

2 tsp Sichuan or black peppercorns
5 star anise seeds
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
1 Tbsp fennel seeds

Toast the peppercorns in a hot skillet for 1-2 minutes, until aromatic. Put all ingredients in a spice grinder or coffee grinder and process to a fine powder. Keep fresh in an airtight container stored in a cool, dark place.

“““`

So I decided to use black pepper to spare the tastebuds of my lovely assistant Karin, who does not do well with spiciness and related mouthfeels, tho she’s generally okay with a bit of regular pepper. This worked out fine; less successful was my decision to use a plastic spice grinder that had previously housed sea salt. I wound up having to rectify that mistake with mortar and pestle, tho even then I don’t think I ground the star anise finely enough. The roughness of the end result does however add a dash of the provincial to an otherwise quite sophisticated blend. Karin pointed out that I could probably just have used store-bought but honestly, this tasted so much fresher. I’d highly recommend using a metal bladed grinder tho, for the rest of you trying this at home.

Next week, we’ll talk about the organization of the book, by which I mean I’ll continue to wax poetic over Ms Monroe-Cassel’s talents as a cookbook author, while considering a delicious beverage recipe. Do join me!

“““`

11/13/2019 Click on these links for Parts Two, Three and Four of the series!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/24/firefly-the-big-damn-cookbook-by-chelsea-monroe-cassel/

Sep 21 2019

Schellingstrasse 48 by Walter Kolbenhoff

For all that it is a Millionenstadt, Munich can also be quite a small town. Literary and artistic Munich even more so. Thus it’s not very surprising that in Schellingstrasse 48 (48 Schelling St.), Walter Kolbenhoff’s memoir of the Nazi era, POW internment in America, and early post-war Munich, other authors from the Süddeutsche Zeitung‘s series of 20 books about Munich make appearances. Oskar Maria Graf, whose Der ewige Spiesser followed two books after Wir sind Gefangene came two books before Kolbenhoff’s in the series, was an occasional visitor to Schellingstrasse. Kolbenhoff uses a well-known phrase from Thomas Mann that the Süddeutsche later used as the title for the Mann volume in the series. Alfred Andersch, author of Der Vater eines Mörders was in the same POW camps as Kolbenhoff in Louisiana and Pennsylvania; they were both involved in a POW publication called Der Ruf as well as a successor of the same name published in Munich after the war; later they were both involved in early post-war West Germany’s most important literary movement, Gruppe 47. In short: Munich connected.

Schellingstrasse 48

Kolbenhoff himself was surprised to wind up in Munich. He was a Berliner born and bred. As a young apprentice, he wandered far and wide in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. He felt drawn to southern lands. He returned to Berlin, but the advent of Nazi power forced him into exile, and he landed in Copenhagen. That city welcomed him, and he felt at home there, learning Danish and plying various trades until the war took an interest in him. After his release from American internment, he fully intended to return there. Chance, in the form of a letter from a fellow prisoner to his family in rural Bavaria, took Kolbenhoff to southern Germany. The family turned out to be local gentry, and at a time when meager rations made malnutrition a common experience in German cities, Kolbenhoff found himself living well as a practical adoptee of well-off farmers. In the bitter months of 1946, he was warm and well fed. The war seemed hardly to have touched Bad Aibling.

Nevertheless, errands take him into the big city. Munich is in ruins, former soldiers are everywhere scrounging food and cigarettes, “women in worn-out dresses and coats. The faces were without expression, the eyes cast down and without the slightest emotion. I saw no children. I was seized by an uncanny loneliness and despair. Get out of this city, just get out!” (p. 16, my translations throughout) A few steps later, though, he sees a notice — “All book printers, typesetters, letter-makers, book binders, etc. report to Alfred Andersch, Schellingstrasse 39.” (p. 16) — and resolves to check whether it is his old friend with the unusual name. It is indeed, and Andersch has landed at a newspaper approved and supplied by the US occupation authorities. By the end of the afternoon, Kolbenhoff has a job at the paper, has met the renowned author Erich Kästner, and has a line on one of the rarest goods in Munich: an intact dwelling. “‘What a day,’ [in English in the original] I thought when I stood outside [of the newspaper offices] on Schellingstrasse again.” (p. 22)

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/21/schellingstrasse-48-by-walter-kolbenhoff/

Sep 20 2019

Lines Composed a Few Yards from Schlachtensee, With Apologies to W.W.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I read
These pages, rolled from their printing-press
With a rotary hum.—Once again
Do I behold those last and polished drafts
That many a wild scene describe,
Acts the more connected to themes
And th’ arguments of the plays.
The day is come when I again review
Here, under Frumious name, and mark
These plots of novels bound, these biographies
Which in these bindings, with their full-told lives
Are kept on two small shelves, and lose themselves
‘Mid tales and mysteries. Once again I see
These fantasies, this science fiction, splendid works
Of planets near and far, fantastic fables,
Beasts in their secret lairs; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from the wizard’s pipe!
Their affairs unmeddled, in chapters new,
Or of some Reader’s room, where in plush comfort
The Reader sits alone.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/20/lines-composed-a-few-yards-from-schlachtensee-with-apologies-to-w-w/

Sep 17 2019

Wonderland: An Anthology edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane

First of all, Titan Books just has the best speculative fiction short story anthologies. Between this and the recent Wastelands 3: The New Apocalypse alone, I feel entirely spoiled with exposure to some of the best minds working in fantastic fiction today. Wonderland collects 20 brand new short works (18 stories, plus two poems from Jane Yolen) inspired by Lewis Carroll’s classics, that run the gamut from luminous to terrifying, with every shade of wonder in between. Whether looking at Wonderland from a historical perspective or diving into its text as presented by Mr Carroll himself or re-setting the proceedings in different times and places, these 20 inventive gems carve out new space in our collective psyches for Wonderland to inhabit.

Personal disclosure time: my first starring role as an actress was in my primary school’s adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. I was cast as the White Rabbit but wound up having that supporting role enlarged — given more lines, given more time on-stage, given more motivations and things to do — to reflect my talent, which happened a lot during my too-brief stage career. It was a bit like how Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter became so much more important in the Tim Burton film than in any other adaptation, tho I likely got better reviews for my performance than he did (seriously, a national paper said I stole every scene I was in. I’m still not sure what they were doing at my school play, but I imagine it was a slow week in the human interest pages.) Anyway, this formative experience goes a long way towards explaining why I’m so fond of this setting and of any adaptations thereof.

That said, it’s perhaps surprising that my favorites of the collection were probably the least traditional, going all out with a sci-fi bent, as M. R. Carey’s There Were No Birds To Fly and Cavan Scott’s Dream Girl did. The period pieces definitely gave them a run for their money, tho. I loved Genevieve Cogman’s The White Queen’s Pawn, as well as Juliet Marillier’s Good Dog, Alice!, both set in a post-Victorian Britain somewhat askew from the one we inhabited. I also adored the more far-flung adaptations, particularly Angela Slatter’s Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em and L. L. McKinney’s What Makes A Monster, the latter so much so that I’ve requested her full-length novel, A Blade So Black (set in the same universe as the short story,) from my local library. The hallmark of a good short story collection, after all, isn’t just to satisfy, but also to whet the readers’ appetite for more of the writers’ works.

Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane have done an amazing job curating this anthology. We at the Frumious have been given the chance to interview them about it, so look out for that in the coming weeks! In the meantime, feel free to hop over to any of the other sites featured on the Wonderland book tour, beautifully illustrated in the graphic at right.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/17/wonderland-an-anthology-edited-by-marie-oregan-and-paul-kane/

Sep 14 2019

Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson

On the second page of his biography of Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson offers a thumbnail sketch of his subject: “He was, during his eighty-four-year-long life, America’s best scientist, inventor, dimplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and clear-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.” The rest of the book, just shy of 500 pages, fills in the details of this set of characterizations. Some of Isaacson’s assertions are debatable — that homespun humor or philosophical pragmatism are unique to America, for example — but his characterization of Franklin is accurate, and carries through the narrative of his life.

Benjamin Franklin

But wait, there’s more! as Franklin himself might say. “But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In this process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.” (p. 2) Throughout the book, Isaacson gives examples of how shrewdly Franklin cultivated other people’s perceptions of himself and his work and ideas. “As a young printer in Philadelphia, he carted rolls of paper through the streets to give the appearance of being industrious. As an old diplomat in France, he wore a fur cap to portray the role of backwoods sage. In between, he created an image of himself as a simple yet aspiring tradesman, assiduously honing the virtues—diligence, frugality, honesty—of a good shopkeeper and beneficent member of his community.” (pp. 2–3)

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/14/benjamin-franklin-by-walter-isaacson/

Sep 12 2019

How To by Randall Munroe

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, asks how to do various things — jump really high, throw things, build a lava moat, and a couple dozen more — and considers approaches that are both sound and absurd. Hilarity ensues. The book begins with an earnest disclaimer, a plea not to take the title as a guide. “Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.”

How To

If that did not drive the point home, the first sentence of the introduction reads, “This is a book of bad ideas.” He then undercuts himself by saying that although “smearing mold on an infected wound sounds like a terrible idea,” that is basically what penicillin is. The underlying matter of the book, then, is not just how to tell good ideas from bad, but how exploring even cockamamie ideas can lead to interesting insights and, occasionally, solutions to apparently intractable problems. You might not think that lowering a heavy rover on a tether from a hovering spacecraft is the best way to get the rover to the surface of Mars. In fact, at first glance it would appear either impossible or overly complicated, but that is in fact how Curiosity touched down, for reasons that Munroe explains.

He adds, “This book explores unusual approaches to common tasks, and looks at what would happen to you if you tried them. Figuring out why they would or wouldn’t work can be fun and informative and sometimes leads you to surprising places. Maybe an idea is bad, but figuring out exactly why it’s a bad idea can teach you a lot—and might help you think of a better approach.”

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/12/how-to-by-randall-munroe/

Sep 10 2019

Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin

Winter is coming. The orbit of the planet Werel gives it winters that last five thousand nights, give or take. Sound familiar? Well, Planet of Exile was published in 1966, four years before George R.R. Martin sold his first professional story.

Planet of Exile

As in Le Guin’s other Hainish stories, humans have been on Werel a very long time and have adapted to local conditions. The indigenous people, the Tevarans, have a low level of technology but have devised various strategies for coping with the winter. Nomadic, or semi-nomadic during the temperate seasons, they build up stores for the coming winter and construct mostly-underground dwellings where they can stay warmer and wait out the long cold season. Another group of indigenous people, the Gaal, relocate from the latitudes depicted in Planet of Exile to warmer climes where, presumably, they can survive without the elaborate preparations undertaken by the Tevarans. The Gaal are known as raiders. They pass through the Tevaran territory, taking what they can, but mostly they are in a hurry to move south, so it is not too difficult to fend them off.

A third group of people on Werel are the farborn, as the Tevarans call them, descendants of colonists who arrived on slower-than-light interstellar ships many generations ago. Operating under something like the Prime Directive, the settlers made minimal use of technology so as not to disturb the local societies any more than necessary. The colonists expected to assist the indigenous people as they acquired increasing levels of technology. The colonists also expected to be in periodic contact with the starfaring civilization that sent them forth. Unfortunately, neither of these happened, and they have gradually lost the technology that they came with; knowledge of the stars has largely retreated into legend by the time Planet of Exile begins. Nor can they interbreed with the local populace, and their numbers are dwindling slowly but steadily.

Planet of Exile tells of the season when all of those verities failed to hold. The Gaal have changed their tactics. Instead of raiding a bit as they pass through, they are moving more slowly but systematically razing or taking everything in their path. Traditional Tevaran methods will never hold them off. Rolery of Wold’s Kin, a young Tevaran woman out of place in her society, is rescued from certain death by Jakob Agat Alterra, a young farborn man, and a leader among them. Their first contact breaks taboos on both sides; the bond they forge will break more but prove crucial if their two peoples are to survive the conflict that is coming.

The book is only 100 pages, it might even count as a novella in today’s market, and yet it puts forward a coherent world, two and a half richly imagined human societies, and complex relationships among the people it introduces. Like many science fiction stories of its time, Planet of Exile posits telepathy as something that exists and could be developed in various forms, given the proper combination of talent and practice.

Le Guin’s background with anthropology is clearly visible: the Gaal and the impending winter provide the danger, but the real conflicts in the story arise from the clash of the worldviews of the farborn and the Tevarans. Their worldviews have allowed them to survive, but not they may very precisely stand in the way of survival. Like people everywhere, both groups are loathe to change fundamental ways of dealing with the world, even in the face of shattering evidence and opportunity to do things differently. Because Planet of Exile is not a tragedy or a dystopia, they do find partial means of reaching beyond what they have known, but not without substantial cost. In just her second novel, Le Guin is already reaching deeply into societies and people, without losing and of the narrative verve that lets her finish her tale in the time that a twenty-first century author might still just be warming up.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/10/planet-of-exile-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Sep 08 2019

The Incorruptibles by John Hornor Jacobs

Romans and cowboys! A demon-powered steamboat! Saloon fights! Distressing damsels! Samuel Clemens! Now this is how you embrace the pulpy side of things and stay the heck out of the uncanny valley. Not least because very unfriendly immortals are likely to sweep down from the uncanny heights and leave you scalped or kilt ded.

The Incorruptibles

Fisk and Shoestring are tough hombres of the Hardscrabble Territories, and as The Incorruptibles opens they’ve been hired by the patrician Cornelius to ride scout and keep an eye on things as the patrician’s steamboat Cornelian makes its way up the Big Rill with an intended destination of Passasuego. Fisk and Shoestring don’t really know why the boat is headed up the river, and frankly they’re not the kind of men who care. If the money is good, they’ll do the job. They’d prefer it if the Rumans would listen to their hard-won wisdom about life on the plains but if they don’t and get themselves killed, it’s pretty much all the same. Should have stayed in Rume with Emperor Tamburlaine.

The steamboat not only has a demon in its firebox, it has its own Ruman intrigues in the patron’s family. The patrician himself is, as one character observes, “a devil for the hunt.” No local guides are going to tell him what’s imprudent. The first son has several of Cornelius’ vices, most notably including heedlessness, plus a few more of his own and few noticeable virtues. Other than being the first son, of course. The second son tries to be a moderating influence, and he even shows signs of believing that Fisk and Shoestring might know a thing or two about the wild lands, what with having ridden their length and breadth, and having survived there for quite a few years. Of course, who listens to second sons? One sister is a decadent viper, the other sister has a Past and maybe some witchery too. Add an impulsive ranking Ruman whose connections have put him on the expedition well before experience should have, a couple of passengers about whom more should have been said to Fisk and Shoestring, plus a Plains winter in the not too distant future, and the scout job quickly turns into far more than they bargained for. Which is the fun that the book promised, isn’t it?

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/08/the-incorruptibles-by-john-hornor-jacobs/

Aug 30 2019

Little White Lies (Debutantes Book 1) by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Oh, gosh darn it, if I’d known that the next book in this series was coming out in November, I’d have held off on reading this for a while! I mean, I’m glad I did read it — Jennifer Lynn Barnes consistently writes amazing stuff — but these next few months are going to feel interminable!

Anyway, Little White Lies follows a scrappy young woman named Sawyer Taft who’s lived a fairly hardscrabble life with her flighty single mom. When her grandmother Lillian shows up and offers Sawyer half a million dollars for college and expenses in exchange for Sawyer undertaking a debutante season and coming out to southern society, Sawyer agrees, primarily because moving in with her grandmother will make it much easier for her to finally figure out who her biological father is. Sawyer’s many unusual interests make her a talented sleuth, and her natural resilience and bluntness allow her to adapt to what’s essentially a foreign culture without losing her own identity, but even she is blindsided by her rapid and unwitting involvement in kidnapping and theft, among other felonies and lesser misdemeanors.

A large part of the charm of this novel lies in Sawyer’s navigation of and cultural clash with the moneyed, genteel world her mother ran away from, and the humor that comes from such dissonance. That’s to be expected: perhaps less obligatory is the display of the strong bonds of friendship that grow between the four young women at the heart of this book. The way they connect and fray apart and come together once again, in pursuit of the truth and justice — even if only within the confines of their insular society — makes for some truly entertaining and ultimately heart-warming storytelling. I do wish there’d been a little more diversity in this book, and am definitely hoping for it in the next. Even so, I can’t wait to read more, tho ugh November feels so far away!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/30/little-white-lies-debutantes-book-1-by-jennifer-lynn-barnes/

Aug 28 2019

Son of Heaven by David Wingrove

I remember seeing David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo books back in the 1980s and 1990s. They looked like a big, pulpish series set in a future dominated by China. A little while back, I picked up Son of Heaven, which says it’s Chung Kuo #1, thinking I would look in on this series and maybe set to reading the whole thing. I had a quick look at the publishing history of the series, in part to check buying options, and I found out that history is more complicated than I would have expected.

Son of Heaven

In its first incarnation, Chung Kuo was published as eight volumes (although Wikipedia maintains that Wingrove planned a ninth to make the whole a trilogy of trilogies, and his publisher pressured him to wrap it up in the eighth) between 1988 and 1999. A “re-casting” of the epic began in 2011, with Wingrove planning an expansion to 20 volumes. The Middle Kingdom, which had originally been the first book, became the third, with Son of Heaven appearing as the first. This is the edition that I bought and read. This publication set also ended after eight volumes. The final book in the 2011–15 set was The White Mountain, which was the title of the third in the original series. Since 2017, Wingrove has been self-publishing the series and reached the eleventh volume, Upon a Wheel of Fire, in July 2019. The twelfth, Beneath the Tree of Heaven, shares a title with the fifth book in the original published set.

I bring all of this up to note that Wingrove is working on a large scale. About a third of Son of Heaven is set in the 2040s, with some characters recalling events from the present (which of course was a bit in the future when Wingrove was writing this novel), while the latest book in the series is set in the early 2200s. His plans encompass more than doubling the original eight-volume set, and it seems very likely that the economics of self-publishing, in contrast to those (and various other vagaries, no doubt) of trade publishing, will allow him to complete his epic. I bring it up also to note that Son of Heaven, along with the next book in the set, Daylight on Iron Mountain, are both prequels to where Wingrove originally started the main action of Chung Kuo.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/28/son-of-heaven-by-david-wingrove/