Oct 26 2021

Stolen Earth by J. T. Nicholas

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. When he was placed in their Navy upon attainment of adulthood, he was both happy not to be sent to the mines and reluctant to take a place that would likely see him parted from his parents for years at a time. His stint in the Navy proved disillusioning, with the final straw being the response they sent to a small, if growing, political insurrection on the space station Themis. Disgusted, Gray walked away from the Navy and built up his own crew aboard the Arcus, engaging in a little light piracy and other minimally violent if illicit activities in order to keep body and soul together on the fringes of SolComm space.

When the Arcus gets a lead on a lucrative job that will require them to brave the Interdiction Zone (IZ) around Earth in order to scavenge several valuable artifacts for SolComm collectors, more than one of the crew is skeptical. It’s common knowledge that Earth has been taken over by unfettered sentient AI, necessitating humanity’s flight to the stars. SolComm built the IZ in order to protect what’s left of humanity from the landbound AI, effectively rendering any return impossible. But Gray’s contact assures him that they can get him through the IZ, and will make it worth the Arcus’ while.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/26/stolen-earth-by-j-t-nicholas/

Oct 25 2021

The Last Line by Robert Dugoni

Wow, what a way to whet a reader’s appetite for more!

Police Detective Del Castigliano has left Madison, Wisconsin for Seattle, ostensibly to pursue opportunities in Homicide, but really to get away from a failed engagement and memories of his ex. He’s partnered with hotshot veteran detective Moss Gunderson, who’s generously given him the lead on his first case in Seattle. A man living on a houseboat had spotted two objects floating in the marina the night before. Thinking they were logs that could damage several of the anchored boats, he’d gone out to investigate, and discovered that the logs were actually two waterlogged corpses. Moss has plenty of other cases to work on, so hands this one off to Del, intimating that it’s likely a case of a border crossing gone wrong.

Del plunges into the work but finds himself quickly stumped for leads. As he works every possible angle in his new position at his new precinct, he slowly uncovers a criminal conspiracy that could have dire consequences if exposed, for both himself and the few friends he’s made in Seattle so far. Del doesn’t know who to trust as he must struggle to balance the demands of truth with survival in this riveting novelette.

For such a short read, this story packs a punch, quickly filling readers in on Del’s background and surroundings, and investing us deeply in his future. I really want to know what happens next! Even tho I’d never read any Robert Dugoni before this, I’m very much interested in reading more now.

We’ve been lucky enough to participate in the blog tour for The Last Line, so find below an excerpt from the story, as well as a giveaway, our first! Click on the link or the widget at the bottom of the page to enter to win a copy of The Last Line, as well as a $20 Amazon gift card.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/25/the-last-line-by-robert-dugoni/

Oct 22 2021

Monstress Vol. 5: Warchild by Marjorie M. Liu & Sana Takeda

To be perfectly honest, when I saw this series was nominated for the Best Graphic Story Hugo again, I sighed, girded my loins and decided to plunge in so as to get this over with quickly. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that all the things I disliked about the first four volumes were present in much less egregious forms here, while the things I did like were much stronger and easier to enjoy.

And maybe my aversion was a result of me bingeing the first four books all at once: readers, the grimdark of this series is A LOT. Perhaps each book is more manageable when removed from the rest. I did have to take a quick refresher course from my previous reviews to remind me of who and what was going on, and while I’m still not 100% sure who everyone is and why they were doing what they did, I don’t feel like I missed too much, or at least not too much more than I had while reading the preceding books.

So in this volume, the Federation of Man is finally launching its attack on the Arcanics, bearing down on the city of Ravenna. As Lord Corvid’s sister lives there and refuses to be evacuated, he (characteristically) decides he’s going to head over and force her to leave. Maika, our heroine, is still searching for pieces of the mask, so decides to tag along since it’s on her way. Kippa, having heard news of fox survivors in the area, wants to go as well in order to fulfill her vow, much to Maika’s dismay.

Our trio arrives to find a city in chaos, and Maika soon decides, after watching the shambles of the defense coordination, to take charge. But war is an awful, ruinous thing, and Maika will have to be even worse than that if she wants to give Ravenna a fighting chance at survival.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/22/monstress-vol-5-warchild-by-marjorie-m-liu-sana-takeda/

Oct 21 2021

Hugo Awards 2021: Best Short Story Nominees

There was a wealth of authors I very much enjoy reading in this slate, and new-to-me authors I was pleased to make acquaintance of! On reflection, I don’t feel that this year’s list was as good as last year’s, tho was still solidly entertaining.

As with last year, I’ll go over each (mostly) alphabetically. A Guide For Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad is a delightful story of sentient AIs, one of whom is forced to be the mentor to the other. It’s got a lovely light novel manga feel to it while still having important things to say about sentience and labor rights.

Rae Carson’s Badass Moms In The Zombie Apocalypse starts off interestingly enough but I swiftly lost interest, even as a mom of three young children who has also had two miscarriages, when it became clear that the point of the story was how some women will risk everything to have a baby. I found that weirdly off-putting but, you know, different strokes etc.

As the owner of a sharing library that I’m constantly curating (aside: I put RPGs and dice in there over the summer and was SO HAPPY when someone took them!), I really enjoyed Naomi Kritzer’s Little Free Library. I wish the ending had been a little stronger, but I’m always a fan of Ms Kritzer’s work.

Metal Like Blood In The Dark by T. Kingfisher is the first of two fairy tale adaptations on this list. This tale, featuring sentient AI that aren’t quite as delightful as Ms Prasad’s but are perhaps more intriguing, edged out Yoon Ha Lee’s The Mermaid Astronaut in my ratings. TMA was lovely and large-hearted and lyrical but just not quite as interesting as the AI stories.

And finally we have John Wiswell’s Open House On Haunted Hill which is the most tender story of hunger and loneliness you’ll ever read. I’m having a hard time deciding between this and MLBitD for the winner, but think I’ll go with Ms Kingfisher’s entry, as the meditation on deceit in its few pages was surprisingly deep. Well, perhaps not so surprising if you’re already familiar with the rest of her excellent work.

Enjoy the links to each story while they’re still up! And let us know in the comments what you think!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/21/hugo-awards-2021-best-short-story-nominees/

Oct 20 2021

Salt Magic by Hope Larson & Rebecca Mock

This stunningly original graphic novel tells a tale of life in Oklahoma after the Great War, when a young soldier returning from Europe triggers a curse, leaving his younger sister to find a way to save their family farm.

Vonceil Taggart is the youngest of five children growing up on a farming homestead ten miles north of the nearest town. The Taggarts’ farm has a freshwater spring that sustains them even when the rains fail, as they’re threatening to do around the time Vonceil’s beloved oldest brother Elber returns from fighting in Europe. To Vonceil’s disappointment, Elber barely has time for her now, having eyes only for Amelia, the sweetheart he left behind. Vonceil finds Amelia crushingly dull, and had secretly prayed that Elber would meet and marry a sophisticated European beauty while deployed and whisk Vonceil off with them afterwards to tour the world. Instead, Elber seems fairly intent on being boring and grown-up and marrying Amelia and settling down in Oklahoma for good.

When a beautiful Frenchwoman sweeps into town shortly after Elber’s wedding, Vonceil feels instantly drawn to her. Greda is exotic and lovely, but has come bearing a grudge. Apparently, she and Elber had embarked on an affair while in Paris, and now she wants him to come away with her again. Elber refuses, at which point Greda curses the farm’s spring, telling Elber and Vonceil that it will only run salt water till he forsakes his family and comes lives with her in Sere.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/20/salt-magic-by-hope-larson-rebecca-mock/

Oct 19 2021

Meranda And The Legend Of The Lake by Meagan Mahoney

Meranda is an 11 year-old girl whose parents moved away from their Nova Scotia home and close-knit family to live in Calgary when she was only 3. While she has regular video visits with her dearly loved relatives back in Cape Breton, her helicopter parents have always been cagey about returning, until the death of her mother’s beloved Uncle Mark sends them all home for his funeral.

Meranda has long been fascinated with her hometown, whose main claim to fame is its relationship with the mermaids who allegedly live in the surrounding waters. But her mother Beth is extremely nervous about her getting too close to the lake, and perhaps not just because Meranda uses crutches to get around, a result of the cerebral palsy that makes her legs difficult to rely on. Meranda’s also painfully near-sighted, using thick glasses to help her see; between that and the fact that her coloring is completely different from her parents, she can’t help but suspect that she has closer ties to a mermaid heritage than her parents are willing to let on.

Unfortunately, this is only one of the many things her parents don’t care to discuss with her, and so Meranda spends the days leading up to Granduncle Mark’s funeral feeling increasingly confused by the weird reactions, if not downright hostility, of some of the townsfolk to their return. Fortunately, she makes a friend, Claire, who’s willing to help her get to the bottom of things, with perhaps the foremost issue being the mystery of what actually happened to Granduncle Mark. Did he really fall overboard from his ship or was he pulled into the waters and drowned by the lake’s increasingly combative merfolk, as some are claiming? It’ll be up to Meranda to figure out what’s going on, in the process helping her family’s small town find peace with its own mythic legacy.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/19/meranda-and-the-legend-of-the-lake-by-meagan-mahoney/

Oct 18 2021

Hugo Awards 2021: Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form Nominees

Hello, everyone, it’s Hugo season once more! Doug and I are both voting members, and I’m waffling on whether or not to go in person to this year’s awards, seeing as how they’re basically in my city this time and who knows when that will happen again! Decisions, decisions.

Speaking of decisions, we’ll be talking about our voting choices here, starting with my opinions on (what I was genuinely surprised to complete first of all the categories) the nominees for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Prior to the nominations, I’d only actually watched one of these movies, the effervescent Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), written by Christina Hodson, directed by Cathy Yan (Warner Bros.) I got to see it in theaters right before the pandemic shut down the USA and thought it, quite frankly, the best DC movie made to date*. It’s definitely my favorite of the movies listed here, and my first-place choice for this category.

The next movie I checked out was Soul, with screenplay by Pete Docter, Mike Jones and Kemp Powers; directed by Pete Docter; co-directed by Kemp Powers; produced by Dana Murray (Pixar Animation Studios/ Walt Disney Pictures). I’ve gotten out of the habit of watching every Disney animated movie that shows up in theaters, and my enjoyment of Soul reminded me of how remiss I’ve been. Soul is an uplifting and surprisingly deep tale of finding your purpose in life (and, arguably, pre-life.) I can understand the criticism of having the main Black character spend so much of the movie not being inside his own body but am frankly glad Disney chose to feature a person of color at all.

A lack of diversity certainly isn’t a failure of Tenet, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner Bros./Syncopy) This sci-fi film features John David Washington doing some really cool, really cerebral backward-motion action scenes. Unfortunately, the movie is entirely too much in love with itself and how clever it thinks it’s being. It was nice to watch Robert Pattinson and Aaron Taylor-Johnson talk in their regular accents tho (and, coincidentally, look extra tasty) in this ultimately silly tale that had much more interesting special effects than story.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/18/hugo-awards-2021-best-dramatic-presentation-long-form-nominees/

Oct 17 2021

Das Erwachen by Josef Ruederer

I admired the conception of Das Erwachen (The Awakening) more than I enjoyed its execution. As Josef Ruederer’s widow Elisabeth wrote in an brief introductory note, “[He] wanted to portray life — history and people — in his home city through the nineteenth century up to the present [1916] in a four-volume novel.” Unfortunately, he died in 1915, leaving the overall work unfinished. The Awakening, which was to be the first volume, was the only one completed at the time of his death.

Das Erwachen by Josef Ruederer

The contours of the larger work are visible in the first few chapters of Das Erwachen. The book begins at an unspecified but relatively modern time, and each chapter steps back a generation or two until Ruederer reaches the known beginnings of the Gankoffen family, a man who led the construction of Munich’s largest church, the Frauenkirche. He is mainly seen through the efforts of a later Gankoffen to trace the family’s continuity from its first famous son, through a period of obscurity in northern Italy, and back into social prominence in nineteenth century Munich. Each of these chapters offers an interesting period picture, but except for the family names they are mostly untethered to any ongoing narrative. I can imagine that Ruederer intended for these chapters to connect to elements in subsequent volumes, or for there to be equivalent chapters of an outro to match his intro, but as Das Erwachen stands, they give it an unbalanced structure.

Ruederer narrates the first chapter from the perspective of a very young boy, Peppi, giving readers an unusual view of life in nineteenth-century bourgeois Bavaria. Given that Peppi is a customary diminutive of Josef, and that Peppi’s family name Luegecker echoes Ruederer (particularly in using “ue” rather than “ü”), this chapter is very likely based on the author’s earliest memories. Some of them are slightly horrifying reminders of the accidents that could befall a child even in wealthy nineteenth-century households: falls, spills of boiling liquids, and so forth. Peppi presumably survives to adulthood, even though the chapter ends with his early school years and he is not seen again in the text.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/17/das-erwachen-by-josef-ruederer/

Oct 14 2021

North by Brad Kessler

I read a lot of books where I praise the empathy displayed, but after reading Brad Kessler’s brilliant North, I realized that there’s another, rarer quality I appreciate even more in writing: the quality of compassion. It’s one thing to understand where another person’s pain is coming from, to find common ground no matter how alien another’s motivations, but it’s altogether something different, something greater, to reach out a helping hand, whether it’s in the form of providing material comfort or even, in a scene here that made me cry, the warmth of a friendly face, as Angela did by showing up at the detention center just to chat with Sahro, just to be a human being connecting with another through kindness and a listening heart.

Sahro is one of our main protagonists, a young Somali Muslim sick of living in fear in her home nation. She and countless others have heard that if you travel to America and request asylum, they will give you a hearing, and that America is a land of good, kind people, where every home has three taps, one for water, one for milk and one for orange juice. As an orphan growing up in a nomadic culture, she’s pretty certain she can brave the perilous journey. But arriving at her destination and being jailed merely for the temerity to ask for help is the rudest shock on a trip riven with more terror than any one person should ever have to undergo.

Up north in Vermont, cloistered monk Father Christopher of the Blue Mountain Monastery is worrying more about his apple orchard during an unseasonal blizzard than the state of the souls of the monks under his care. In fairness, the souls are all in pretty good shape, with the monks all bending their energies to the contemplative life, himself included. He finds that he has a lot more to contemplate than usual, however, when the monastery’s groundskeeper Teddy rescues two women from a car crash in the snow.

Teddy is an Army vet who lost his leg in Afghanistan and has come back to his hometown, taking up his father’s old job as a layman working for the monastery. While his feelings about Vermont are complicated, he knows two things very clearly: first, you always help people stranded in the cold, and second, obedience to the chain of command, while not paramount, is often useful in providing moral clarity. Nowadays, his CO is Father Christopher, so whom better to bring his new charges to?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/14/north-by-brad-kessler/

Oct 13 2021

Men To Avoid In Art And Life by Nicole Tersigni

One of the most fun things about owning a Sharing Library (which is the un-trademarked name of the more ubiquitous Little Free Libraries) is finding treasures like these generously popped in by an anonymous donor. I’m so glad I decided to peek in to mine when I did, so I could snag this before anyone else carried it away!

Men To Avoid In Art And Life by Nicole Tersigni is a gift book, similar in design to art/coffee table books but significantly smaller in size, consisting primarily of illustrations with pithy captions. The largest chunk of text comes from the foreword by comedian Jen Kirkman, which is of a tone with the rest of the book.

Based on Ms Tersigni’s popular Twitter thread, this tome collects details of classic art (with a very helpful index in the back! I can’t believe I didn’t know Charles van Beveren before this,) often depicting a woman whose expression can be easily interpreted as her being bored or bothered by the man next to her. Each illustration is captured with the kind of misogynistic statements that are all too easy to find appended as supposedly clever comments to innocuous tweets on Twitter. The juxtaposition is often witty, almost always hilarious, and 100% accurate of the experience of most women in the 21st century.

And that’s really why these tweets became popular enough to be collected into a pretty volume you can hold in your hand and flip through at your leisure: the sense of kinship with women throughout history who had to endure the same kind of nonsense we did, with even more limited recourse to fight back. It’s both comforting and vindicating to know that listening to men being shitty isn’t new, that our foremothers didn’t necessarily put up with it lightly, and that we can and almost indeed owe it to them to proclaim misogyny unacceptable, whether boldly through direct political action or more subversively through humor like this.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/13/men-to-avoid-in-art-and-life-by-nicole-tersigni/