Feb 12 2023
The Red Scholar’s Wake is, by turns, a romance, a meditation on loss, a political intrigue, a story of starfaring pirates, an examination of parenthood, and a tale of interplanetary adventure. That sounds like a lot, maybe too much for fewer than 300 pages, so let me look at it from a slightly different angle. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/12/the-red-scholars-wake-by-aliette-de-bodard/
Feb 04 2023
Just write the fun parts. Take a science fiction premise — that evolution ran differently on an alternate earth giving rise to kaiju (Godzilla and company, I didn’t know the term before I had heard of this book) — and just write the fun parts. That’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. The parallel earths, two among presumably …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/04/the-kaiju-preservation-society-by-john-scalzi/
Jan 29 2023
Things, moments, people, poems. Heaney finds inspiration for the poems in District and Circle in things that he encounters or imagines, moments he hopes to preserve or evoke in others, people he remembers, and poems he either recalls or translates. Places, which loomed larger in other collections, are less present here, though of course they …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/29/district-and-circle-by-seamus-heaney/
Jan 28 2023
Dave Hutchinson, like William Gibson, is an artiste of the slightly funny deal. They run all through Cold Water, and trying to figure out just who is running a caper on whom is one of the pleasures of the novel. Carey Tews, the novel’s main protagonist, is a Texan who’s been in Europe for decades …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/28/cold-water-by-dave-hutchinson/
Jan 15 2023
Even by the standards of European monarchs, many of the Romanovs were terrible people. Peter the Great had his oldest son killed by torture. Earlier, Peter’s half-sister Sophia had tried to prevent him from assuming the throne, and if he had lost that contest he might well have paid with his life. Ivan VI succeeded …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/15/the-romanovs-by-simon-sebag-montefiore/
Jan 13 2023
Events at the end of Black City left Erast Fandorin, the Sherlock Holmes of Tsarist Russia, in a coma. The beginning of Not Saying Goodbye reveals that he has been in that state for a bit more than three years. Masa, his faithful companion for more than a quarter of a century, has watched over …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/13/not-saying-goodbye-by-boris-akunin/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/01/taking-stock-of-2022/
Dec 30 2022
Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year. Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk. Nobel winner Tokarczuk uses very short chapters, each titled “The Time of …”, to depict life in an archetpyal Polish village from just before the outbreak of the First World War through the last years …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/30/wrapping-up-3/
Dec 29 2022
So many weeks and months gone by, and still none of the right words about Aspects. John M. Ford sold his first story to one of the “big three” science fiction magazines before turning 20. Ford wrote a Star Trek novel from the point of view of the Klingons years before The Next Generation brought …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/29/aspects-by-john-m-ford/
Dec 25 2022
Luke 2:1-14, Anglo-Saxon: Soþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto, þæt eall ymbehwyrft wære tomearcod. Þeos tomearcodnes wæs æryst geworden fram þam deman Syrige Cirino. And ealle hig eodon, and syndrige ferdon on hyra ceastre. Ða ferde Iosep fram Galilea of þære ceastre Nazareth on Iudeisce ceastre Dauides, seo is genemned …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/25/merry-christmas-2/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire