Jul 24 2022
Henryk Sienkiewicz, an early Nobel laureate, wrote historical novels set mostly in the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that, like Shakespeare’s history plays, have a resonance well beyond their initial audiences and historical settings. Sienkiewicz lived and wrote at a time when Poland’s imperial neighbors had erased it from the map of Europe, and yet …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/24/on-the-field-of-glory-by-henryk-sienkiewicz/
Jul 23 2022
The long-running No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series relies on a careful balance between new stories — usually cases that the agency is called on to solve — and deeper development of its continuing characters. Too much of the former, and it runs the danger of reading like an episode of old-style television: dramatic events that leave …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/23/how-to-raise-an-elephant-by-alexander-mccall-smith/
Jul 22 2022
Seeing Things returns to a greater length, though many of its poems — particularly the 48 in Part II, “Squarings” — are short; the squarings are all twelve lines each. “Glanmore Revisited” offers seven sonnets in its short sequence. “The Schoolbag” is also sonnet length, while “1.1.1987” and “An August Night” are three lines each. Compact …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/22/seeing-things-by-seamus-heaney/
Jul 16 2022
After tangling things forwards and backwards in A Trail Through Time, Jodi Taylor offers more straightforward adventures for the historians of St Mary’s in No Time Like the Past. Which is to say, there are calamities, dangers expected and otherwise, narrow escapes, and scuffles with university bureaucracy. I would say that Dr Madeleine Maxwell, first-person …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/16/no-time-like-the-past-by-jodi-taylor/
Jul 15 2022
How does Count Zero, William Gibson‘s second novel, hold up more than 35 years after its publication? That’s what I was thinking about, re-reading the book for the first time in at least a decade. At the end of Neuromancer, Gibson’s first, genre-defining novel, something happened to the AIs and the entirety of cyberspace, something …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/15/count-zero-by-william-gibson/
Jul 10 2022
“Sleeping Beauty is pretty much the worst fairy tale, an way you slice it” says Zinnia Gray, first-person narrator of A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow. She adds, “Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.” (p. 2) And there’s the first catch, because Zinnia Gray is dying, victim of a rare genetic defect, most of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/10/a-spindle-splintered-by-alix-e-harrow/
Jul 03 2022
Becky Chambers dedicates A Psalm for the Wild-Built to “anybody who could use a break,” and the novella is, on the whole, very restful. It’s not without conflict, but it is a break from the grim, from the horrible, and it shows people trying to be their best selves. That’s not easy, and one person’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/03/a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-by-becky-chambers/
Jul 02 2022
Further into the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Fritz Leiber tends toward longer stories. Swords Against Wizardry is mainly two tales, “Stardock” and “The Lords of Quarmall.” The other two in the volume, “In the Witch’s Tent” and “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar” are little more than stage directions setting up the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/02/swords-against-wizardry-by-fritz-leiber/
Jun 21 2022
Across the Green Grass Fields is the first of Seanan McGuire‘s Wayward Children series that I have read that’s entirely waywardness, and I liked it that way. There’s no mention of Eleanor West’s Home, nor do any of the characters from the previous five novellas in the series appear. I didn’t miss them at all, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/21/across-the-green-grass-fields-by-seanan-mcguire/
Jun 12 2022
Elder Race offers an extended meditation on Clarke’s Third Law, some thoughts on cultural contamination that are not new but are important to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s characters, all wrapped up in a fast-paced adventure of swords and sufficiently advanced technology. The novella is set on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humans during the first interstellar …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/12/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire