Sep 28 2024
One of the things that science fiction writers have learned how to do in the 206 years since Frankenstein was first published is how to bring their readers along with the new elements of the world that they put into their stories. Most of the time, they take care to make the fantastic elements plausible …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/28/frankenstein-by-mary-shelley-2/
Sep 26 2024
One of the many astonishing things that Richard Rhodes does in The Making of the Atomic Bomb is to match the tone and pace of each of the major sections to their theme. It’s common enough in good novels, but uncommon in non-fiction, and vanishingly rare in a non-fiction work of this size and scope. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/26/the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb-by-richard-rhodes-pt-3/
Sep 21 2024
Everybody who’s anybody among Berlin’s dead craves an invitation to Frau Altenshul’s salon. She has devoted her afterlife — much as she had devoted her life — to beauty, whether that was beautiful music, beautiful art, or the simple beauty of conversation among like-minded people. Max Liebermann was a painter who had lived a long life, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/21/das-konzert-by-hartmut-lange/
Sep 14 2024
As the fortieth anniversary of its publication approaches, I suppose it’s fair to call Shards of Honor an old-fashioned space opera, although the series it kicked off is open-ended and its most recent work appeared just six years ago. Somehow I missed the Vorkosigan saga when it was becoming a big thing in science fiction …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/14/shards-of-honor-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/11/hugo-awards-2024-best-novelette/
Aug 04 2024
Like many children who grow up in peculiar families, Ru does not realize just how peculiar his home life is. As he gets bigger, he starts asking questions. Who am I? Who are we? Where do we come from? The second two are particularly important in in Bowbazar, the Calcutta (the spelling that Das uses …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/04/the-last-dragoners-of-bowbazar-by-indra-das/
Aug 03 2024
Without the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s set of 50 more great novels of the 20th century, it might have been a very long time before I heard of Andrzej Stasiuk, let alone read any of his books. Stasiuk was born in Warsaw in 1960, but he makes his home in a small town in Poland’s furthest southern …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/03/die-welt-hinter-dukla-by-andrzej-stasiuk/
Aug 02 2024
I should have read the description of The Language of the Night more closely because when it arrived I was a little irritated to discover that it’s a collection of essays mostly from the early and mid-1970s, with some footnoted and additional remarks that Le Guin added to a new edition of the book in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/08/02/the-language-of-the-night-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
Jul 28 2024
In the first two novellas of Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills series — The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and When the Tiger Came Down from the Mountain — violent conflict is kept at a distance, and much of the tension in the stories arises from the question of whether it can continue to be kept from …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/28/mammoths-at-the-gates-by-nghi-vo-2/
Jul 27 2024
This is the fifth year that I have been a reader and a voter for the Hugo Award, a practice I began when I fulfilled a long-time dream and attended a World Science Fiction Convention. Finances and geography, among other things, have conspired to keep me away in the years since, but maybe I will …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/27/hugo-awards-2024-general-and-some-novellas/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire