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 …
Tag: Science Fiction
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/17/wonderland-an-anthology-edited-by-marie-oregan-and-paul-kane/
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. As in Le Guin’s other Hainish stories, humans have been on Werel a very …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/10/planet-of-exile-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/28/son-of-heaven-by-david-wingrove/
Aug 21 2019
Yikes
Sometimes speculative fiction is just a little too on the nose: The Republicans, coming to power …, wanted to do away with free trade. In a frenzy of nationalist rhetoric, they sought to replace globalization with protectionist tariffs. They wanted to pull up the economic drawbridge, just as their predecessors had after the Wall Street …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/21/yikes/
Aug 20 2019
The Warehouse by Rob Hart
Oh gosh, this was one of those deeply affecting cautionary tales that you finish and need to put down and just sort of sit and recover from for a while. Set in a near-future where the trajectory of global (but especially American) capitalism has come to its merciless inevitability, the largest employer in the country …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/20/the-warehouse-by-rob-hart/
Aug 14 2019
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth #1) by N.K. Jemisin
So on the one hand, this is some gorgeously written, truly imaginative sci-fi set in a world where the science seems like magic, so much so that the book reads like a terrific fantasy novel. It’s also a sharply drawn parable of slavery and gilded cages, based on inherent powers owned by people dubbed orogenes …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/14/the-fifth-season-the-broken-earth-1-by-n-k-jemisin/
Aug 11 2019
Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee
My review of Revenant Gun, the third in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, ended “In short, I would greatly enjoy reading more stories set within Lee’s hexarchate, or indeed either the heptarchate that preceded it or the successor states that are trying to succeed it… And no more Jedao for a while, please. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/11/hexarchate-stories-by-yoon-ha-lee/
Aug 10 2019
An Informal History of the Hugos by Jo Walton
I remember enjoying these assessments of the Hugo Awards when they first appeared as columns on Tor.com, and I am glad to see them collected in book form with the addition of selected comments that appeared in the discussion that followed each column. The subtitle of this collection — A Personal Look Back at the Hugo …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/10/an-informal-history-of-the-hugos-by-jo-walton/
Aug 09 2019
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
For the epigraph to Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Robson riffs on the old saying about the past being a foreign country. Instead of “they do things differently there” she has “we want to colonize it.” That’s the first indication that her novella will eventually be a time-travel story. The next is the abrupt …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/09/gods-monsters-and-the-lucky-peach-by-kelly-robson/
Aug 09 2019
An Anatomy of Beasts (Faloiv #2) by Olivia A Cole
Hurray, work finally calmed down enough again for me to read a library book! After the events of the first book in the series (that you should really read before picking up this one,) our heroine Octavia is on the run from the rest of the humans of N’Terra. She finds refuge with the Faloii, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/09/an-anatomy-of-beasts-faloiv-2-by-olivia-a-cole/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire