Aug 09 2019
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
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/
Aug 04 2019
One of the things that science fiction can do better than many other genres of literature is to take an abstract philosophical or metaphorical problem and make it very, very literal. “Am I forever defined by my past?” is a popular introspective question. “How do I deal with all of these other beings around me?” …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/04/artificial-condition-by-martha-wells/
Aug 03 2019
It’s nearly impossible to talk about Binti: The Night Masquerade without discussing elements of Binti and Binti: Home, so I am not even going to try. And to be honest, the best thing that happens in Binti: The Night Masquerade, from a storytelling perspective, is a plot surprise a bit more than halfway through the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/03/binti-the-night-masquerade-by-nnedi-okorafor/
Jul 29 2019
The Tea Master and the Detective introduced me to Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe, an interstellar setting that sprang from an alternate Earth history in which East Asian powers and cultures dominated the age of discovery and thus also the leap into space. Her web site says that the more recent stories are influenced by …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/29/the-tea-master-and-the-detective-by-aliette-de-bodard/
Jul 27 2019
Binti told the classic science fiction story of a talented young person from the hinterlands — and an outsider from an outsider people in those hinterlands — who gains admission to wider worlds by dint of talent and hard work. Unlike many of those stories, though, Binti’s is interrupted by violence and tragedy even before she …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/27/binti-home-by-nnedi-okorafor/
Jul 24 2019
“The night in New Orleans always got something going on, ma maman used to say—like this city don’t know how to sleep.” (p. 7) It doesn’t, and neither does P. Djèlí Clark’s splendid, exciting, enchanting novella The Black God’s Drums. Clark’s first-person narrator, a slightly feral young woman named Creeper, makes her own way in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/24/the-black-gods-drums-by-p-djeli-clark/
Jul 23 2019
In near-future London, Charlie Aaron volunteers for a drug trial to help make ends meet. Nothing seems to happen, but several months later, she develops a crippling narcolepsy that sees her fired from her desk job, unable to make the anonymous ASMR videos that are her side gig, and thus evicted from the cupboard under …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/23/sweet-dreams-by-tricia-sullivan/
Jul 20 2019
The Calculating Stars starts with a bang. Elma York, Kowal’s protagonist and first-person narrator says that she and her husband had flown up to the mountain cabin that he inherited for stargazing, “By which I mean: sex. Oh, don’t pretend that you’re shocked. Nathaniel and I were a healthy young married couple, so most of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/20/the-calculating-stars-by-mary-robinette-kowal/
Jun 26 2019
Hi, Frumious Readers! I feel like I’ve been away foreeeever, but it’s been crunch time over at my other reading job with CriminalElement.com so my apologies for being infrequent over here. Anyway, with Doug away for a bit, I’m glad to be back with this really great new novel sent to me by our friends …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/06/26/the-record-keeper-by-agnes-gomillion-2/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire