This was the book that made me wonder whether I just wasn’t enjoying reading books on the smartphone. Bridge of Birds would be terrific in any format, but I had had lukewarm or only just better than lukewarm reactions to two authors I normally quite like, Connie Willis and John Scalzi. Then I tried an …
Tag: Science Fiction
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/21/muse-of-fire-by-dan-simmons/
Feb 12 2015
What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton
Jo Walton answers the question posed by the title for a bit more than 100 books in this collection of brief reviews devoted to re-reading. As I read through, I enjoyed thinking of how the emphasis could fall on each of the words in the title, although the cover design clearly places it on the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/12/what-makes-this-book-so-great-by-jo-walton/
Feb 06 2015
Truth and Fear by Peter Higgins
People who were annoyed by the cliffhanger ending of Wolfhound Century should definitely wait the six weeks or so until Radiant State is published before reading Truth and Fear. Peter Higgins hasn’t solved the middle-book problem, but it’s clear that he conceived and wrote the three books of the Wolfhound Century tale as a single, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/06/truth-and-fear-by-peter-higgins/
Jan 28 2015
Vlast and Cool and Dangerously Sympathetic
I’m about a quarter of the way through Truth and Fear (concurrent with more Discworld, The Iliad – to see whether it captures me the way The Odyssey did, and in a modern translation since I bounced right off of Chapman’s, and probably some other things that rise to the surface of the to-be-read piles), …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/28/vlast-and-cool-and-dangerously-sympathetic/
Jan 20 2015
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
The protagonist of The Three-Body Problem is a Chinese woman named Ye Wenjie. She barely survived the Cultural Revolution in China, and is so disillusioned by her experiences that she takes the opportunity as a governmental scientist to hijack an official program that’s attempting to make contact with aliens. She succeeds in making this contact, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/20/the-three-body-problem-by-cixin-liu/
Jan 19 2015
Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins
Sometimes it’s nice to be squarely in the middle of the target audience. Although I am not sure whether anyone would have said ex ante that the audience for a police procedural set in an alternate history Russia with fantasy and science fiction elements was much more than just me. But Peter Higgins went and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/19/wolfhound-century-by-peter-higgins/
Jan 11 2015
Symbiont (Parasitology Book 2) by Mira Grant
Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire) seems a little bit like Midas to me. So far everything she’s written – whether it’s urban fantasy, superhero, apocalypse, or something else – has hit the mark and become gold. Symbiont, the second book in her Parasitology series, keeps up the excellent writing and the interesting plot. In some …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/11/symbiont-parasitology-book-2-by-mira-grant/
Jan 05 2015
The Peripheral by William Gibson
I adore William Gibson with a slightly unhealthy fierceness, akin to obsession. His Neuromancer was my first introduction to cyberpunk of any sort, and I knew I had found my tribe, or at least part of it. To read Neuromancer in 1984, before everyone had a desktop computer and AOL, was a complete nerdgasm for …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/05/the-peripheral-by-william-gibson/
Jan 04 2015
The Book of Strange New Things: A Novel by Michel Faber
I admit that I was prepared to not like this book. It concerns a Christian pastor being sent to the first inhabitable planet found by humankind so that he can minister to the alien species already living there, but I quickly discovered that that was an extremely simplistic view of the story. What I had …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/04/the-book-of-strange-new-things-a-novel-by-michel-faber/
Jan 02 2015
Never Deal With a Dragon / Choose Your Enemies Carefully / Find Your Own Truth by Robert N. Charrette
For my first review for the Frumious Consortium, I’d like to start with a bang, a triple play. Three books at once, all part of a trilogy inscribed in the same universe, all by the same author, and all uncommonly uniform enough in style and execution as to try and pass a single review as …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/02/never-deal-with-a-dragon-choose-your-enemies-carefully-find-your-own-truth-robert-n-charrette/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire