Category: Science Fiction

Ava’s Demon, Book One: Reborn by Michelle Fus

The hallmark of a great graphic novel is that even in the wordless panels, you can still hear precisely what’s going on. There’s a big, climactic battle scene near the end of this book that’s entirely devoid of the written word, yet I could hear every single thing that was happening and to loud, orchestral …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/30/avas-demon-book-one-reborn-by-michelle-fus/

Forest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal

Forest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal

Forest of Memory, a novella from 2016, finds Mary Robinette Kowal writing in a very different mode from her two well-known series, the Glamourist Histories and the Lady Astronaut books. Two hundred or so years into the future, material abundance and pervasive interconnection have left some very wealthy people hungering for the real, for the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/20/forest-of-memory-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Outpost Zero by Sean Kelley McKeever & Alexandre Tefenkgi

Collecting the entire fourteen issue run of the sci-fi comic book title. So this book has an interesting perspective on the living-in-space genre. Outpost Zero is all that remains of a generation ship that left Earth centuries ago. The survivors have adopted something of a small town mentality, focusing on keeping their outpost alive and …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/25/outpost-zero-by-sean-kelley-mckeever-alexandre-tefenkgi/

Sation Eternity by Mur Lafferty

Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

What’s it like to be the protagonist of a mystery series? Everywhere you go, people die. Vacation? Murder. Big social occasion? More murder. Village fête? Very murdery. Spotting the clues and solving the crime when local police are stumped does not exactly win friends either. Mallory Viridian hates it. She’s had years of practice, and …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/15/sation-eternity-by-mur-lafferty/

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard

The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard

The Red Scholar’s Wake is, by turns, a romance, a meditation on loss, a political intrigue, a story of starfaring pirates, an examination of parenthood, and a tale of interplanetary adventure. That sounds like a lot, maybe too much for fewer than 300 pages, so let me look at it from a slightly different angle. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/12/the-red-scholars-wake-by-aliette-de-bodard/

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Just write the fun parts. Take a science fiction premise — that evolution ran differently on an alternate earth giving rise to kaiju (Godzilla and company, I didn’t know the term before I had heard of this book) — and just write the fun parts. That’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. The parallel earths, two among presumably …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/04/the-kaiju-preservation-society-by-john-scalzi/

Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson

Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson

Dave Hutchinson, like William Gibson, is an artiste of the slightly funny deal. They run all through Cold Water, and trying to figure out just who is running a caper on whom is one of the pleasures of the novel. Carey Tews, the novel’s main protagonist, is a Texan who’s been in Europe for decades …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/28/cold-water-by-dave-hutchinson/

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

I’m so glad I finally found the time to get to this oldest book on my TBR-pile! I’ve had it there since it was nominated for a Hugo two years ago, but other deadlines pushed it aside till I finally had a moment this January to dive in. And oh, what a smart, elegant, emotional …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/20/the-space-between-worlds-by-micaiah-johnson/

Area 51 Interns #1: Alien Summer by James S Murray & Carsen Smith

I literally have no idea who “Murr” is but apparently he’s super famous on the Internet, and I got to read this cool book by him and Carsen Smith! This middle grade novel features Viv Harlow, who’s about to graduate middle school and is super anxious about having one last perfect summer with her best …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/04/area-51-interns-1-alien-summer-by-james-s-murray-carsen-smith/

The Case Of The Forked Road (Bad Machinery #7) by John Allison

Every Christmas, while the kids are exclaiming over toys and playing in relative harmony, I adopt benevolent mama pose and sit and read a Bad Machinery book while they giggle and coo (clearly romanticized, but if not now, when.) This year, I was so discombobulated by the book series’ change of format that I accidentally …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/02/the-case-of-the-forked-road-bad-machinery-7-by-john-allison/