Jun 09 2025
With a tagline like “Immortal. Mercenary. Kind of a tool” this is the kind of book that is usually pure catnip to me. Tho I have to admit that by the fourth or fifth issue opener of “My name is Simon. Simon Pure. Though I’m anything BUT”, I was ready to cheerfully strangle someone, character, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/06/09/redcoat-volume-1-einstein-the-immortal-by-geoff-johns-bryan-hitch/
Apr 22 2025
with Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes on letters and design. Am I getting jaded? I love mythologies and the ways that comic books spin up brand new gods and pantheons and legends and dramas, but reading this book — that feels very much like a cross between Kieron Gillen’s prior The Wicked + The Divine …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/22/the-power-fantasy-volume-1-the-superpowers-by-kieron-gillen-caspar-wijngaard/
Apr 20 2025
By the year 2248, when Icehenge begins, humanity has long-established settlements on Mars though terraforming is far from complete. Spaceships ply the middle planets, and asteroid mining has been an industry long enough for people to have grown up in it. One of the key differences that has made long-term projects such as terraforming viable …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/20/icehenge-by-kim-stanley-robinson/
Dec 27 2024
Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year. In Urs Widmer’s Der Geliebte der Mutter (My Mother’s Lover) the first-person narrator tells the story of his mother’s life, beginning with the death of her lover, many years after her own death. Erwin died as he lived best, leaning over a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/27/wrapping-up-4/
Sep 03 2024
This novella is the first of a trilogy and I have Thoughts about that. As a reader, I love that there’s more of this story to be had, even as it’s satisfyingly complete as is. As a reviewer, I love that we’re bringing the novella back: I’m tired of slogging through 300+ page books that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/03/crypt-of-the-moon-spider-by-nathan-ballingrud/
Jul 30 2024
Oh dear. This book starts out so promisingly, as a woman on her deathbed makes her lover swear to speak with the daughters the latter gave up for adoption. A grief-stricken Sylvie Swift has no idea how to approach the two girls she gave up as babies, so decides to write them a series of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/07/30/daughters-of-chaos-by-jen-fawkes/
Apr 07 2024
The cover of After the Apocalypse looks crinkled and dog-eared, as if the calamities within its pages have begun to seep out into the world beyond. The clock on the book’s cover is set to a few minutes after midnight, a reminder that after the worst has happened, things go on for at least some …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/04/07/after-the-apocalypse-by-maureen-f-mchugh/
Apr 06 2024
Tables are turning, and characters are leveling up. In the sixth book of the Chronicles of St Mary’s — a mostly lighthearted and adventurous series about time-traveling historians — Dr Madeleine Maxwell has been promoted to Chief Training Officer. True to form, she’s shaking things up. In this case, she’s speeding up the training of new historians …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/04/06/what-could-possibly-go-wrong-by-jodi-taylor/
Mar 03 2024
What would Jazz Age America be like if it had a large and powerful Native American state in the Midwest, with its capital a thriving city called Cahokia, descendant of the largest Indigenous settlement north of Mexico? In 1922, the great Mound is still the symbolic center of the city, as it has been for …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/03/03/cahokia-jazz-by-francis-spufford/
Nov 30 2023
Six months after the events chronicled in the debut novel of this series, siblings Rosemary and Aaron Harker are living on tenterhooks, wondering whether the omissions in their last report have been discovered and whether they’re being sidelined from their life’s work as Huntsmen as a result. Their latest assignment from the Circle doesn’t seem …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/30/uncanny-vows-huntsmen-2-by-laura-anne-gilman/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire