Harkaway takes the epigraph for Gnomon from The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski. “When the first question was asked in a direction opposite to the customary one, it was a signal that the revolution had begun.” Ethiopia, as portrayed in The Emperor is a land of whispers and intrigues, barely contending with modern technology, shaped by …
Category: Science Fiction
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/24/gnomon-by-nick-harkaway-pt-2/
Sep 22 2021
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, Pt. 1
Some time past the middle of the twenty-first century, Britain offers its citizens the safest, most democratic, best-adjusted society in human history. Every person under the System is encouraged — though not compelled — to spend a certain amount of time each week voting, and is semi-randomly assigned to decision-making bodies for the duration of their session. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/22/gnomon-by-nick-harkaway-pt-1/
Sep 20 2021
From Page to Screen: Dune
Confession time: Though I have read Dune several times after encountering it at an early and impressionable age, I don’t think that I have read it this century. My recollection is more impressionistic than detailed, and my impression is that the movie got all of the most important parts of the story up on the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/20/from-page-to-screen-dune/
Sep 17 2021
From The Neck Up by Aliya Whiteley
Bluntly, I don’t know anyone working in speculative fiction today who consistently writes such disturbingly weird shit. But not like in a gratuitous way. Aliya Whiteley doesn’t want to shock you, necessarily, but she is unafraid to plumb into the deeper, uglier parts of the human psyche to examine the monstrous and strange, to ponder …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/17/from-the-neck-up-by-aliya-whiteley/
Sep 12 2021
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
“As a heartless killing machine, I was a total failure.” That’s Murderbot to a T. All Systems Red introduces Murderbot, a part-mechanical part-organic construct more formally known as a Security Unit, one of many produced to keep humans safe in an interstellar civilization. Before the story began, this Security Unit had hacked its governor module …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/12/all-systems-red-by-martha-wells/
Aug 29 2021
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Out on the edge of civilized space, Lsel Station, the largest of the Stationer settlements, is home to some thirty thousand humans, a gateway to a few further systems, and the holder of some remarkable neurotechnology. The center to which Lsel is peripheral is the Teixcalaanli Empire, a star-spanning empire in the grand tradition with …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/29/a-memory-called-empire-by-arkady-martine/
Aug 13 2021
Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
Humans didn’t generally turn up dead on Preservation Station. It was a low-violence society where most people’s needs were well met. As the SecUnit mostly formerly known as Murderbot puts it, “This junction, and Preservation Station in general, were also weird places for humans to get killed; the threat assessment for both transients and station …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/13/fugitive-telemetry-by-martha-wells/
Jul 29 2021
The Follower by Nicholas Bowling
As the parent of twins, I can attest to the fact that twins can be as sweetly devoted yet as deeply strange as the siblings depicted in this novel. After the death of his father, the already rather odd Jesse Owens (yes, really) starts looking for meaning in all the most metaphysical places. His search …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/29/the-follower-by-nicholas-bowling/
Jul 24 2021
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow
Isn’t Eastern Standard Tribe a neat title? It sounds so nifty, so cool, so exciting, there must be a lot happening behind it. Doctorow has Art, the first-person narrator of roughly half the chapters, spell things out about halfway through the book. “It’s like this,” I said. “It used to be that the way you …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/24/eastern-standard-tribe-by-cory-doctorow/
Jul 22 2021
Assassin’s Orbit by John Appel
Gosh, I’m at the point in my life where I really wish we had a better comparison for books featuring older female heroes than The Golden Girls. Nothing against the classic sitcom, but literally the only similarity Assassin’s Orbit has with TGG is that the main characters are feisty older women. That’s definitely a draw …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/07/22/assassins-orbit-by-john-appel/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire