May 28 2025
I can’t be the only person who picked up this title thinking that there’d be a religious subtext here. And perhaps there is, but the creators chose a much more interesting way to use the title word in this graphic novel, that collects the first (?) four books of the series. Science Officer Orrin Kutela …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/28/convert-by-john-arcudi-savannah-finley/
May 09 2025
In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read Believing is Seeing, Year of the Griffin, Mixed Magics, and Unexpected Magic! That’s three collections of short stories and the sequel to my deeply beloved Dark Lord of Derkholm. Believing is Seeing (1999) This is a story …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/09/a-year-of-diana-wynne-jones-the-new-millennium/
May 07 2025
Lois McMaster Bujold originally conceived of Shards of Honor and Barrayar as one novel. She was writing her first novel and did not have a firm grasp on how much should fit between the covers of one book. As she writes, “My writing career has been on-the-job training throughout, and this was no exception.” (p. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/07/barrayar-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
May 06 2025
The Karma Sequence is a fascinating novel that blends mystery with philosophical and speculative fiction, asking: what if your genes know more about your future than you could ever imagine? Dan, an introverted computer genius, has fought his way back from a life-shattering crisis that left him isolated, powerless, battling addiction, and close to death. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/06/the-karma-sequence-by-a-o-wagner-excerpt/
May 03 2025
Eurovision 2025 is coming up in not quite three weeks, and I’ll be watching it, though I hadn’t given it much (if any) thought until I looked up the date just now. I watched in 2024 and amused myself on social media, cackling along with fellow commenters, but the truth is that I was still …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/03/space-oddity-by-catherynne-m-valente/
Apr 26 2025
Annihilation kicks off the Southern Reach series, which was a trilogy for 10 years until VanderMeer published a fourth book in 2024. A movie adaptation of Annihilation was released in 2018. The series, and this first volume in particular, are often described as classics and even appear on some all-time-best lists. It’s fair to say …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/26/annihilation-by-jeff-vandermeer/
Apr 23 2025
As I’ve mentioned before, I love speculative mysteries! In the next few months, we can look forward to murders among scholars on far-future Jupiter, at a magical boarding school in England, and revolving around a small town high school rivalry in the U.S.A., all being published by Tor. If “dark academia” is the zeitgeist, these …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/23/speculative-mysteries-to-get-excited-about/
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/
Apr 19 2025
This book totally should not work. (I think Mary Robinette Kowal may have been the first to make this observation in public.) Scalzi takes an absurd premise — the moon suddenly, completely, and for no discernible reason turns into cheese — and then plays it straight for the rest of the novel. The impossible, the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/19/when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-by-john-scalzi/
Mar 23 2025
In some distant and ultimately irrelevant future, humanity has mastered time travel and discovered not a single causal chain through the unity of time and space, but a vast multitude of timelines. They cluster in groups of similar development. In some, humanity spreads to the stars; in others, humanity remains more tightly tied to its …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/23/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-by-amal-el-mohtar-and-max-gladstone/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire