May 25 2016
Soon after reading The Collapse was just the right time to pick up Europe at Midnight, Dave Hutchinson’s second book set in a Europe that kept right on collapsing after 1989 and, by the unspecified date of the story, sends more than 500 entrants each year to the Eurovision Song Contest. Europe at Midnight splinters …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/25/europe-at-midnight-by-dave-hutchinson/
May 06 2016
The Left Hand of Darkness takes place on a world nearly frozen, with people constantly contending against the natural forces that will kill them, given half a chance or just a little too much inattention. The Word for World is Forest takes place on a warm and pleasant planet, where plentiful rains and abundant sunshine …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/06/the-word-for-world-is-forest-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
Apr 27 2016
What if people took Plato’s Republic seriously enough to attempt putting it into practice? What if two of those people were the Greek deities Apollo and Athena, who have the power to make Plato’s implausible starting conditions real? Those are the premises underlying The Just City by Jo Walton. The Olympians, as Walton describes them, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/27/the-just-city-by-jo-walton/
Apr 16 2016
I remembered three things from when I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress long, long ago: the taxonomy of jokes (not funny, funny once, and funny always), that dropping rocks onto earth from the moon was an important part of the revolution, and the significant death at the end. I also remembered liking the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/16/the-moon-is-a-harsh-mistress-by-robert-a-heinlein/
Apr 15 2016
Like the human aliens of the planet Gethen, The Left Hand of Darkness is first one thing and then another, encompassing all of them yet remaining bounded by its humanity. The inhabited worlds of Le Guin’s interrelated Hainish novels are tied together by membership in the Ekumen, eighty-odd planets in something like a trading federation, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/15/the-left-hand-of-darkness-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
Mar 24 2016
Salvage and Demolition is the other Tim Powers novella that I read in an afternoon or so last autumn. It’s a fun mashup of genres: It starts as a noir mystery with a splash of Bukowski and a studied bookishness; it veers [spoilers] into time travel and Lovecraft, with just a little bit of Snow …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/03/24/salvage-and-demolition-by-tim-powers/
Feb 28 2016
Cauldron is the sixth novel in Jack McDevitt’s series of novels featuring Priscilla Hutchins as a protagonist, and is not a good place to begin reading the series. In fact, it’s chronologically the last novel (to date) in the series, as the seventh book goes back to the very beginning of Hutchins’ career to show …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/28/cauldron-by-jack-mcdevitt/
Feb 11 2016
I thought that Lagoon would be the first book I read by Nnedi Okorafor. Or maybe The Book of Phoenix, which a friend had strongly recommended. Turns out the first was Binti, one of a new line of novellas published electronically and on paper by Tor.com. I have it on paper, courtesy of a surprisingly …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/11/binti-by-nnedi-okorafor/
Jan 16 2016
All the best sci-fi novels are, at their cores, novels of ideas. Template is no different, exploring philosophies of the defining traits of societies and what it means to belong. Here’s the thing with this book, tho: while written in the third person, it takes the narrative view of the hero of the piece, Conn …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/01/16/template-by-matthew-hughes/
Dec 27 2015
There are so many, many great and splendid things about this book. First, as with all good hard sf, it is a novel of ideas, not merely translating our human experiences into distant settings, but also imagining alternate forms of personhood, whether in the structure of alien races — beyond the tired insectoid/robotic hive minds …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/12/27/a-fire-upon-the-deep-by-vernor-vinge/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire