Apr 26 2025

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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 that with Annihilation, VanderMeer struck a chord with a broad reading public, and that the book has staying power — the version that I read was a new edition for its 10th anniversary with a specially written introduction. It does something for a lot of people. Just not me.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

In the present, or perhaps in a very close future, something large and strange has happened on the Gulf of Mexico coast of Florida — probably between Apalachicola and where a line southwest from Gainesville would meet the coast, an area that has always been isolated and nearly bare of human habitation. Because Florida ranks third among US states in population and the images of teeming Miami or the vast sprawl around Disney World and Orlando dominate perception of the state, it’s easy to forget how empty and wild much of it remains. More than a third of Florida’s counties have populations of fewer than 50,000 people, and along the coast where VanderMeer sets his story no place for more than 200 miles has a population of more than 1000; it’s practically unpeopled.

Some kind of barrier has formed between the region, which has come to be known as Area X, and the rest of the world. Inside the barrier, uncanny things happen. The natural isolation of the region and the new barrier keep people out, while dimly described authorities have sent numerous expeditions into Area X, presumably to understand what is happening in there. Annihilation is the diary of a member of the eleventh expedition, the first to enter Area X in two years and made up of four women: an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist and the narrator, a biologist. One of the rules of the expedition is that they do not use, or even know, each other’s names. The narrator says that they had supplies with them for six months, though as she describes the party’s hike from the border to the base camp set up by previous expeditions and does not mention any vehicles or pack animals, I do not see how that is possible. Right away, then, things are not as they seem, cannot be as they seem.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/26/annihilation-by-jeff-vandermeer/

Apr 25 2025

Tantalizing Tales — April 2025 — Part Three

In which we check out some of the most interesting books to be released here at the tail end of the month before turning our attention to May!

First up, we have a newly published memoir, Ana Hebra Flaster’s Property Of The Revolution. A family of Cuban revolutionaries found themselves growing increasingly disillusioned by Fidel Castro’s regime, and were forced to flee their homeland for an entirely different space: a snowy mill town in New Hampshire. A political refugee at the age of six, young Ana clung to her matriarchal extended family’s courage and quirky wit to help her make sense of all the turmoil and change that was going on around her.

Several decades on, as a successful adult with a five year-old daughter of her own, Ms Hebra Flaster was forced to confront once more the memories of that time in her past, leading her to not only talk about her experiences publicly but to also eventually write this powerful book. Celebrating the resilience of refugees while acknowledging the pain that shaped them, this is a fascinating look not only at immigration in general but also into Cuban and Cuban American politics and sociology.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/25/tantalizing-tales-april-2025-part-three/

Apr 24 2025

Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud

Winner of the Prix Goncourt, and translated from the original French by Cory Stockwell.

There is an unusual form of French novel, of which this is a prime example, called the recit. It’s a sort of self-aware narrative, in which the narrator knows that they’re telling a story, with all the inherent discomfort of self-consciousness. This approach is what makes the tale told in Live Fast less autobiography than auto-fiction — a distinction that may seem overly cute to readers in English but which acknowledges the fact that reality is what we make of it, and who truly knows what lies in the heart of others?

The story itself is based on the death of the author’s husband Claude, killed too young in a motorcycle accident while heading home from work one day in 1999. Only 41 years-old, Claude loved music and motorcycles, and had borrowed a particularly powerful example of the latter on the day he died. The death was clearly accidental, but over two decades after the fact, the narrator still grieves and, understandably, finds herself looking for ways in which things could have turned out differently. Where she differs from the usual mourner is in how she delicately teases out the minute and myriad possibilities in which a single change in the tapestry of their lives could have kept him alive: things she could have done, things he could have done, things the entire universe could have made happen so that he would not have met his end so suddenly on that sunny afternoon.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/24/live-fast-by-brigitte-giraud/

Apr 23 2025

Speculative Mysteries to Get Excited About

The cover of The Incandescent by Emily Tesh shows the outline of a phoenix against black. 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 books are well timed.

First up, we have The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh, coming out on May 13th. I’ve loved all of Emily Tesh’s books so far, but beyond the assumption of some speculative element and some England-ness, I didn’t really know what the expect from The Incandescent. The first books I read by Tesh were a novella duology about the power of the forest, and then I read her novel, which is mindbending military space opera. I’ve learned that Tesh likes to experiment with genre and that I am happy to be along for the ride!

In The Incandescent, the setting is a boarding school, but the focus is largely on the adults there, with a lot of administrative work that has to get done. The teens are firmly referred to as “children.” The teaching parts are written very realistically. As a reader who has spent decades teaching, I appreciate the care main character Saffy Walden puts into instructing her students and marking their work as well as looking out for their welfare.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/23/speculative-mysteries-to-get-excited-about/

Apr 22 2025

The Power Fantasy Volume 1: The Superpowers by Kieron Gillen & Caspar Wijngaard

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 (with Jamie McKelvie) and Warren Ellis & Bryan Hitch’s The Authority — I just felt tired. I love when amalgams create something new. And while this was definitely a fresh take on the superhero genre, it did not, for me, feel fresh enough.

Which doesn’t make it bad at all. There are, in the book’s present day, six great superpowered people. Others have also been born into the powered Family, tho with lesser gifts. Collectively, they’re all known as Atomics, as they began to appear when the first atomic bomb was detonated. But it’s the Big Six who hold sway over the world, striving to preserve the delicate balance of peace and keep the fragile web of humanity alive against threats both internal and external. And perhaps, most importantly, to police each other from doing anything that could irreparably harm the world and the sacred timeline (yes, really) that Saint Valentina protects.

Saint Valentina is one of the first Superpowers we meet, as she has a discussion with the second, omnipath Etienne Lux, in the 1960s. Etienne believes that the ethical thing for Superpowers to do is to take over the planet as benevolent rulers and protectors. Valentina disagrees, and they nearly come to blows. Instead, they settle on the balance of powers and oversight that will carry them through the ensuing decades, to 1999 where our story picks up.

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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 21 2025

A Surfeit of Guns by P.F. Chisholm

A Surfeit of Guns picks up the afternoon of the day after the end of A Season of Knives; P.F. Chisholm gives her protagonist Sir Robert Carey no time to rest. In fact, she sends him off on a night patrol that of course turns out to be eventful, though not in the ways that everyone present expects. Like the first two books about Sir Robert, A Surfeit of Guns gallops at a furious pace, through intrigue, clan alliances, hair-trigger tempers and the ubiquitous corruption of the lands near the border between England and Scotland. In this particular set of escapades, a shipment of guns has come up from the south, a delivery from Queen Elizabeth to the Warden of her borderlands so that he may better keep the peace. Unfortunately, Sir Robert — the Deputy Warden and the only one in those parts to have met the fearsome Queen in person — is away on the aforementioned night patrol when the guns come in. Bad luck for Carey? Or an unusually canny move by the usually somnolent Warden?

A Surfeit of Guns by P.F. Chisholm

It is quite some time before Carey contemplates that question about his sister’s husband, and his nominal superior in the government of the Marches. Or rather, quite a lot happens before Carey contemplates that question, because A Surfeit of Guns, like its predecessors, takes place over a little more than a week, and events come fast and furious. It’s a delight to see Carey put things together, as they start out looking very odd indeed. Who is the mysterious German-speaker that his night patrol encounters? And why is the favorite of the King of Scotland hot on his trail? A lot happens before Carey begins to find the answers to those questions, too, and by that time he is in quite deep.

Deep, too, are the habits of the borders. When the Scottish king’s favorite heads back across with their quarry, Sergeant Dodd points out that it’s very likely another Scottish party will soon follow to scoop up some livestock from the English side and claim that they were part of what the lawful first party had recovered.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/21/a-surfeit-of-guns-by-p-f-chisholm/

Apr 20 2025

Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson

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 is a set of treatments, developed in the early twenty-first century, that stop aging in adulthood. People in the era of Icehenge expect to live on the order of a thousand years, though obviously nobody has managed that much yet. Robinson tells his tales of this epoch through three interlinked first-person novellas, one set in 2248, one in 2547 and one in 2610.

Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson

Emma Weil’s story starts on the interplanetary vessel Rust Eagle, and in the very first sentence she lets readers know that the journey will be interrupted by a mutiny. She is an ecological systems engineer, one of the best in the business, keeping spaceships’ life support systems in balance on long voyages as humans and the life forms that support them breathe in and out, eat and excrete, using and returning to the onboard environment oxygen and carbon dioxide and many other trace items that are nonetheless vital. The closer a ship can get to becoming a closed system the lower its running costs, an important consideration in the economics that Robinson has set up in the book.

Looking nearly three hundred years into the future — Icehenge was published in 1984 — Robinson considered that Earth would still be dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, but that they would work together through the Mars Development Committee to keep the Red Planet under their two thumbs. He doesn’t dwell on Earth, which is just as well given that the Soviet Union had less than a decade left to run, but posits that conditions on Mars would lend themselves to bureaucratic dominance and very little freedom, even deep into the terraforming process. In Emma’s time, people can move around in domed cities but outside the domes they still need life support of some sort, whether vehicles or suits. The Committee’s technocrats extend their control over the material conditions of colonists’ lives into thorough control of their lives in general.

Naturally, not everyone is willing to follow the Committee’s strictures. Some of them wind up in jail, orbiting Mars. Emma’s father is in that jail. Others have hatched a long-running plan; that’s the mutiny that Emma mentions in the first sentence of her account. Of course it only looks like a long plan to readers. To characters with a lifespan plausibly measured in centuries, spending a few decades putting certain things into motion is a modest investment, especially if the payoff is freedom or something even more audacious.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/20/icehenge-by-kim-stanley-robinson/

Apr 19 2025

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

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 inexplicable is implacably real for the characters. The book is hilarious in parts, but it’s funny within the premise, there’s no nod-and-grin to readers that it really isn’t happening for the characters. How can people live in a world where something so crazy can happen without warning?

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Well, that’s exactly the question. Crazy things happen without warning to people all the time, and they have to live with the consequences. They don’t usually happen to everyone in the world at the same time, but that’s part of the fun of writing a science fiction novel rather than a mundane work of fiction. And the crazy things that happen without warning are more often negative — a car accident, a life-changing medical diagnosis, sudden unemployment — rather than mind-bogglingly bizarre. But in When the Moon Hits Your Eye people react to drastically changed circumstances just as people do to more mundane upheavals, some with equanimity, some by going off the rails, some by changing themselves too.

Structurally, the book is a mosaic novel. Each chapter recounts one day after the moon’s change and focuses on what happens in one person’s life. Some of the groups recur — the guys in an Oklahoma diner, people in and around a couple of Wisconsin cheese shops, astronauts whose upcoming lunar careers are utterly upended — but very few specific characters repeat until the very end when Scalzi spends a couple of extra days with one character who decides she can’t even. Those are very short chapters. Some chapters have invented news articles at the beginning to set the stage, and to show wider reactions to events that the narrative part of the chapter then portrays up close. Other chapters end with quotations from online settings within the world of the novel; these, too, give extra commentary from outside the one-person, one-day, one-chapter structure that Scalzi has set up in the main narratives.

In these daily episodes, Scalzi plays to his strengths. For starters, the pacing is excellent. The first chapter is a master class in not quite saying what has happened. It’s set in the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio. The museum is real, by the way, on 500 Apollo Drive in Wapakoneta, Neil Armstrong’s home town, open 10 to 5 seven days a week with a few seasonal exceptions. They really do have a moon rock that Armstrong brought back from his Apollo 11 mission. When the Moon Hits Your Eye opens near the end of the working day, with the museum’s director just about to head out for date night with his beloved spouse when he receives a call from the museum’s facilities director.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/19/when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-by-john-scalzi/

Apr 18 2025

Tectiv Vol 1: Noirtopia by Richard Ashley Hamilton & Marco Matrone

with Dave Sharpe on letters.

What a clever post-apocalyptic spin on the noir genre! Bingo Finder is a scavenger in the utopian farm village of Ellay, venturing into the ruins of urban neighborhoods to find anything that might be worth bartering. On one trip with her best friend Fenn, she finds what, to her, is a veritable jackpot: a treasure trove of books hidden away for decades or more. One with a crumbling cover that says “Tectiv” especially appeals to her, even tho no one else really cares.

This is likely because no one else in Ellay reads. Instead, they live peaceful lives of subsistence and trade, guided by a benevolent mayor and his many sons. Mayor, as a matter of fact, keeps trying to set up Fenn with Eldest, his unimaginatively named first child. Fenn has little interest. Instead, she surprises Bingo with a kiss one evening but doesn’t want to talk about it afterwards, claiming that Bingo is the kind of person who just won’t let it go if she does.

Bingo is, understandably, affronted. But she’s even more shocked when she’s awoken from a sound sleep later to find Fenn on her rooftop, with an attacker in pursuit. Fenn plummets from the roof and Bingo is knocked out. Yet when Bingo wakes up again, she finds no trace of Fenn.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/18/tectiv-vol-1-noirtopia-by-richard-ashley-hamilton-marco-matrone/

Apr 17 2025

Captains Wanted by Andres Schabelman

What an odd and interesting metaphysical novel! Told primarily in the second person, this tale of magical realism flits between fantasy, science fiction and the everyday as it explores what it means to truly be in charge of your own life.

The “you” addressed in this novel is the frustrated, fake-it-till-you-make-it everyperson (tho tends to skew, in my reading, as male.) Pressured by family to succeed at capitalism, You blow a coveted job interview by being fearful of authenticity. Depressed, obsessing over minutiae and living on a friend’s couch, You stumble across a strange storefront while taking a walk one day. At first repelled by the sign saying (more or less) “Captains Wanted”, You eventually make your way inside, and begin a journey towards enlightenment that You’d never imagined possible.

What struck me most about this short but meaty novel — it took me a while to get through it, honestly, because there was so much to think about! — was the way in which Andres Schabelman incisively gets to the heart of what’s wrong with so much of modern existence today. We’re so preoccupied with how we look to others that we don’t stop to consider how we truly feel and why that matters, not only to our own health but to society’s. Does society really need more people lying through their teeth about how happy and competent they are, so as not to let others see their vulnerability? Or do we as a people need to learn to extend empathy and kindness to both ourselves and to others?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/17/captains-wanted-by-andres-schabelman/