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/

Apr 16 2025

Hyo the Hellmaker by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

a swirling figure holds up a hammer and nail on the cover of Hyo the Hellmaker by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

Hyo the Hellmaker, by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh came out this week, from Scholastic! It’s got intricate world building, noir vibes, and atmospheric illustrations by the author for any manga-loving teen of your acquaintance.

Hyo is a “hellmaker,” which means she is able to make bespoke curses for your enemies. Once you commission her, she can curse someone who you specify with anything from a bad day to death. She lives in a world plagued by a magical poison, and the only known antidote comes from the island of Onogoro. When Hyo and her brother (who was raised as a living weapon) are confronted with a dead body on Onogoro, they are plunged into the seedy underbelly of the island—where both humans and gods have a lot to hide.

Hyo and her brother, new in town, navigate this situation warily. They acquire some new allies, but are not sure how much anyone can be trusted as they meet people and gods in different social positions. The way they balance favors to and from different factions, as the reader learns about the political machinations of the town, feels very noir to me, which I enjoy.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/16/hyo-the-hellmaker-by-mina-ikemoto-ghosh/

Apr 15 2025

An Interview With Kyle Casey Chu, author of The Queen Bees Of Tybee County

In conjunction with the publication of the first book in Kyle Casey Chu’s debut middle-grade duology, The Queen Bees Of Tybee County, we have a fabulous interview to share with you, dear readers! Also known as the drag queen Panda Dulce, Ms Chu was unwittingly thrust into the global spotlight in 2022 when far-right extremists stormed her Drag Story Hour in order to silence her. Undaunted, she is now leveraging her platform to tell even gayer stories.

TQBoTC is her first published effort. From the synopsis:

“After making the buzzer-beating shot at the Georgia basketball state championships, Derrick Chan becomes the star of Bayard Middle School. Derrick’s single dad could not be prouder. But there are parts of Derrick that no one knows about, like the toenail polish he wears under his basketball sneakers, his secret lip-sync performances in the bathroom mirror, and the feelings he’s developing for his best friend and teammate JJ.

“As the school year comes to a close, Derrick’s dad takes an out-of-town job and ships Derrick off to spend the summer with his estranged, eccentric grandmother Claudia. Soon, Claudia introduces Derrick to the world of small-town southern beauty pageants, and Derrick suddenly feels he’s found where he belongs. But when the opportunity arises to compete in the town pageant, Derrick is forced to decide just how much of himself he’s ready to show the world.

“Can he learn to love and accept the most unique parts of himself? And what will happen if others — like his father and JJ — can’t do the same?”

Read on for an illuminating interview with this bold, insightful author!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/15/an-interview-with-kyle-casey-chu-author-of-the-queen-bees-of-tybee-county/

Apr 14 2025

All The Noise At Once by DeAndra Davis

Even if one of the supporting cast wasn’t named after an Arsenal Football Club legend, I would still rate this sensitive, witty and heartbreakingly realistic exploration of the effect of police brutality on a Black autistic teenager very highly.

All Aiden Wright has ever wanted to do is play football on the same team with his older brother Brandon. Brandon isn’t just the star quarterback at their Florida high school: he’s also being courted by multiple schools for his athletic prowess. Aiden is no slouch himself when it comes to both football analysis and speed. He’d be the perfect running back to complement his brother’s skills.

But Aiden suffers a massive sensory overload during his junior year tryout, so isn’t selected for the team. To add insult to injury, his Life Skills teacher is adamant that he use his ample free time to get an after-school job. At least his assigned partner for the task, Isabella, is both understanding and kind.

Things might start looking up even more when a running back position suddenly opens on the football team. Brandon persuades Coach Davis to give Aiden another chance, and the team acquit themselves well in their first game. While Aiden would really rather not go out with the rest of the team to celebrate at a local diner afterwards, he knows that it means a lot to Brandon, so does his best to return the support that his brother has always given him.

Unfortunately, not everyone on the team is thrilled that Aiden has joined them. When a fight breaks out, the police are called in and Aiden gets hurt. Worse: Brandon is arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer while trying to come to Aiden’s aid, putting his football career and entire future in grave jeopardy.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/14/all-the-noise-at-once-by-deandra-davis/