Dec 18 2021
The 2021 World Science Fiction Convention, DisCon III in Washington, DC, is in full swing as I write. In fact, presentations of this year’s Hugo Awards are set to begin in 15 minutes an hour and fifteen minutes, and I plan to write about those in the morning when I wake up and find out …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/18/putting-the-world-into-worldcon/
Sep 14 2021
For the first three-quarters or so of this book, I was absolutely enthralled. Qian Julie Wang tells the story of her relatively prosperous, if politically oppressed life in Northern China before her Ba Ba emigrates to America, followed by herself and her Ma Ma five years later. They overstay their visas, becoming undocumented while Ba …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/14/beautiful-country-a-memoir-by-qian-julie-wang/
Aug 28 2019
I remember seeing David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo books back in the 1980s and 1990s. They looked like a big, pulpish series set in a future dominated by China. A little while back, I picked up Son of Heaven, which says it’s Chung Kuo #1, thinking I would look in on this series and maybe set …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/28/son-of-heaven-by-david-wingrove/
Aug 24 2019
Distinguishing a warning that should be heeded from a host of false positives is a famously hard problem. The foreign community in Peking, as it was then generally called in the West, failed that test in the summer of 1900, costing many hundreds of lives. The Boxer Rebellion concentrates on the defense of the Legation …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/24/the-boxer-rebellion-by-diana-preston/
Aug 21 2019
Sometimes speculative fiction is just a little too on the nose: The Republicans, coming to power …, wanted to do away with free trade. In a frenzy of nationalist rhetoric, they sought to replace globalization with protectionist tariffs. They wanted to pull up the economic drawbridge, just as their predecessors had after the Wall Street …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/21/yikes/
Aug 17 2019
“I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world “My surname is Lu and my personal name is Yu, but I am not to be confused with the eminent author of The Classic of Tea. My family is quite undistinguished, and since I am the tenth of my father’s sons …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/17/barry-hughart-1934-2019/
May 11 2018
“The Chinese Lord of the Rings.” Or, as translator Anna Holmwood puts it in her introduction, “one of the world’s best-loved stories and one of its grandest epics, a series that can count its fans in the hundreds of millions. And yet this is the first time it has been published in English, despite making …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/05/11/a-hero-born-by-jin-yong/
Dec 22 2017
Time for some short takes, to mostly clear the desk for the coming year. The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest. In the fourth of her five Clockwork Century novels, Priest takes a stab at telling her story mostly from the point of view of an unsympathetic narrator. Rector Sherman is an addict, hooked on the “sap,” …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/22/wrapping-up-2/
Jul 02 2017
“Of interest mainly to specialists” is one of those phrases that reviewers often use to suggest, however gently, that a book is terribly dull and that no one outside of a select audience should read it. With a subtitle that reads The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries, China Among Equals is clearly aimed …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/02/china-among-equals-edited-by-morris-rossabi/
Apr 19 2015
One of the hazards of getting a blurb for your book from someone who has written a great book on a closely related subject is that it invites comparisons. Age of Ambition — subtitled Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China — has a blurb from Peter Hessler, whose three books on contemporary …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/19/age-of-ambition-by-evan-osnos/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire