May 25 2025
Kassandra tells the tale of the fall of Troy in a first-person flashback narrated by Cassandra herself. At the time of the telling, she has been in Greek captivity and is on her way to her execution. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the king of Troy, and his wife Hecube. Long before this novel’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/25/kassandra-by-christa-wolf/
May 18 2025
I purchased A Perfect Day to Be Alone on the strength of Doreen’s review. The book is, as Doreen described, short, quiet, absorbing, surprising and, in the end, memorable. A young Japanese woman named Chizu is the first-person narrator, and she tells her story over a bit more than a year as she manages her …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/18/a-perfect-day-to-be-alone-by-nanae-aoyama-2/
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 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 27 2025
History books, if they stick around long enough, eventually become artifacts of their own eras, history in a double sense: explaining earlier periods with the terms and perspectives of their own time, which look different decades later. In the last chapter of Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth T. Jackson helps the process along by offering his expectations …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/27/crabgrass-frontier-by-kenneth-t-jackson/
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 21 2025
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/04/21/a-surfeit-of-guns-by-p-f-chisholm/
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