Jul 02 2022
Further into the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Fritz Leiber tends toward longer stories. Swords Against Wizardry is mainly two tales, “Stardock” and “The Lords of Quarmall.” The other two in the volume, “In the Witch’s Tent” and “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar” are little more than stage directions setting up the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/02/swords-against-wizardry-by-fritz-leiber/
Jun 30 2022
with colors by Brigitte Findakly and translations from the original French by Kim Thompson and Joe Johnson. I’m not sure what I expected when I cracked open this volume of anthropomorphic animals living in the countryside. From quite early on you see that our title character Ralph Azham is a bit of a loser, the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/30/ralph-azham-vol-1-black-are-the-stars-by-lewis-trondheim/
Jun 27 2022
Tho I’m a ginormous fangirl of both this series and its creative team, I must say that I’m glad that this installment was passed over for the Hugo nomination (for purely temporal reasons) because things definitely start to fuzz out of cohesion here. So! Our intrepid heroes were originally, literally sucked into the twenty-sided world …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/27/die-vol-3-the-great-game-by-kieron-gillen-stephanie-hans-clayton-cowles/
Jun 23 2022
So on the one hand, I love any book with an inclusive portrayal of role-players and depictions of how out of game dynamics can affect in-game performance. On the other, yikes, these people need to play something that isn’t Dungeons & Dra– I mean, Dice & Deathtraps. I guess it’s unfair of me to stereotype …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/23/the-last-session-vol-1-roll-for-initiative-by-jasmine-walls-dozerdraws-micah-myers/
Jun 21 2022
Across the Green Grass Fields is the first of Seanan McGuire‘s Wayward Children series that I have read that’s entirely waywardness, and I liked it that way. There’s no mention of Eleanor West’s Home, nor do any of the characters from the previous five novellas in the series appear. I didn’t miss them at all, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/21/across-the-green-grass-fields-by-seanan-mcguire/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/14/hugo-awards-2022-best-novelette-nominee/
Jun 12 2022
Elder Race offers an extended meditation on Clarke’s Third Law, some thoughts on cultural contamination that are not new but are important to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s characters, all wrapped up in a fast-paced adventure of swords and sufficiently advanced technology. The novella is set on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humans during the first interstellar …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/12/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/
Jun 11 2022
Forbidden love between two princesses. Forbidden not because they are both women, but because they are princesses, and relations between their two states are tense and unequal. Thanh is a princess of Bình Hải, in the south, nominally superior to its northern neighbor but falling back in relative power because of the neighbor’s greater access …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/11/fireheart-tiger-by-aliette-de-bodard/
Jun 09 2022
Myth, starfaring bots, near-future Nigeria, fell fae, artistic immortals and the magic of the mind all feature in the 2022 Hugo finalists in the category of Best Novelette. “Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer sets its story on a large interstellar ship that just barely survived an encounter with hostile aliens and is …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/09/hugo-awards-2022-best-novelette/
May 31 2022
Wow, has this series grown on me! As with last year, I selected this title first of the Hugo nominees for Graphic Novel in hopes of getting it out of the way, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it actually does keep getting better from volume to volume. As always, an overwhelming amount happens …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/31/monstress-vol-6-the-vow-by-marjorie-m-liu-sana-takeda/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire