Dec 24 2019
I just don’t get it. This isn’t a terrible book. But it’s not a very good one either, and I am utterly mystified by all the acclaim it’s been getting. Never mind my hostility to the introduction of magic into what was a solidly sci-fi series till partway through book two. Never mind my brain’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/24/the-stone-sky-the-broken-earth-3-by-n-k-jemisin/
Oct 15 2019
One of the unusual things that Naomi Novik does in Spinning Silver — so unusual, in fact, that I can’t think of another fantasy book that does it — is to state that some of her main characters are Jews. The first chapter lays out the hints: the characters are moneylenders in a small town whose …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/10/15/spinning-silver-by-naomi-novik/
Aug 14 2019
So on the one hand, this is some gorgeously written, truly imaginative sci-fi set in a world where the science seems like magic, so much so that the book reads like a terrific fantasy novel. It’s also a sharply drawn parable of slavery and gilded cages, based on inherent powers owned by people dubbed orogenes …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/14/the-fifth-season-the-broken-earth-1-by-n-k-jemisin/
Aug 10 2019
I remember enjoying these assessments of the Hugo Awards when they first appeared as columns on Tor.com, and I am glad to see them collected in book form with the addition of selected comments that appeared in the discussion that followed each column. The subtitle of this collection — A Personal Look Back at the Hugo …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/10/an-informal-history-of-the-hugos-by-jo-walton/
Aug 10 2019
Conversations on Writing grew from three sets of discussions between Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon for the Oregon radio station KBOO. She completed her introduction to this volume less than four months before her death in January 2018; Naimon wrote his not quite two weeks after her passing, it’s a touching valediction. “I …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/10/conversations-on-writing-by-ursula-k-le-guin-and-david-naimon/
Aug 09 2019
For the epigraph to Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Robson riffs on the old saying about the past being a foreign country. Instead of “they do things differently there” she has “we want to colonize it.” That’s the first indication that her novella will eventually be a time-travel story. The next is the abrupt …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/09/gods-monsters-and-the-lucky-peach-by-kelly-robson/
Aug 04 2019
One of the things that science fiction can do better than many other genres of literature is to take an abstract philosophical or metaphorical problem and make it very, very literal. “Am I forever defined by my past?” is a popular introspective question. “How do I deal with all of these other beings around me?” …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/04/artificial-condition-by-martha-wells/
Aug 03 2019
It’s nearly impossible to talk about Binti: The Night Masquerade without discussing elements of Binti and Binti: Home, so I am not even going to try. And to be honest, the best thing that happens in Binti: The Night Masquerade, from a storytelling perspective, is a plot surprise a bit more than halfway through the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/03/binti-the-night-masquerade-by-nnedi-okorafor/
Jul 29 2019
The Tea Master and the Detective introduced me to Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe, an interstellar setting that sprang from an alternate Earth history in which East Asian powers and cultures dominated the age of discovery and thus also the leap into space. Her web site says that the more recent stories are influenced by …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/29/the-tea-master-and-the-detective-by-aliette-de-bodard/
Jul 27 2019
Binti told the classic science fiction story of a talented young person from the hinterlands — and an outsider from an outsider people in those hinterlands — who gains admission to wider worlds by dint of talent and hard work. Unlike many of those stories, though, Binti’s is interrupted by violence and tragedy even before she …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/27/binti-home-by-nnedi-okorafor/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire