Doug Merrill

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A Season of Knives by P.F. Chisholm

Nov 16, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill

Sir Robert Carey is the very model of an Elizabethan courtier; he has skills equestrian, pedestrian and deductional. He’s met the Queen of England and he’s won the fights he chronicles, in England and in Scotland, and some in Lands Debatable. He’s well acquainted, too, with matters barely ethical; he understands corruption, both the venal and the gentry’s style.
A Famine of Horses by P.F. Chisholm

Nov 3, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill

The same friend who, ages ago, recommended I read Dorothy Dunnett suggested I picks up books by P.F. Chisholm, and this how bookish friendships are sustained over decades. We don’t always like the same things — Little, Big left her cold — but she seldom goes astray when she says she thinks I will like something. I hope the recommendations I have made in return have been similarly rewarding, because A Famine of Horses was a bang-up winner.
Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold

Oct 14, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill

After two Vorkosigan books that are outliers in the larger series — Shards of Honor because it was the first; Ethan of Athos because it’s about an unusual planet — Brothers in Arms returns to what I think of as the main sequence of the saga: books about the life of Miles Vorkosigan. Brothers in Arms begins just after the operation that was told in “The Borders of Infinity.” I haven’t read that work yet, so the beginning was a little awkward for me.
The Helmet of Horror by Victor Pelevin

Oct 13, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill

What’s the difference between a very long online discussion and a labyrinth? What if the thread is started by someone called Ariadne? “I shall construct a labyrinth in which I can lose myself, together with anyone who tries to find me — who said this and about what?” (p. 1) What if the participants all say they are each in a single room with minimal furnishings — these include a screen and a keyboard, of course — and a door that opens, for most of them, onto some kind of corridor?
Die Physiker by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Oct 12, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill

Dr Miss Mathilde von Zahnd runs one of the most renowned, and one of the most expensive, private psychiatric clinics in all of Switzerland. The enormous fees paid by the rich clientele — in the stage notes before the play proper, Dürrenmatt speaks of moronic millionaires, schizophrenic authors, arteriosclerotic politicians — have enabled most of the patients to move into a new building overlooking a lake in the midst of idyllic grounds that surround the von Zahnd family’s former summer villa.
And Go Like This by John Crowley

Oct 6, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill

And Go Like This collects nine works of Crowley’s shorter fiction that were originally published between 2002 and 2018, plus the final story “Anosognosia” — when a person cannot recognize that they have a disability because of an underlying condition — which was published for the first time in this volume. They range in length from one page (“In the Tom Mix Museum”) to about 60 (“The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” and the three parts of “Mount Auburn Street”).
False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

Oct 5, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill |Urban Fantasy

Because of the way that Lies Sleeping ended, Peter Grant finds himself suspended, temporarily he hopes, from the London’s Metropolitan Police. Because expenses don’t stop just because a job does, he signs up to work in the security department of one of London’s biggest and flashiest IT start-ups, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation.
Mein litauischer Führerschein by Felix Ackermann

Sep 29, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill |Eastern Europe

Mein litauischer Fürherschein — My Lithuanian Driver’s License — carries the subtitle “Ausflüge zum Ende der europäischen Union,” “Excursions to the End of the European Union.” He means one of the geographic ends of course, not the demise of the Union. I’m not sure I would have chosen Lithuania as the end of the Union either, since it’s nestled between Poland and Latvia.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Sep 28, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill

One of the things that science fiction writers have learned how to do in the 206 years since Frankenstein was first published is how to bring their readers along with the new elements of the world that they put into their stories. Most of the time, they take care to make the fantastic elements plausible within the world portrayed by the story, and largely consistent once the rules of the game are laid out.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, Pt. 3

Sep 26, 2024 | thefrumiousconsortium.net | Doug Merrill

One of the many astonishing things that Richard Rhodes does in The Making of the Atomic Bomb is to match the tone and pace of each of the major sections to their theme. It’s common enough in good novels, but uncommon in non-fiction, and vanishingly rare in a non-fiction work of this size and scope. The third and final part is just two long chapters, one on the Trinity test and the other on Hiroshima. They are tales of awe and terror.