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Robert Fromont

robertfromont@wyrms.de

Joined 1 year, 4 months ago

Pākehā reader of Speculative Fiction

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Robert Fromont's books

To Read (View all 7)

Currently Reading

Red Team Blues (2023, Head of Zeus) 4 stars

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's Red Team Blues is a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about …

Come for bleeding edge crypto crime, stay for the Lotus 1-2-3 mentions

5 stars

Maybe @pluralistic@mamot.fr lost a bet? Why else write a novel about an 'ageing accountant'? If so, Cory Doctorow got the last laugh, because Red Team Blues is a gripping page-turner!

Our hero, Marty, is only technically an accountant (forensic accountant “when I wanted to talk about the job”), this is really a detective novel, complete with organised crime in the shadows, grisly murders, covert government agents, thugs with clubs lying in wait in lobbies, and “old fashioned shoe-leather work”.

These crime-novel boxes are ticked, as only Doctorow can, with the most germane near-future-but-could-be-today technological and social elements possible. Cryptocurrency is central to the plot (and Marty's strong opinions about crypto groaned out in the very first chapter), as are ‘secure enclaves’, a ubiquitous computing technology that's as obscure as it is crucial.

Doctorow brings this obscurity into the light with trademark clarity, but the tech, the drilling through processors, …

The Ministry for the Future (Paperback, 2021, Orbit) 4 stars

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the …

…the two billion poorest people on the planet still lack access to basics like toilets, housing, food, health care, education, and so on. This means that fully one-quarter of humanity … is immiserated in ways that the poorest people of the feudal era of the Upper Paleolithic were not.

The Ministry for the Future by  (13%)

The future that I'm worried about is the one where, instead of everyone zooming about in photoelectric kite yachts, this proportion of people living in worse-than-Upper-Paleolithic conditions increases, gradually or quickly, to all of humanity.

The Ministry for the Future (Paperback, 2021, Orbit) 4 stars

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the …

...the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately…

The Ministry for the Future by  (21%)

Robinson captures the dread of the 21st century pretty well.

The Ministry for the Future (Paperback, 2021, Orbit) 4 stars

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the …

Somehow both harrowingly realistic and implausibly optimistic

4 stars

The Ministry for the Future follows the history of the eponymous ministry created by the UN in 2025 to represent the interests of future people when addressing #ClimateChange; given that the solutions to climate change will take effect over hundreds of years, so don't immediately benefit the current generations, the ministry would speak for future generations in order to ensure long-term thinking is applied.

The novel has three main characters: Frank, who we meet in the first traumatising chapter, is an American relief worker, and the only survivor of an Indian town struck by a devastating heatwave that wipes out millions. Frank suffers the rest of his ruined life with acute PTSD, which drives him ever more desperately find ways to avoid such a catastrophe from repeating. Early in the novel, it spurs him to actions that introducing us to the second main character:

Mary, an Irish lifetime diplomat, is …

The Fault in Our Stars (Hardcover, 2012, Dutton Books) 4 stars

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never …

A reverse Romeo and Juliet that asks the biggest questions, and proposes some pretty good answers

5 stars

@johngreen@mastodon.social's The Fault in our Stars is the story of a 16 year old girl, Hazel, riddled with terminal cancer. The novel opens with her multiple awful treatments, dependency on an oxygen tank she must take everywhere and use even while sleeping, her depression, sarcasm, loneliness.

She meets a boy at a support group, Augustus, who's lost a leg to cancer but is now cancer free. Amid shared irony, and angst, they fall slowly, then suddenly, in love, and depart on an adventure to track down the mysterious author of her favourite novel.

Any book about terminally ill children is sure to be unbearably sad, but Green's writing is so compelling that this novel will surely wring a tear from even the hardest hearted eye. (Green explicitly wants to reject the tropes of the cancer-kid genre. I'm not widely read enough to judge whether he succeeds.)

Fault in Our …

The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials #2) (Paperback, 2001, Dell Yearling) 5 stars

As the boundaries between worlds begin to dissolve, Lyra and her daemon help Will Parry …

The epic struggle becomes clear, for us if not for Lyra and her new friend

5 stars

In The Golden Compass, book 1 of this series, we met Lyra, the half-wild charge of a scholar of an Oxford University in a parallel universe, and follow her adventures with warrior polar bears to the gates of a new world. This is book 2 of the series, in which Lyra meets Will, who had fled 'our' world into a parallel world to escape shadowy men who are pursuing him to obtain the papers of Will's long-lost explorer father. As Lyra and Will explore the third parallel universe, we learn of the titular knife, which can cut any substance, including the membranes that separate parallel universes. We also learn of the epic battle playing out across the universes, which involves god and angels, and both of their fathers, and of which they're unwittingly key players. This is a fantastical, imaginative adventure spanning many climes and crossing the boundaries of the …

Sourdough: A Novel (2017, MCD) 4 stars

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with …

A happy romp through a weird and wonderful high-tech food-science future, with a sprinkling of magic realism

3 stars

As I've become a sourdough enthusiast myself, I found the existence of this book intriguing; a story about a woman robotics worker living in Silicon Valley, who starts experimenting with sourdough, obtains a 'mother' from an exotic ex-boyfriend, becomes involved with privately-funded underground project based in an abandoned military base, where various 'mad scientist' types research their bleeding-edge food technology, working towards the opening day of the ultimate exotic food market - sourdough, but also crickets, slurry grown from fungus, etc.

I enjoyed it, but on reflection, the fact that the plot could be encapsulated as "woman programmer discovers that actually she prefers baking" left a sour taste. And that was before I discovered that the author, Robin Sloan, isn't a woman as I had assumed.

Fiebre Tropical (Paperback, 2020, Amethyst Editions) 5 stars

Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca …

Come for the Spanglish, stay for the teenage lesbian immigrant angst.

5 stars

This is a vivid, stifling tail of first love and heartbreak, written in the Spanglish of Francisca, a not-so-sweet sixteen fresh of the plane in Miami, dragged with her sister to the promised land of Yanquilandia from Colombia by her controlling, born-again-christian mother, where they live in a small apartment with with her drunkard abuela.

Sucked into the world of the local evanglical church against her will, she falls for the pastors' adopted daughter, Carmen. She 'accepts Jesus into her heart' in order to be with her crush, and finally there's a source of joy in her existence, where she's otherwise an outsider at all turns.

Along the way we learn of past quinceañera vidas of the matriarchs of Francesca's family; her abuela, the most eligible costeña bachorette who wanted to have nothing to do with any of her suitors, much to her father's consternation, and her mother, the capitalist-schoolgirl …

The Actual Star (Hardcover, 2021, Harper Voyager) 4 stars

The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents —telling …

A braided tale spanning millenia

5 stars

Three societies at three moments in time: a Mayan kingdom in decline in 1012CE, modern day capitalist society at the rollover of the Mayan calendar's 'long count' cycle in 2012, and 'Laviaja', a post-climate-change wanderer society of 3012CE.

If you liked Cloud Atlas's cast of characters popping up in different ages, you'll like the braided structure of this novel. In each strand, a small cast of characters face abandonment, alienation, and the yearning to escape.

If Ursula Le Guin's 'Birthday of the World' left you yearning for more, you'll love Byrne's 1012CE strand, as teenage twin monarchs rise to power in a declining kingdom bathed in animal gods, bloody rituals, and sacred places.

If you ponder #PostColonialism, #CulturalAppropriation, or you've ever been a privileged white tourist on a guided tour to an ancient place, there's something in the 2012CE strand for you. It follows the sordid misadventures of a misfit …

The Girl in the Road: A Novel (Paperback, 2015, Broadway Books) 5 stars

A debut that Neil Gaiman calls “Glorious. . . . So sharp, so focused and …

A tale of slavery, sexual violence, and prejudice set in the nearish future.

5 stars

This was Monica Byrne's debut novel and wow! She doesn't screw around!

This is the gripping tale of a climate-tipping-point future where India has much more economic clout in the world, and is expanding its power and influence (with China) into Africa. Among many interesting technologies that have been developed, a huge wave-energy power generator has been constructed from India to Africa, consisting of a long chain of floating inverted pyramids, each about a metre square, which form a road between continents; the 'Trail'. Although it's illegal to walk on, travellers do it anyway.

Meena is one such traveller, who is fleeing something in India, although we don't know the details, only that she's got snake bites on her chest, she's fled her home, and is totally paranoid about being followed.

We learn that she's an orphan raised by the parents of her doctor father, who was brutally murdered, along …

Babel (2022, Harper Voyager) 4 stars

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, …

A magical alternative history of Oxford about the physical and cultural violence and slavery of empire and colonisation.

5 stars

Like #TedChiang's ‘Seventy Two Letters’, Babel is set in a fantastical alternative history of England during the Industrial Revolution. In Kuang's universe, the revolutionary tech is yínfúlù, silver talismans engraved with a word in one language and it's translation in another. When a bilingual utters the words, the subtle differences between their meanings are released by the silver, working magic on the physical world. “The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language the words are incapable of expressing - the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being.” Like in #UrsulaLeGuin's Earthsea, words have magical power, but also like Earthsea, the magic is taught to adepts in cloistered academies, in Kuang's case the Royal Institute of Translation. Translators are not only key to great leaps in productivity for British Industry, …

Walkaway (2017, Tor Books) 3 stars

Walkaway is a 2017 science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow, published by Head of Zeus …

A vindicating romp for faraday-cage-wallet-toting, gait-altering, cyanogenmod-installing, cypherpunk githubbers everywhere

5 stars

Walkaway by @pluralistic@mamot.fr has been described as a utopian novel in a sea of dystopian alternatives, although I'd say it's actually both utopian and dystopian. It takes place in the 'middle distance' of the future; cars are still a thing, and they have wheels that roll on the ground, space travel isn't really a thing yet - humankind is essentially still bound to the Earth. But number of current-day issues have reached their logical culmination; from mundane technology (drones everywhere, 'interface surfaces' stuck to things instead of touch-screen smartphones, 3D printer 'fabs' are ubiquitous, capable of printing machines, clothing, and food) to the Big Issues of our time: Social inequality is extreme, with the overwhelming majority of the populous trapped in a struggling middle-class of insecure wage slaves, ruled by a tiny over-class of 'zottas', the hyper-rich owners of everything, from real estate, through business and roboticized industry, to intellectual …