Rereading The Wheel of Time Alongside the TV Adaptation

With the release of the Wheel of Time TV adaptation, I’ve tried to reread each book before its corresponding season airs—not just to spot divergences from the source material, but also to notice where the show genuinely improves on the original. And in many ways, it does. If there’s one thing the adaptation has highlighted for me, it’s just how uneven the pacing of the novels can be. On reread, the series often twists and loops without really moving forward, especially in the later middle volumes.

First Encounters: 1992 and the Swedish Editions

My first experience with The Wheel of Time was the Swedish translation of The Eye of the World back in 1992. Like many translated fantasy series of the time, each book was split into two volumes—something that may have made sense commercially or logistically, but from a reader’s perspective felt awkward. The breaks weren’t always at natural points in the narrative.

By the time I reached The Dragon Reborn, I grew tired of waiting for translations and switched to English around 1995. I quickly caught up, and A Crown of Swords became the first book I bought in English hardcover upon release.

Peaks and Valleys in the Early Books

Even then, I felt The Eye of the World stood above both The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn. I enjoyed the Battle of Falme and the climax in Tear, but much of the journey to those moments dragged. It’s interesting how strongly those impressions remain today.

Right now, I’m rereading The Shadow Rising—clearly I didn’t manage to finish it before the show’s third season arrived. But this book, together with The Fires of Heaven and Lord of Chaos, has always represented the high-water mark of the series for me. A Crown of Swords was still enjoyable, but unmistakably a step down. And from A Path of Daggers onward, the momentum slows to a crawl. By that point the magic had faded; I mostly continued because I wanted to see how it all ended.

Characters and Plotlines: What Still Works (and What Doesn't)

Rand’s chapters have always been the most engaging for me, followed by the Tanchico storyline—though even that is slow on the page. It compensates with moments of brilliance, such as Nynaeve’s confrontation with Moghedien late in The Shadow Rising. Perrin and the Two Rivers plotline, however, tested my patience more and more as the series progressed. That part of the narrative simply sprawled.

The TV adaptation made significant changes to the Tanchico arc, but the alterations generally tightened the pacing and improved the flow, even if I sometimes missed the texture of the books.

The Forsaken: Mystery Lost in Translation?

One of the biggest differences between the novels and the show is the portrayal of the Forsaken. On the page, they feel shadowy, ancient, and terrifying. On screen, some of that mystique is inevitably lost. Plotting in the shadows is difficult to convey visually without resorting to endless exposition, and the show understandably moves faster than Jordan’s prose allows.

The most jarring example for me has been the portrayal of Lanfear, especially in her interactions with Moiraine. Their dynamic on the show feels markedly different from the books. Still, the changes led to a striking confrontation in the season finale, which makes me suspect the writers may have had alternate plans for Moiraine’s arc. Considering how central she has become compared with her trajectory in The Fires of Heaven, that could have been intriguing. I never liked how that storyline played out in the books, especially how long it took to resolve.

Closing Thoughts

Rereading The Wheel of Time alongside the TV adaptation has been a surprising experience—part nostalgia, part reevaluation. The series remains a cornerstone of modern fantasy, but the show has, at times, exposed its weaknesses as much as it celebrates its strengths. Still, returning to these books after so many years has reminded me why they mattered in the first place, even if I now see them with clearer eyes.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? – Thomas Nagel

Having read several books on consciousness this year, I kept running into references to Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And really, who wouldn’t want to read something with a title like that? The piece itself is quite short, originally published as an article in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, but its influence far outweighs its length.

At its core, Nagel’s essay asks a deceptively simple question: even if we knew everything there is to know about a bat’s biology, neurology, and behavior, would that tell us what it is actually like to be a bat? His answer is essentially no. Bats experience the world through echolocation, a sensory mode so alien to us that we cannot meaningfully imagine it. We can describe the mechanisms, but the subjective experience—the what-it-is-like aspect—remains inaccessible.

Nagel uses this example to argue that consciousness has an irreducibly subjective component. No amount of objective, third-person description can fully capture first-person experience. This poses a serious challenge to reductive materialism, or at least to the idea that consciousness can be completely explained in purely physical terms.

The essay is important well beyond academic philosophy. It has played a significant role in discussions about animal consciousness, animal welfare, and the moral implications that follow from acknowledging subjective experience in non-human creatures. Judging by works like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, we still have a long way to go in taking those implications seriously. While those ethical questions matter, my own curiosity is mainly focused on the problem of consciousness itself—perhaps the biggest question of them all, and one that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember.

Ever since I first became seriously interested in science, and consciousness in particular, I have leaned toward materialism, even if I lacked the vocabulary to describe that position early on. The idea that the mind arises from physical processes has always seemed compelling to me, intuitive even. Reading Nagel, however, feels like encountering a carefully constructed obstacle in that path—one that cannot simply be waved away.

Looking back, I think part of my fascination with science and the mind came from science fiction. Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (L’Île mystérieuse) and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books were early favorites. Ideas like Mulan’s mind-reading abilities and the apparent inner lives of Asimov’s robots planted early questions about how minds work, what counts as thinking, and whether subjective experience could exist in non-human entities.

Nagel does not claim that materialism is false. Rather, he argues that our current physical theories may be fundamentally unsuited to explaining subjective experience. The problem, he suggests, may not be with consciousness itself, but with the conceptual tools we are using to approach it. That restraint—posing a problem without pretending to solve it—is part of what makes the essay so enduring.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? is not an easy or comforting read, despite its brevity. It leaves you with an unresolved tension: a recognition that consciousness is real, vivid, and central to our existence, and a simultaneous awareness that our best scientific explanations may never fully capture it. For anyone interested in consciousness, philosophy of mind, or the limits of scientific explanation, it remains essential reading—even fifty years on.

Agyar – Steven Brust

Agyar is something as unusual—and quietly impressive—as a vampire novel that never once uses the word vampire. Every hint is indirect, every clue oblique. Instead of being told what Agyar is, the reader is left to piece it together through small, carefully concealed references. That alone makes the novel intriguing: it reads like a mystery, where the truth slowly emerges through implication rather than exposition.

But Agyar is not just a mystery, nor merely an unconventional vampire novel. At its heart, it is also a love story—one that digs into ideas of redemption, the possibility of goodness in something fundamentally monstrous, and the question of whether love can redeem evil, or at least restrain it.

I find myself wondering how the book was originally marketed, because it would be fascinating to read it entirely cold, without knowing its genre in advance. That said, knowing that this is a vampire novel does not really diminish the experience. The pleasure lies in the journey—spotting the clues, appreciating the restraint, and watching Brust trust the reader to keep up.

As ever, Brust’s prose is a delight. Even when the story itself did not fully grip me, I found myself smiling at turns of phrase and enjoying the act of reading. With Brust, the telling is often as important as the tale being told, and Agyar is no exception.

Agyar himself is clearly not a nice man. He does horrible things, and Brust never really lets the reader forget that. Yet his constant fight against his own animal instincts—his attempts at restraint and self-control—does engender sympathy. He is not redeemed by denial of what he is, but by resistance to it. The final scenes of the book, in particular, do a great deal to redeem him in the eyes of the reader, even if they do not absolve him.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is following Agyar’s internal journey. He begins in a kind of weary indifference—to his fate, to the trap that has been set for him, and perhaps even to himself. Slowly, that indifference gives way to a need to act, fueled largely by love. Even though he is ultimately unable to fully change what is coming, the Agyar who faces his fate at the end of the book is not the same one we meet at the beginning.

Structurally, the book has a diary-like format, with each chapter presented as typed recollections of recent events. The narrative jumps around, as diaries tend to do, which adds to the slightly aimless feel of the story and mirrors Agyar’s own drifting existence. It works well thematically, even if it occasionally makes the story feel meandering.

That said, I did not find Agyar as compelling as Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels or his other Dragaeran books. I enjoyed those more overall. Still, it is always interesting to see Brust stretch himself, demonstrating the breadth of his talent and his willingness to try something different.

This does make it a difficult book to recommend. It is far from an ideal entry point for readers new to Brust, and it is probably not a great choice for someone actively seeking traditional vampire fiction. Agyar sits somewhat awkwardly between categories.

Thematically, the novel explores familiar territory: what it means to be human, questions of morality, and the blurred lines between good and evil. These are staples of good horror. While Brust does not necessarily break new ground here, the way he approaches these ideas—quietly, indirectly, and with a surprising tenderness—keeps them interesting.

As is often the case when Brust experiments, the results are mixed—at least for me. The book is unlike almost anything else I have read, which I admire, even if it does not always work. I can easily see how some readers might find it slow or even boring. Much depends on what expectations one brings into the book.

In the end, Agyar is an interesting and thoughtful experiment. It may not be my favourite Brust novel, but it is a compelling meditation on restraint, love, and redemption—and a reminder that even monsters can change, if only a little, before the end.

Reading for the Kids

Most of the reading I do for the kids happens during the school year. Once summer rolls around, routines dissolve and bedtime becomes more of a suggestion than a rule. During term time, though, reading is firmly embedded in the bedtime ritual, and these days it mainly revolves around the two youngest. The oldest can read on his own now, and finding a book that would genuinely work for all three would be a herculean task. It is hard enough to find something that both a soon-to-be six-year-old and a nine-year-old will enjoy.

Reading aloud comes with its own set of challenges.

There is the constant stream of questions. Some of them are about words they do not understand, which is good and something I actively want to encourage, even if it breaks the rhythm of the story. Others come from drifting focus, or from a need to comment on everything. It can be frustrating, but it is also part of the experience.

Then there is the difficulty of following the story when reading for two very different listeners. One has a tendency to fall asleep within five seconds, the other can produce an impressive list of reasons why sleep is impossible tonight. Some evenings we barely make it through a couple of pages. Other nights we push on despite someone clearly being asleep, because the other is still listening intently. Given that, I can understand if the story sometimes feels hard to keep track of from their perspective.

I also remember from my own childhood that listening to someone read can actually be harder than reading yourself. Attention wanders more easily. I have very vivid memories of reading as a kid, where a sentence would spark the imagination, and suddenly you would find yourself half a page further down with no idea what you had just read. I suspect the same thing happens now, just in a different form.

We recently finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which means I have now reread it for the third time, but this time for the benefit of the youngest. To try something that would appeal more to her—she has been a bit lukewarm about Harry Potter—we moved on to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They have seen the Wonka movie, but not Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We have read Matilda and Boy: Tales of Childhood, and they have seen The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, so Roald Dahl felt like a safe bet.

So far it seems to be working, even if the book is noticeably bleaker than I remembered. Children in poverty, miserable circumstances, and neglect, who somehow triumph anyway, is a recurring theme. It is not subtle, but it is powerful, and I can see why it resonates.

We will probably finish Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before the school holidays. After that, the plan is to return to Astrid Lindgren in January. Emil was a clear hit when we read it earlier, and we have dipped into Pippi Longstocking now and then with reasonable success. Revisiting Pippi feels like a good idea. I am also toying with the thought of introducing them to Just William, though I am not entirely sure how well it will land.

As with most things when it comes to reading for kids, the real challenge is not the books themselves, but timing, attention, and finding the right story at the right moment. When it works, though, it is still very much worth the effort.

Revisiting Anita Blake – Urban Fantasy’s Early Pulse and Why the Magic Faded

I started reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series sometime in the late 90s. My memory is fuzzy on the exact year, but I clearly remember hitting Obsidian Butterfly (2000) when it was only available in hardcover—always a sign that I’d caught up with a series that was still very much alive and kicking.

At the time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was arguably the coolest thing on TV, and I suspect it nudged me toward picking up Anita Blake. Long before “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” became marketing categories, Hamilton was quietly shaping both genres. In hindsight, Anita Blake was probably the seed that later pushed me to try Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files—a series that ended up being much more my style.

From Gritty Detective Horror to Paranormal Romance

What initially drew me into the Anita Blake books was the blend of detective fiction, horror, and a touch of supernatural noir. Anita worked crime scenes. She raised the dead. She hunted monsters. It felt like a gritty cousin of Buffy’s monster-of-the-week formula, but darker and more adult.

Somewhere along the line, the tone shifted. Or perhaps it was always there, simmering under the surface and I just didn’t notice until it spilled over. But by the time Narcissus in Chains rolled around, the series had fully transformed into something else—something much more romance-first and, to my tastes, far less compelling. The shift felt sudden from my perspective, even if the breadcrumbs had been there all along.

Hamilton clearly discovered her core audience and leaned into it. No shame in that, but it was no longer the series I had signed up for, and I drifted away shortly after.

Returning to Where It Started

I reread Guilty Pleasures about a decade ago, but the experience didn’t stick. More recently, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I picked up books two and three again. Maybe I wanted to see whether the early spark I remembered was still there.

The short answer: not really.

The dialogue was far more stilted than I remembered, the characters thinner, and the pace frantic enough that I occasionally felt the pages were trying to outrun me. That said, the action and horror elements still hold up remarkably well, and the violence is much more graphic than I recalled—which makes the later pivot to paranormal romance feel all the more jarring.

Book three, Circus of the Damned, also introduces Richard Zeeman, kicking off the love triangle that would eventually swallow the series whole. Perhaps I was reading these books for the wrong reasons, but that trope always grated on me.

A Curious Absence From the Screen

Given how foundational Anita Blake was to shaping early 2000s urban fantasy, it’s genuinely surprising the series never made it to TV. Had it come out ten years later, during the boom of streaming-first supernatural shows, I think it would’ve been a prime candidate for adaptation.

And honestly, I suspect a TV version would have diverged heavily from the later romance-heavy arcs and stayed closer to the early crime/horror tone—much like how The Expanse, The Witcher, and Game of Thrones were reshaped for broader audiences.

Will I Keep Rereading?

I’m not feeling the old magic, but I may still push on with another couple of books to see where the reread takes me. Even flawed rereads have a certain nostalgic gravity. And there’s something oddly comforting in revisiting the stories that shaped our reading habits, even if they land differently decades later.

Maybe that’s worth a future post in itself—why we reread, and what we expect to find when we go back.

Rediscovering Hard Science Fiction – and Why “Fantasy in Space” Doesn’t Quite Scratch the Same Itch

For a long time I drifted away from hard science fiction—at least the kind of SF driven by ideas rather than space wizards, space empires, or fantasy tropes wearing chrome-plated armour. Then last year I picked up Greg Egan’s Permutation City, and something clicked back into place. The same part of my brain that lit up as a kid reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 or Rendezvous with Rama suddenly woke up again.

There’s nothing quite like that particular flavour of SF: the big-idea, mind-bending, concept-driven storytelling where the central engine of wonder is thought itself. And yet, over the past decade, only a handful of books scratched that itch. Charles Stross’s Glasshouse did it. Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief did it. But many other “SF” titles I picked up turned out to be… something else entirely.

Fantasy in Space – And Why It Sometimes Works (and Sometimes Doesn’t)

A lot of modern speculative fiction marketed as science fiction is essentially fantasy with spaceships. I don’t say this as criticism; some of these books are among my favourites. Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series? Brilliant. C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy? Atmospheric, dark, and compelling.

But both could easily be rewritten without a single starship and they would still work just fine. Their core mechanics, worldbuilding, and themes operate independently of scientific logic. They rely on magic—explicit or implicit—not on speculative extrapolation of technology or physics.

And honestly, I often find “fantasy in space” more palatable than hybrids that try to blend the two directly. Works where magic and science operate side by side tend to break my suspension of disbelief, not because I’m a purist, but because the rules start to contradict each other. Magic that violates fundamental physics is hard to reconcile with a world that simultaneously wants me to take its science seriously.

Yes, Clarke’s Third Law tells us that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But that only helps if the magic is technology, or at least behaves like technology. If it’s just magic labeled as science, the illusion falls apart quickly.

When Magic Is Science After All

There are brilliant exceptions where the boundary between science and magic becomes the point. Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and Jack Vance’s Dying Earth both present decaying far-future worlds where what looks like magic is revealed (or strongly implied) to be technology forgotten by time.

This “magic-as-misunderstood-science” feels more honest, in a way. It leans into Clarke’s Law while preserving internal logic. And it’s far more satisfying than pretending that gravity-manipulating sorcery or soul-binding rituals somehow coexist with real-world physics.

A Personal Contradiction: Why I Still Prefer Star Wars to Star Trek

Given all this, it’s always been ironic that I prefer Star Wars over Star Trek. If anything violates the science/magic separation, it’s Star Wars. The Force is magic, plain and simple. Hyperspace travel has no scientific grounding whatsoever. And the midichlorian detour in the prequels—an attempt to rationalise the irrational—only made things worse.

And yet… I’m far more forgiving with films. Different medium, different expectations. Movies aren’t trying to build rigorous speculative frameworks. They thrive on myth, archetype, image, and emotion. Books invite slow thinking; films ask for fast feeling. So I let Star Wars be a fairy tale in space, and I don’t demand the same internal logic from it that I expect from a science-fiction novel.

Returning to the Big Ideas

Maybe this is why Permutation City hit me so hard when I picked it up last year. It reminded me how powerful idea-driven SF can be when it takes itself seriously enough to follow its implications all the way down. And how rare that experience has become.

It also reminded me that there’s space—pun unavoidable—for all of it: the hard SF that bends your brain, the fantasy that hides in a spacesuit, and even the space operas that don’t care about physics at all. But every once in a while, it’s nice to return to the works that treat science and thought experiments as their true protagonists.

Wheel of Time, Season One – Looking Back Now That the Wheel Has Stopped Turning

Back in the late 90s, long before streaming giants ruled the world, fans of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time spent countless hours dream-casting our hypothetical TV series. I imagine it was a fun exercise precisely because no one genuinely believed it would happen. The sheer scale of the world, the sprawling cast, and a plot that twisted and meandered for fourteen books made it seem almost impossible to adapt in any satisfying way.

Then A Game of Thrones arrived and rewrote the rules. Suddenly every fantasy property with even a hint of brand recognition was being eyed for adaptation. The Witcher, Shannara Chronicles, and The Wheel of Time all rode that wave—each one an attempt, to varying degrees, to capture their own version of HBO’s lightning in a bottle.

Now, with the Wheel of Time show apparently dead after its third season, I find myself revisiting that first season with mixed feelings. The show had started to find its footing—even while diverging more and more from the source material—and it’s a strange thing to see it end just as it was beginning to feel like its own creation.

The Mountain of Expectations

I’ve always approached adaptations as separate works. Even the best ones—The Expanse being a rare exception—tend to fall short when compared page-to-screen. Still, somewhere deep down I hoped the series might recapture a bit of the wonder I felt when I first read The Eye of the World now close to thirty-five years ago. Not because the books were flawless (they were absolutely not great literature, even teenage me knew that), but because they were formative.

So when Season One arrived in 2021, I watched with cautious optimism.

Early Choices: Some Sensible, Some Strange

Some adaptation choices made perfect sense. Aging up the main cast was understandable, if only to avoid continuity nightmares when young actors age faster than their characters.

But other changes were harder to swallow. Perrin being married—and then killing his wife in the first episode—felt like manufactured drama rather than meaningful storytelling. It was jarring, unnecessary, and added nothing to his character beyond shock value.

The Mat situation didn’t help either. With Barney Harris leaving mid-production, the show rewrote his arc on the fly, and it showed. I don’t envy the writers here; there was likely no good solution available, but the result was messy and fans noticed.

On the positive side, I agreed with the need to streamline. Cutting travel bloat and simplifying subplots helped the pacing considerably. The books were notoriously uneven in places, especially early on, and trimming the fat made sense.

What Season One Got Right

Up until the finale, I was genuinely enjoying the season. It balanced nostalgia with a more modern pace, and it kept enough of the spirit of the books to feel familiar. The decision to merge The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn later (in Season Two) was also smart—those novels dragged in ways that didn’t add much to the core narrative. If only we could have seen the Stone of Tear on screen.

But for the first season specifically, the show’s strongest achievement was unquestionably the Children of the Light. The books often portrayed them as cartoonishly rigid; the show gave them nuance, menace, and presence in a way Jordan never quite did.

And yes, I’m happy to say goodbye to certain things: the incessant braid-tugging, the battle-of-the-sexes banter that aged badly, and the trio of boys endlessly assuming the others understood women better. None of that needed to survive the transition.

The Finale: The Wheel Stumbles

Then came the last episode.

The pacing collapsed, major plot beats were rushed, and the internal logic seemed to evaporate. After a surprisingly strong run, the finale felt like a patchwork of ideas forced together without enough time or clarity. It wasn’t unwatchable, but it was deeply unsatisfying—and it overshadowed much of the careful work that led up to it.

Now That the Wheel Has Stopped Turning

Knowing now that the series won’t continue past Season Three adds a bittersweet layer to the whole experience. Just as the show was beginning to carve out its own identity—separate from the books but increasingly confident—it seems we won’t see where that path was leading.

I’m left with mixed feelings. Season One was uneven but promising. It stumbled at the end, but there was enough there to give me hope. And now, with the show’s turning cut short, that hope will have to remain unresolved.

Maybe I’ll revisit Seasons Two and Three in future posts. For now, Season One stands as a reminder of how difficult it is to bring a world like the Wheel of Time to screen—and how, even when the result isn’t perfect, part of me is still glad someone tried.

Five Nights at Freddy’s and a Bit of Trend Spotting

I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 with my oldest son today—mostly because he’s not quite old enough to watch it alone. Sitting there in the cinema, half following the film and half keeping an eye on his reactions, I found my mind drifting toward a few broader trends I’ve been noticing. To keep this post from sprawling into a book of its own, I’ll focus on one topic in particular: kids and reading. (Perhaps the other reflections will turn into future posts.)

Growing Up with Books vs. Growing Up with Screens

We put a lot of emphasis on getting our kids to read. With Luxembourgish schools exposing them to several languages, we don’t limit reading to only one. At home, for reasons too long to unpack here (but maybe worth a post at some point), English has become the primary family language—despite neither me nor my wife being native speakers. Unsurprisingly, English has also become the main language of reading.

When I was young, you could hardly pry books out of my hands. My wife was the same. There were long stretches of childhood when I’d spend entire afternoons—and sometimes evenings—devouring anything from fantasy novels to history books. Two or three hundred pages a day wasn’t unusual, and more on weekends.

I do think the pace of life has changed. It feels harder now for anyone—adult or child—to settle into hours of uninterrupted reading. Screens compete for attention on every front: streaming, games, phones, tablets, you name it. I had computers early on, but games were limited at first. Even later, when I had full access to Diablo, Civilization II, and anything else that would run on my trusty old PC, I kept reading. Gaming influenced my time, but it never replaced books.

Reading Aloud, Reading Together… but Not Reading Alone?

My own love of books was shaped very directly by my mother reading to me and my brother every single day. That ritual sparked the desire to read on my own, and once the spark was lit, it burned wildly. I now read to my younger kids almost every night. My youngest son constantly begs for “just one more chapter,” even when I strongly suspect it’s an elaborate bedtime-stalling tactic.

But unlike my childhood experience, the nightly reading didn’t automatically translate into them wanting to read solo. My brother never developed a love for reading either, so clearly environment isn’t everything.

The encouraging part is that my oldest son finally seems to have found his own rhythm. Completely unprompted, he’s now working his way through Sanderson’s Mistborn books—hardly the lightest material to start with. Watching that shift has made me reflect on how cyclical some of these concerns really are.

The Eternal Complaint About “Kids These Days”

Which brings me to a quote often attributed to Socrates:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority… They contradict their parents, chatter before company… and tyrannize their teachers.”

Whether or not Socrates actually said this (historians have their doubts), it perfectly captures a timeless truth: every generation is convinced the next one is doomed.

Maybe nothing fundamental has really changed. Maybe kids today aren’t less patient, less focused, or less book-inclined—they’re just growing up in a different environment, the same way we did, and the same way people did thousands of years ago. And parents—me included—will always worry, observe, overthink, and compare.

Closing Thoughts

If Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 accomplished anything beyond entertaining my son, it was giving me an excuse to reflect on these things. And seeing him voluntarily pick up hefty fantasy novels on his own feels like a reminder that interests can bloom in their own time.

Perhaps the real trend isn’t that kids have changed.

Perhaps it’s simply that we all eventually reach the age where we start sounding suspiciously like ancient philosophers.

Martha Wells’s The Rising World

I was genuinely excited when Martha Wells announced a new fantasy series. After the well-deserved success of The Murderbot Diaries, it felt like a good time to revisit the roots of why I loved her writing in the first place. My introduction to Wells came sometime in the late ’90s, when I picked up City of Bones after a glowing review. Not long after, I stumbled across a used copy of The Death of the Necromancer—my first visit to Ile-Rien—and that was it. I was hooked. Hooked enough to hunt down a hardback of The Element of Fire through abebooks.com back when the site was still a treasure map for out-of-print fantasy.

Reading pace has been a casualty of life for many years, though things have improved as the kids have gotten older. Even so, I didn’t get to The Witch King until January 2025, long after I’d bought it near release. The digital reading pile is tall and competitive.

The Witch King — Two Timelines, One Explosive Start

The Witch King begins with a literal bang—Kai awakening into chaos—and I felt almost as disoriented as he does. The story splits into two alternating timelines:

• the present, following the fallout of Kai’s abrupt return, and

• the past, chronicling his role in the rebellion against the Hierarchs.

The contrast is stark: pacing, tone, themes—almost everything differs between the two. And as often happens with books that split themselves this way, I found the past timeline more engaging for much of the first half. Its stakes felt larger, the cast more vivid, the world more textured. The present-day conspiracy only really caught my attention closer to the midpoint, when threads finally began to cohere.

By that time, I would have happily rolled straight into Queen Demon, but of course it wasn’t out yet—one of the occupational hazards of reading unfinished series. Now that it is out, I’ve finally started it… only to realise that nine months is just long enough to forget half the cast.

Queen Demon — A Promising Start

I’m only a few chapters into Queen Demon, but so far the structure mirrors the first book: a present timeline paired with a past one. Interestingly, this time it’s the present storyline that’s drawing me in, even more than the flashbacks. Perhaps this is intentional—a shift in focus now that the groundwork has been laid.

I wouldn’t recommend these books as an entry point to Martha Wells. They’re dense, filled with characters and histories that don’t always get the oxygen they need. Readers who came to Wells through Murderbot might also find the pacing and tone more challenging. Some supporting characters in the present timeline—Sanja and Tenes, for instance—didn’t feel fully realised in the first book, overshadowed by the flashback sequences and their larger-than-life figures.

Themes — Friendship, Identity, and the Shape of a World

One thing the series does beautifully is its handling of Kai himself. As a demon, he’s effectively immortal and nearly indestructible; the emotional stakes come not from threats to him but to his chosen family. His loyalty and self-sacrifice are central, and his deep friendship with Ziede may be the beating heart of the series so far.

The books are rich with queer themes—gender fluidity, nonbinary characters, queer relationships, bodies inhabited across genders, disability representation—but none of it is presented as unusual within the world. It’s simply the fabric of how these characters live. Paradoxically, given how many such elements there are, I sometimes expected them to play a more direct role in the plot. Yet I suspect the intention is to portray a world where this is simply normal, accepted, and unremarkable.

Looking Ahead

Writing this has refreshed my memory somewhat, which should help as I continue Queen Demon. I’m curious to see where Wells is taking the story now that the present timeline seems ready to step out from under the shadow of the past.

Here’s hoping the momentum holds—and that this time I don’t pause long enough to forget who everyone is again.

On the Eve of the Upside Down

 Thoughts Before the Final Season of Stranger Things

Tomorrow the last season of Stranger Things lands, and it feels strange—appropriately so—to think back on just how much the show reshaped not only Netflix but the streaming landscape as a whole. When the first season appeared in 2016, it felt genuinely fresh. Not because it reinvented the wheel, but because it demonstrated convincingly that streaming services could deliver something more than filler content or TV reruns. It was stylish, character-driven, and confident in its storytelling.

In hindsight, Stranger Things wasn’t just a show; it was a signal flare. It told the world that Netflix wasn’t merely a library, but a studio capable of producing cultural events. And it worked—spectacularly.

Unfortunately, the success also triggered the scramble that ultimately splintered the streaming world. Suddenly every media company needed its own service, and we went from the promise of “everything in one place” back to something that looks suspiciously like fragmented cable packages. Add to that the flood of rushed “original content” commissioned in the hope of capturing a fraction of Stranger Things’ magic, and much of streaming now feels like endless noise—too much content, not enough worth watching. Ironically, the show that made streaming exciting also helped fuel the content glut that made the experience exhausting.

Why Stranger Things Worked (for Me)

A lot has been written about the nostalgia factor—the 80s setting, the analog aesthetic, the bikes and arcades and D&D sessions. And while I certainly recognize that appeal, it wasn’t what hooked me. I identified with the nerdy D&D kids, sure, but nostalgia was always just a bonus.

For me it was the worldbuilding, the atmosphere, the sense that something was lurking just out of sight. I’ve always loved stories involving parallel worlds, mysterious laboratories, and the thin membrane between our everyday reality and something stranger. Stranger Things stitched all that together with characters I genuinely cared about. In some ways it echoed the ensemble dynamic of the Scooby Gang from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though without a single central protagonist—unless you count Eleven, which you arguably could.

I binged the first season almost in one sitting. It had that rare blend of pacing and mystery that made “just one more episode” feel inevitable.

The Seasons in Retrospect

Season 2 didn’t land the same way. It felt repetitive, more like a remix of the first season’s beats than a genuine progression of the story. My interest drifted a bit, and it wasn’t until Season 3—helped along by my oldest son starting the series from scratch—that I found myself pulled back in.

What surprised me most was how much darker the show became, especially by the fourth season. Stranger Things had always dipped its toes into horror, but it increasingly embraced it. I was also taken aback that the veil between the real world and the Upside Down was lifted so openly. I had assumed the mysteries of the parallel dimension would remain hidden from the broader world, as is common in this type of story. Shows like The X-Files relied on that very tension, letting audiences imagine the strange events unfolding just beneath the surface of our own supposedly familiar world.

By breaking that convention, the writers removed a major narrative constraint. And now, going into the final season, the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been—because the world knows. There’s no putting the genie (or the Demogorgon) back in the bottle.

The Cast Growing Up

One practical concern is simply that the actors have aged out of their roles. This was already somewhat evident three years ago in Season 4. It’s not the first series to face this problem, of course—Harry Potter, Boy Meets World, and countless teen dramas ran into the same issue—but I’m curious to see how they handle it here. The emotional core of Stranger Things always relied on the cast being believable as kids confronting the unimaginable. That dynamic is more complicated once everyone is visibly an adult.

Looking Toward the Finale

Despite my grumbling about the broader state of streaming, I’m genuinely excited for tomorrow. Whatever flaws the show has accumulated along the way, Stranger Things has always remained ambitious, atmospheric, and oddly earnest for something so steeped in cosmic horror.

It changed Netflix, changed streaming, and carved out its own corner of pop culture. And even if the world it helped create is now far more chaotic than the one it was born into, I’m eager to see how it all ends before the portal finally closes.

Returning to Dragaera

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Vlad Taltos series. Some of my earliest memories of hunting down rare books online involve tracking down used paperbacks of the first seven books. Athyra was particularly hard to find back then, and only the first three novels had been conveniently collected in The Book of Jhereg, and I wasn't much of a fan of trade paperbacks anyway. 

Last year I ended up re-reading everything from Jhereg through Orca. When I first encountered the series, I loved the early novels best—those where Vlad is still firmly embedded in “the organization.” Athyra, at the time, left me a bit disappointed. Coming back to it now, I’m surprised at how strong it actually is. Brust rarely writes the book you expect, but he always writes the book he means to, and on this reread I was far better prepared to appreciate the range he moves through.

Back then, Orca and Issola felt like the high point of the series. Orca in particular contains reveals I absolutely didn’t see coming, even though Brust had planted some subtle clues. When Issola came out, I had finally caught up to publication order—and then waited the long five years for Dzur. I read everything from Dzur through Vallista on release, but never returned to them afterwards, and they didn’t linger in my memory the same way the earlier novels did.

Which is probably why it took me so long to pick up Tsalmoth. When I finally did, and then moved straight into Lyorn, something clicked. Both books brought back that spark from the early days of the series. Maybe they genuinely recapture an older tone—or maybe it’s simply that I’ve changed, given my revised opinion of Athyra. It might be time to reread the later mid-series books as well, just to see how they land now.

As for Lyorn, it was a delight to see Kragar again. For years I had somehow half-believed he’d died in one of the earlier books—very in character for him to slip past my assumptions unnoticed. It’s possible I mixed him up with one of Vlad’s less fortunate associates from his exit from the organization.

What is certain, however, is that with Tsalmoth and Lyorn we’ve clearly entered the endgame. Threads that were merely whispers before are now surfacing, and I’m realizing how much I missed on my first pass through the series.

It’s been a long, winding journey—one I started decades ago with flimsy paperbacks and continues now through audio and e-books—but I’m excited to see Brust bring the Cycle to its conclusion. And a little sad, too. Series like this don’t come around often, and it’s been a privilege growing alongside it.

Returning to Old Universes: On Reading Eisenhorn

When I was young, I read an unreasonable amount of media tie-in fiction. Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, the odd Planescape paperback—those slim mass-market volumes with wonderfully lurid covers. They were inexpensive, plentiful, and set in worlds I already loved through games and daydreaming. At the time, I wasn’t especially concerned with literary merit; a tolerable plot and a few interesting characters were quite enough.

And then, sometime in my late teens, the habit simply evaporated. Other genres crowded in. I drifted toward more “serious” literature, then non-fiction, then whatever happened to cross my path. Somehow, decades slipped by without my picking up anything resembling the shared-universe fiction of my childhood.

Yet for years, I’ve heard people—smart people, readers whose taste I trust—speak highly of Dan Abnett. One friend in particular has been quietly insistent, nudging me toward his work with the confidence of someone recommending a book they know will land. So earlier this year, I finally gave in and picked up Xenos, the first of the Eisenhorn novels. Technically the series is no longer a trilogy, not with The Magos bolted on, but the original three still form a clean arc.

It’s strange to think that for all my childhood fascination with tabletop games, I never actually played Warhammer 40,000. I tried my hand at everything from ASL to Warhammer Fantasy Battles, painstakingly painting a regiment or two before my attention wandered, but 40k always remained a kind of distant planet I orbited without landing on. My only real contact with the universe came later, through the RTS games in the early 2000s—Dawn of War particularly—where bolters and chainswords felt more like atmospheric decoration than lore.

Perhaps I was nudged toward the books by the persistent background hum of news about Henry Cavill’s upcoming 40k adaptation. Having now finished the original trilogy, I find myself genuinely curious to see what becomes of that project. Cavill’s dedication to The Witcher (and to staying faithful to source material in general) gives me more confidence than I expected to have in a Warhammer screen adaptation.

As for the books themselves: I was surprised by how much I enjoyed them. Eisenhorn is far better written than I anticipated—tense, atmospheric, occasionally introspective, and full of characters who feel more layered than tie-in fiction has any obligation to provide. Gregor Eisenhorn in particular is a fascinating study in erosion: a principled man steadily worn down by the weight of necessity, secrecy, and compromise.

If the series has a weakness, it’s one shared by much action-oriented fiction: the hero’s improbable survival in the face of overwhelming odds. There were a few moments where my suspension of disbelief wobbled, and I wondered if the Emperor Himself had quietly added Eisenhorn to the psychic equivalent of a protected species list. But these moments didn’t ruin my enjoyment—at worst, they briefly pulled me out of the moment before the narrative swept me back in.

And so, with my first sip from the vast well that is the Black Library, I find myself considering another taste. Not immediately, perhaps, but soon—on a weekend when I’m in the mood for baroque Gothic futurism and fast-paced action. It’s been unexpectedly rewarding to revisit a form of fiction I abandoned decades ago, and to find that, sometimes, returning to an old genre feels less like nostalgia and more like rediscovery.

Current Reading November

 I just finished A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Earlier this year, I read Soonish by the same duo, and it left a lasting impression. That book had a delightful curiosity to it—a playful but rigorous exploration of emerging technologies—and I was eager to see what the Weinersmiths would make of the next frontier: space colonization. My interest, admittedly, is hardly abstract. With SpaceX’s recent successes, the idea of humans stepping beyond Earth feels less like distant science fiction and more like a slow, inexorable march toward reality.

In many ways, A City on Mars confirmed what I already suspected about the technical hurdles of extended space travel and planetary settlement. The challenges—propulsion, radiation shielding, life support systems—are immense, but not unknown. Where the book surprised me was in its exploration of the legal landscape. I had barely considered the treaties that govern space, or the delicate politics that might arise if nations—or private corporations—begin claiming territory off-planet. The authors’ comparisons to Antarctica and the deep seabed brought a kind of clarity: these are human spaces that are legally and morally complicated, yet astonishingly empty, and they require frameworks that anticipate both cooperation and conflict.

I found myself less concerned about the specter of a space race spiraling into war. The immediate economic incentives seem too thin to drive the sort of escalation we fear on Earth. It reminded me of discussions surrounding AI: the risks are real, yet the response cannot be to halt progress. Understanding, preparation, and careful governance seem far more productive than fear-driven inaction.

Comparing the two books, I found Soonish the more immediately engaging read. Its topics—ranging from robotics to biotech—intersect with our daily lives in ways that feel urgent and tangible. A City on Mars has a loftier scope, more speculative in nature, which made it intellectually stimulating, but in a quieter, more contemplative way. I enjoyed both, but for pure curiosity and the thrill of unexpected discoveries, Soonish remains the winner in my eyes.

As November winds down, these readings have left me reflecting on humanity’s impulses: the drive to explore, to innovate, and to imagine futures that stretch far beyond our immediate horizon. Both books serve as reminders that while technology can carry us to new worlds, it is our imagination, our governance, and our curiosity that will ultimately shape what those worlds might become.