Hugin & Munin Publishing

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 w...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 gritt...

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...

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 mor...

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 h...

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 lit...

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 ...

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 ab...

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 h...

 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 ...