Hugin & Munin Publishing

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 ...