Hugin & Munin Publishing

“ Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! ” That was how science fiction author Charles Stross famously described Gideon the Ninth in a promotional blurb for the book. The full version is even better: “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! Decadent nobles vie to serve the deathless emperor! Skeletons!” Like the best blurbs, it manages to be both accurate and completely ridiculous. Readers quickly shortened the line to the now-famous meme “lesbian necromancers in space” , which spread widely across reviews and social media and became one of the most recognizable descriptions of the novel. But while the phrase is funny, it also points to something interesting. Necromancers have become one of the most flexible archetypes in modern fantasy and science fiction. Once they were almost always villains: dark wizards raising skeletons and commanding armies of the dead. But contemporary authors have expanded the concept dramatically....

Some character types never seem to leave crime fiction. One of the most persistent is the brilliant but broken detective: socially difficult, emotionally damaged, and very often drunk. Netflix’s adaptation of The Devil’s Star , released under the title Detective Hole , returns to that well-worn template with Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole. It is a familiar setup, and by now arguably an overused one, but it still works often enough that the genre keeps coming back to it. My own first encounter with this type of character was probably Robbie Coltrane as Fitz in Cracker . That remains a hard version to beat. I happened to rewatch it a year or two ago after stumbling across it on a streaming service, and it held up remarkably well: messy, abrasive, intelligent, and more believable than many later variations. Since then, the same basic archetype has appeared again and again: the alcoholic genius, the socially misaligned investigator, the detective who can solve everyone else’s problems but not his...

My first real encounter with cosmology—outside of science fiction—came surprisingly early. I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I picked up The Collapsing Universe by Isaac Asimov. In Swedish it was titled Svarta hål och kosmiska ägg (“Black Holes and Cosmic Eggs”), which, in hindsight, might be one of the most wonderfully strange titles imaginable for a middle school student browsing a library shelf. I found it while preparing a five-minute school presentation—and ended up reading the entire book twice. When the day came to present, I enthusiastically talked about stellar fusion in the Sun, how stars evolve over time, and how massive stars can collapse into neutron stars or black holes. Looking back, I suspect most of my classmates were completely lost somewhere between hydrogen fusion and gravitational collapse. But I also remember the teacher seeming impressed, which probably reinforced the feeling that I had stumbled onto something exciting. More i...

Coming back to Moon Called , the first book in the Mercy Thompson series, as part of a broader urban fantasy reread has been a slightly strange experience. Not because the book is bad—it isn’t. But because it sits in a space that feels increasingly like a transition point in the genre. Not quite the earlier, investigation-driven urban fantasy of the 90s and early 2000s, but not fully aligned with the more relationship-centered direction that would come to dominate later. And on reread, that in-between quality becomes much more visible. A Surprisingly Sharp Opening One of the first things that stood out is just how violent the opening is. A throat torn out. A head blown apart. Several deaths within the first few chapters. I had remembered Moon Called as softer—and in a sense it is, especially compared to the early Anita Blake books—but that seems to be more a matter of tone than content. The violence is there; it just doesn’t linger in quite the same way. It’s a reminde...

I’ve found myself drifting back into a reread of urban fantasy from the late 90s and early 2000s— Moon Called , Anita Blake , The Dresden Files . Part nostalgia, part curiosity. What, exactly, did these books feel like at the time? And more importantly: what still holds up? This isn’t meant as a comprehensive history of the genre—just a look at what changes when you come back to it years later. Because somewhere along the way, urban fantasy seems to have shifted—quietly, gradually—from something closer to noir investigation with monsters into something else entirely. One person, one case, one dangerous world. Faith, Religion, and the Need for Rules One of the first things that stands out on reread is the persistent presence of religion and faith. Crosses repel vampires. Faith protects. Belief has power. It’s a strange feature if you stop to think about it. Why does a genre already built on magic, werewolves, and vampires feel the need to anchor itself in som...

Slay the Spire may seem deceptively simple—right up until you realize how much of modern game design it quietly reshaped. There were roguelikes before Slay the Spire , and there were deckbuilders before it as well. But when MegaCrit released Slay the Spire in 2017 (early access) and fully in 2019, it felt like something clicked. The game didn’t invent the idea of combining roguelike structure with card-based combat—but it refined and popularized it to such a degree that it effectively defined a modern subgenre. In the years that followed, we saw an explosion of deckbuilding roguelites: Monster Train , Griftlands , Inscryption , Across the Obelisk , Menace from the Deep , and even oddball hybrids like Balatro . Some lean toward spectacle ( Inscryption ), others toward complexity and long-term systems ( Across the Obelisk ), or speed and efficiency ( Monster Train ). But the underlying rhythm—fight, reward, adapt—remains unmistakably rooted in Slay the Spire . It e...

Some sequels expand a story. Others accelerate it. Golden Son  does something more unsettling: it removes the sense that anything can still be controlled, even by the people driving events. Where  Red Rising  is structured—moving through betrayal, transformation, and the closed system of the Institute— Golden Son  opens in motion. Two years have passed. Darrow is finishing the Academy. There is no reintroduction, no gradual rebuilding of stakes. The story begins mid-stride and immediately compounds its own momentum. It does not feel like a middle book. It feels like something already spiraling. From Game to System Part of what made  Red Rising  compelling was clarity. The Institute, for all its brutality, was legible: a bounded system with rules, alliances, and outcomes that could be anticipated, even if not controlled. Golden Son  dissolves that structure. The story expands outward into fleets, politics, and layered loyalties...

Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold is a revenge story, and not a subtle one. From the moment the premise becomes clear it’s obvious what tradition the book is drawing from. This is, in many ways, a grimdark retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo : betrayal, survival against impossible odds, and a long, methodical march through a list of enemies. That idea alone made the book immediately appealing to me. Revenge stories can be extremely satisfying when done well, and Monte Cristo is one of the classics of the genre. Abercrombie’s take on the formula promises something darker and more cynical: revenge stripped of romance and viewed through the lens of the brutal world he established in the First Law trilogy. The result is an entertaining but slightly uneven entry in the series. The Setup Best Served Cold takes place after the events of the original First Law trilogy and is the first of three stand-alone novels set in the same universe. The protagonist is Monzca...

I’ve always been fascinated by the space race of the 1960s. The sheer audacity of it. The question of why we haven’t been back to the Moon in over half a century. The way the dream of routine space travel seemed tantalizingly close in the 1980s—only to fade toward the turn of the millennium—before being reignited by the Mars missions, the landing of Curiosity , and eventually the rise of private space companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab . It’s a strange and exciting time to be alive. But to understand where we are now, it helps to revisit where it all began. And that’s where John Strausbaugh’s The Wrong Stuff comes in. The Soviet Story We Didn’t Grow Up With Most Western narratives of the space race are, unsurprisingly, American. Mercury. Gemini. Apollo. The triumph of Apollo 11 . Neil Armstrong. “One small step.” But The Wrong Stuff flips the lens. Strausbaugh tells the story of the space race primarily from the Soviet side, and in doing so, he brings to li...

Season 3 of The Night Agent delivers what the show has trained us to expect: conspiracies layered within conspiracies, shifting loyalties, and a central plot that both stands on its own and feeds into a larger, ongoing arc. At a high level, the premise remains familiar. Peter Sutherland is once again pulled into a web of national security threats, political manipulation, and shadow networks operating just beneath the surface of official Washington. The season deepens existing threads rather than rebooting the story, continuing to build the sense that we are watching one long, unfolding conflict rather than a series of disconnected crises. Without venturing into spoilers, Season 3 centers on a high-stakes intelligence threat that forces Peter and his allies into uneasy partnerships. Old secrets resurface. Characters we thought we understood reveal new dimensions. And, as always, nothing is quite what it seems. Twists, Turns, and the Cost of Cleverness There are un...

I picked up Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll partly out of curiosity and partly out of lingering confusion. Quantum mechanics has always been one of those areas where the explanations feel simultaneously elegant and deeply unsatisfying. The math works, the predictions are incredibly accurate, but when you ask what is actually happening underneath the equations, the answers often get vague very quickly. Carroll’s book tries to tackle exactly that question. Rather than focusing on the practical side of quantum mechanics—the calculations physicists use to predict outcomes—he dives into the underlying interpretations of the theory. Most notably, he spends a large portion of the book defending the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the idea that every quantum event causes the universe to split into multiple branches where all possible outcomes occur. It’s an idea that sounds almost absurd the first time you hear it. But what I appreciated about the book is that Carroll approaches i...