Hugin & Munin Journal

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 return to the kind of fiction that first made me love her writing. My introduction to Wells came sometime in the late 1990s, when I picked up City of Bones after reading a glowing review. Not long afterwards, 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 track down a hardback of The Element of Fire through AbeBooks, back when the site still felt like a treasure map for out-of-print fantasy. The author’s copies of City of Bones and The Element of Fire by Martha Wells. Photograph by the author; cover artwork shown for purposes of commentary. My reading pace has been a casualty of life for many years, although it has improved as the children have grown older. Even so, I did not get to Witch King until Jan...

Thoughts before the final season of Stranger Things . Tomorrow morning in Europe, the first four episodes of the final season of Stranger Things arrive. It feels strange—appropriately so—to look back at how much the series came to represent, not only for Netflix but for the streaming era more broadly. When the first season appeared in 2016, Netflix had already demonstrated that streaming services could produce serious original television. House of Cards , Orange Is the New Black , Daredevil , Narcos and Sense8 had all arrived before it. Stranger Things did something slightly different. It showed that a streaming original could become a broad pop-cultural event: a series capable of producing instantly recognisable characters, imagery, music and mythology while still feeling like a coherent story rather than a calculated franchise. In that sense, it was a signal flare. Netflix was no longer merely a convenient library or even an ambitious television producer. It was becoming ...

I have always had a soft spot for the Vlad Taltos series . Some of my earliest memories of hunting down hard-to-find books online involve searching for used copies of the first seven novels. Athyra was particularly difficult to find. At that point, the only convenient omnibus I remember encountering was The Book of Jhereg , which collected the first three novels—and I was not much of a fan of trade paperbacks anyway. I wanted the small mass-market editions, preferably lined up in matching rows on a shelf. The first nine Vlad Taltos novels from the author’s shelves. The first seven are Ace mass-market paperbacks; Dragon and Issola were published by Tor Books. Photograph by the author; cover artwork shown for purposes of commentary. In 2025, I ended up rereading everything from Jhereg through Orca . When I first encountered the series, I loved the earliest novels best: the books in which Vlad is still firmly embedded in “the Organization,” running his te...

When I was young, I read an unreasonable amount of media tie-in fiction. Dragonlance , Forgotten Realms , the occasional Planescape paperback—those slim mass-market volumes with wonderfully lurid covers. They were inexpensive, plentiful and set in worlds I already knew through games and daydreaming. At the time, I was not especially concerned with literary merit. A tolerable plot, a few interesting characters and another journey into a familiar universe were quite enough. Some of the author’s TSR-era Forgotten Realms novels by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb, beginning with Azure Bonds . Photograph by the author; cover artwork shown for purposes of commentary. Then, sometime in my late teens, the habit simply evaporated. Other genres crowded in. I drifted towards more “serious” literature, then nonfiction, then whatever happened to cross my path. Somehow, decades passed without my picking up anything resembling the shared-universe fiction of my childhood. I ha...

I recently 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 in 2025, I read Soonish by the same authors, and it left a lasting impression. The books are clearly related, but they approach technological possibility from different directions. Soonish asks what may become possible and why it has not happened yet. A City on Mars asks a more uncomfortable question: even if something becomes technically possible, does that mean we are ready to do it? My interest in space settlement is hardly abstract. Falling launch costs, reusable rockets and the expansion of commercial spaceflight have made human activity beyond Earth feel less remote. But that is also the first useful correction offered by the book: improved access to space is not the same thing as a viable settlement. A rocket can transport people and equipment. It cannot by itself keep a population healthy, maintain a closed ec...