Hugin & Munin Journal

When Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time began, I decided to reread the books alongside it. The original plan was simple: finish the relevant novels before each season arrived, notice the divergences and see whether the adaptation captured what had made the series matter to me in the first place. I did not always keep pace. Nor did the programme follow the books closely enough for each season to have one obvious corresponding volume. Season Three, for example, was adapted primarily from The Shadow Rising , but it redistributed characters, combined storylines and borrowed selectively from elsewhere. By the time I wrote this in December 2025, Prime Video had also cancelled the series after its third season . What began as a reread alongside an ongoing adaptation had unexpectedly become a comparison with an unfinished one. That comparison has still proved useful. An adaptation does not merely reveal what has been changed. It can expose the structure of the original: which scenes carry ...

Having read several books about consciousness in 2025, I kept encountering references to Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? . And really, who would not want to read something with a title like that? The piece itself is brief. The original paper appeared in The Philosophical Review in October 1974 and runs to only sixteen pages. Its influence far outweighs its length. Cover image: What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel, fiftieth-anniversary edition published by Oxford University Press. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. The Question Behind the Bat Nagel begins from a deceptively simple proposal: an organism is conscious when “there is something it is like” to be that organism. Consciousness is not merely the ability to react, process information or display intelligent behaviour. It includes how existence feels from the organism’s own point of view. Bats make the problem unusually vivid. They are mammals, close enough to us ...

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 assemble the truth from his habits, appetites and carefully controlled recollections. That restraint is more than a clever device. It shapes the entire novel. Agyar is telling his own story, and the things he avoids naming matter almost as much as those he chooses to reveal. Cover image: Agyar by Steven Brust, published by Tor Books. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. The pleasure is therefore not really in discovering that Agyar is a vampire. Most readers will know that before opening the book, and the clues soon leave little room for doubt. The more interesting mystery is what kind of man—or monster—is constructing this account, and how much sympathy his version of events deserves. Agyar is also a love story, although not a re...

Most of the reading I do for the children happens during the school year. Once summer arrives, routines dissolve and bedtime becomes more of a suggestion than a rule. During term time, however, reading is firmly embedded in the evening ritual. These days, that ritual mainly involves the two youngest. The oldest reads independently now—something I had recently begun to reflect on when writing about the difference between reading together and learning to read alone . Finding one book that would genuinely work for all three children would be a Herculean task. It is difficult enough to find something that both a soon-to-be-six-year-old and a nine-year-old will enjoy. Reading aloud is therefore less a matter of selecting the best children’s books than of matching a particular story to particular listeners. Age matters, but so do mood, attention, tiredness and the complicated politics of bedtime. Reading for Two Different Listeners There is the constant stream of questions. Some ar...

I started reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series sometime in the late 1990s. My memory is vague about the exact year, but I clearly remember reaching Obsidian Butterfly in 2000, when it was only available in hardback. That was always the clearest sign that I had caught up with a series that was still very much alive. At the time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the most exciting things on television, and I suspect it nudged me towards Guilty Pleasures . Anita was another young woman confronting vampires and monsters, although Hamilton’s world was darker, bloodier and considerably more adult. The term “urban fantasy” already existed, but the genre had not yet acquired the commercial visibility or familiar formula it would develop during the following decade. Hamilton did not invent supernatural detective fiction, but Anita Blake helped shape the particular mixture of crime, horror, romance and openly supernatural society that later became one of the genre’s dominant ...

For a long time, I drifted away from hard science fiction—or, more precisely, from the kind of science fiction in which a speculative idea is not merely part of the scenery but the engine of the story. Then, in 2024, I picked up Greg Egan’s Permutation City , and something clicked back into place. The same part of my brain that lit up when I was young and reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Rendezvous with Rama suddenly woke up again. There is nothing quite like that particular flavour of science fiction: big ideas, unnerving thought experiments and stories in which the central engine of wonder is thought itself. Charles Stross’s Glasshouse gave me that feeling. So did Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief . Plenty of other books marketed as science fiction were enjoyable, but they were asking something different of me. They offered space wizards, interstellar empires or fantasy tropes wearing chrome-plated armour. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of th...

Back in the late 1990s, long before streaming services ruled television, fans of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time spent countless hours dream-casting a hypothetical adaptation. It was an enjoyable exercise precisely because few of us genuinely expected it to happen. The fourteen-volume main series contained an enormous cast, several cultures, multiple interlocking forms of magic and a plot that could move with tremendous force before wandering into extended stretches of repetition. Adapting it faithfully seemed impossible. Adapting it selectively risked removing the very accumulation that made its best moments work. Then Game of Thrones arrived and changed the commercial calculation. Expensive fantasy television no longer looked like an eccentric gamble. Properties such as The Shannara Chronicles , The Witcher and eventually The Wheel of Time entered development in an industry newly convinced that epic fantasy could attract a mass audience. Promotional ima...

I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 with my oldest son today, mostly because he was not quite ready to watch it alone. Sitting in the cinema, half following the film and half watching his reactions, my mind drifted towards several broader trends I have been noticing. To keep this post from turning into a book of its own, I will focus on one of them: children and reading. Promotional poster for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 , released by Universal Pictures and produced by Blumhouse. Used here for purposes of commentary. Growing Up with Books and Screens We put considerable emphasis on encouraging our children to read. Luxembourgish schools expose them to several languages, so we do not restrict reading to one. At home, English has become the main family language, although neither my wife nor I is a native speaker. Unsurprisingly, it has also become the language in which most of their voluntary reading happens. When I was young, it was difficult to pry a book...