Hugin & Munin Journal

Dan Simmons died on 21 February 2026 in Longmont, Colorado, at the age of 77. His family obituary confirmed that his wife, Karen, and daughter, Jane, were at his side; Ars Technica reported that his death followed a stroke. The news returned me not first to a list of awards or a summary of his career, but to Hyperion . I read the series as a teenager, and few books from that period of my life remain quite so vivid. Simmons wrote across science fiction, horror, historical fiction and thrillers, but for me his name will always summon a group of pilgrims travelling towards the Time Tombs—and the stories they tell along the way. Author photograph: Dan Simmons. Source: Hachette Book Group . Used here for biographical commentary. The Book That Stayed Simmons was best known for the four-volume Hyperion Cantos, beginning with Hyperion in 1989. The novel went on to win the 1990 Hugo Award for best novel , but its importance to me was never primarily a matter of prizes....

R. F. Kuang’s Babel immediately caught my attention through its combination of dark academia and linguistics, two of my favourite literary obsessions. Its nearest relatives are easy to recognise: the enclosed academic world and moral corrosion of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History , combined with something of the scholarly alternative history of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell . But Babel does more than insert magic into Oxford. Its central achievement is to make scholarship itself part of the imperial machinery. Language creates power, Oxford controls the language, and the people most capable of producing that power are recruited from the cultures Britain intends to dominate. Spoiler note: This review discusses the broad direction and moral framing of the final third, but avoids detailed plot revelations. Cover image: Babel by R. F. Kuang, published by Harper Voyager. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Magic Made from Translati...

Blood Rites occupies an interesting—and slightly awkward—position in Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files . It is very much a connecting novel, a book that does important work for the series without necessarily standing out as a clear favourite on its own. Looking at the broader arc, it initially feels less like a destination and more like a bridge. That description is accurate, but incomplete. Blood Rites may be quieter than the novels surrounding it, yet it permanently rearranges Harry’s personal world. It turns supernatural politics into family history, converts earlier decisions into continuing consequences, and leaves Harry with relationships he can no longer keep at a safe professional distance. Warning: This review contains major spoilers for Blood Rites and minor references to later books in the series. Cover image: Blood Rites by Jim Butcher, published by Roc. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Between the Larger Books Both Summer Knight ...

Steven Pinker’s Rationality is not, despite the title, simply a handbook on how to think logically. It does explain the tools humans have developed for reasoning more reliably—logic, probability, statistics, Bayesian updating, and causal inference. But its recurring subject is the gap between possessing those tools and actually using them. Cover image: Rationality by Steven Pinker, published by Penguin Books. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. In that sense, the book is part primer and part catalogue of failure. Its most interesting question is not merely what rationality means in the abstract, but why a species capable of inventing extraordinarily powerful methods of reasoning so often falls back on intuition, anecdote, tribal loyalty, and whatever explanation feels right first. Familiar Ground, Clearly Mapped Rationality overlaps heavily with material familiar to anyone who has spent time reading about statistics, cognitive psychology, or the s...

When The Mummy hit cinemas in 1999, it already felt nostalgic—like a lavish modern remake of a lost matinee serial. There was something unmistakably old-fashioned about it, closer in spirit to The Sea Hawk starring Errol Flynn than to the late-1990s blockbusters it shared space with. It delivered action, adventure, romance, and—crucially—witty, rapid-fire dialogue. DVD cover/poster artwork for The Mummy (1999). Used here for purposes of review and commentary. At the time, the most obvious comparison was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade . A full decade had passed since Indy’s last outing, and there was no clear sign that the fedora would return. Into that vacuum stepped The Mummy , swaggering confidently into sandstorms, ancient curses, and a hero who knew how to throw both a punch and a one-liner. The resemblance was not accidental. Sommers turned Universal’s old monster property into a romantic action-horror hybrid, and members of the cast later recalled the ...

When this article first appeared in February 2026, Universal Pictures had just confirmed a new Mummy sequel with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz returning as Rick and Evelyn O’Connell. The studio had initially scheduled the film for May 19, 2028 . That date has already changed. Universal now lists the film for October 15, 2027 , bringing its resurrection forward by seven months. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett—the filmmaking duo commonly known as Radio Silence—are directing from a screenplay by David Coggeshall. John Hannah has also been confirmed to return as Jonathan Carnahan. The project still has no official title, which makes The Mummy 4 useful shorthand rather than a confirmed name. More importantly, the returning cast does not yet tell us what kind of film this will be. The interesting question is not whether Fraser, Weisz and Hannah can generate nostalgia. They plainly can. It is whether a legacy sequel can recover the peculiar tonal balance that made the origin...

Dan Abnett’s The Magos occupies an interesting and slightly awkward position within the Eisenhorn series. It is neither simply a fourth novel nor merely a short-story collection. It is both: twelve shorter works gathered into a casebook, followed by a substantial new novel that depends upon the history they establish. That awkward structure is also the book’s method. Read in sequence, the stories turn Eisenhorn’s past into evidence. Decisions that once appeared to be isolated necessities begin to form a pattern, and when the main novel finally removes Eisenhorn’s first-person narration, the reader is forced to consider what that pattern looks like from the outside. Cover image: The Magos by Dan Abnett, published by Black Library. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. A Novel Inside a Casebook The volume collects twelve stories written across many years before arriving at the full-length novel itself. Some follow Eisenhorn directly, while other...

John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher series begins with one impossible change and follows its consequences with unusual discipline. People who are intentionally killed almost always return to life. Everything else about the world remains recognisably our own. That single alteration is enough to reorganise medicine, crime, insurance and the meaning of murder. It also creates a new profession: licensed killers whose work may be an act of mercy. I encountered the stories as audiobooks, which turned out to be the form for which they were originally designed. The first instalment appeared as an Audible Original in 2016, narrated by Zachary Quinto; the Subterranean Press print and ebook editions followed in 2017. The two later stories also appeared in audio first, with Quinto returning each time. Cover image: The Dispatcher by John Scalzi, published by Subterranean Press. Cover art by Vincent Chong. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. One Change Is Enough...

On February 5, 2026, HBO announced that it was developing a Baldur’s Gate drama with Hasbro Entertainment. Craig Mazin—the creator of Chernobyl and co-creator of HBO’s The Last of Us —is attached to create, write, executive-produce and serve as showrunner. The project is intended to continue the story after Baldur’s Gate 3 rather than retell the game directly. That makes it more interesting than a conventional adaptation, but also considerably more difficult. The central problem is not how to reproduce the Sword Coast, the monsters or the magic. It is how to continue a story that deliberately has no single ending. Image from Baldur’s Gate 3 showing Lae’zel. Game developed by Larian Studios. Used here for purposes of commentary. A Sequel to a Story with No Single Ending The reported plan is to introduce new protagonists while allowing characters from Baldur’s Gate 3 to return. That is probably the only workable approach. Recreating the game’s entire...

Dark is surprisingly difficult to review without spoilers. Almost anything meaningful you say risks revealing a thread that the series carefully wants you to pull for yourself. This review therefore discusses only the premise established during the opening episodes before stepping back to consider what the series does with time travel, mystery and causality. What makes Dark exceptional is not that it somehow avoids the paradoxes inherent in time-travel fiction. It chooses a largely deterministic model and treats those paradoxes as the conditions under which its characters live. Time travel is not an escape from consequence. It is the machinery that creates and preserves it. Promotional image for Netflix’s Dark , created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Winden and the First Impossible Fact The series is set in Winden, a small German town that initially appears unremarkable apart from the nuclear power ...