Hugin & Munin Publishing

News broke this week that acclaimed science fiction and horror author Dan Simmons has died at the age of 77 following a stroke. Coverage can be found at Ars Technica and Locus Magazine : Ars Technica Locus Magazine Simmons was, of course, best known for the Hyperion Cantos , beginning with Hyperion in 1989. I read the series as a teenager, and I still remember the profound impact it had on me. The first book in particular remains, in my view, the strongest of the four—largely because of its unusual structure. Framed as a kind of science-fiction Canterbury Tales , it presents a series of interlocking pilgrim narratives, each distinct in tone and genre. At the time, I had never read anything quite like it. Of all the stories in Hyperion , the most haunting for me was that of Sol Weintraub and his daughter Rachel, who suffers from “Merlin’s sickness,” a condition tha...

R.F. Kuang’s Babel immediately caught my attention for its combination of Dark Academia and linguistics, two of my favorite literary obsessions. From the outset, it evokes comparisons to Lev Grossman’s The Magicians or Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , while also sharing some DNA with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History . Dark Academia, as a sub-genre, thrives on institutional settings, intellectual obsession, moral ambiguity, and the costs of brilliance—and Babel delivers all of that, with a twist. The novel’s magic system is both original and intellectually playful. Rather than spellcasting or alchemy, magic is generated by language itself: when a word in one language cannot be perfectly translated into another, the lost nuance produces a form of energy that can be harnessed. Scholars capture this power by engraving the paired words—original and imperfect translation—onto silver bars. The rarer the language, the more elusive the concept, or the more...

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 a lot of important work for the series without necessarily standing out as a clear favorite on its own. Looking back at the broader arc, it feels less like a destination and more like a bridge. Both Summer Knight and Death Masks revolve around genuinely world-altering stakes. They mark a clear transition away from “Harry Dresden, wizard-for-hire private investigator” toward something much larger: Harry as a growing power in the supernatural world, increasingly entangled in conflicts that are far beyond his ability to simply walk away from. Blood Rites sits squarely between those larger turning points. The plot is solid, revelations are plentiful, and consequences matter—but it is sandwiched between louder, more dramatic books. Part of why Blood Rites can feel slightly overshadowed is what comes after it. For m...

Steven Pinker’s Rationality is not, despite the title, a straightforward handbook on how to think logically. Instead, it is largely a catalog of the many ways humans fail to do so. The book is less about defining rationality in abstract terms and more about exposing the cognitive traps, statistical misunderstandings, and intuitive shortcuts that repeatedly lead us astray. In that sense, Rationality overlaps heavily with material familiar to anyone who has spent time reading about statistics, cognitive psychology, or the scientific method. There are few genuinely new ideas here if you are already steeped in these topics. Much of the book will feel like a well-organised refresher: confirmation bias, base-rate neglect, motivated reasoning, regression to the mean, and the many ways anecdotes override data in our minds. Pinker is very good at presenting these ideas clearly, and the book remains accessible throughout, helped by a light, sometimes playful tone that keeps it ...

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-90s blockbusters it shared space with. It delivered action, adventure, romance, and—crucially—witty, rapid-fire dialogue. 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 with sandstorms, ancient curses, and a hero who knew how to throw a punch and a one-liner. It’s tempting to see the film as a deliberate attempt to fill the Indiana Jones-shaped hole in popular cinema—and if so, it succeeded brilliantly. A (Mostly) Spoiler-Free Summary Set in the 1920s, the story follows Evelyn Carnahan, an ambitious but somewhat bookish lib...

According to Entertainment Weekly , Universal Pictures has officially announced a new Mummy sequel, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz set to return. The film is currently scheduled for release on May 19, 2028 . For many fans, this will feel both surprising and oddly inevitable. The original trilogy—beginning with The Mummy (1999)—was a defining action-adventure series of its era, blending pulp spectacle, light horror, and old-fashioned swashbuckling charm. However, the law of diminishing returns was clearly visible as the series progressed, and even more so with spin-offs such as The Scorpion King and its sequels. Late sequels to long-dormant franchises have a mixed track record. Some fail to recapture the tone or cultural moment that made the originals work in the first place. Others, while rarely matching the heights of the original films, can still deliver solid entertainment— Gladiator 2 being a recent example of a legacy sequel that found a degree of su...

The Magos occupies an interesting and slightly awkward position in Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40,000 canon. It is neither a straightforward sequel nor merely a short story collection, but something in between: a substantial novel framed and contextualised by a series of shorter works. The result is a hefty volume that feels less like a single dramatic statement and more like connective tissue binding together different eras of Eisenhorn’s long and increasingly troubled life. The book is structured around a core novel, The Magos , supported by a collection of short stories written over many years. Most of these stories focus on Gregor Eisenhorn or the consequences of his actions, reintroducing important characters and narrative threads while quietly laying groundwork for what comes later. Some feel supplemental, but a few are essential to appreciating the book as a whole. Chronologically, The Magos takes place decades after the end of Hereticus , roughly a century later....

John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher series comes from Subterranean Press, a publisher that has earned a reputation for consistently putting out interesting, well-curated speculative fiction. In general, anything with their imprint is at least worth a second look, and The Dispatcher is no exception. The series is available in ebook form via Subterranean Press , though in my case I encountered it as an audiobook—and that turned out to be a perfect fit. The stories are short, sharp, and heavily driven by dialogue, which makes them exceptionally well suited to narration. Rather than feeling like a compromise, the audio format enhances the material, to the point where it’s hard not to suspect that the stories were written with spoken performance very much in mind from the outset. One Change Is Enough The premise is deceptively simple. The world of The Dispatcher is our world, with one crucial alteration. A few years prior to the events of the story, something strange began ha...

Exciting news for fans of Baldur’s Gate 3 : a live-action TV series is officially in the works at HBO, and it’s set to continue the story from the hit game. The project is being developed by Craig Mazin—best known as co-creator of The Last of Us and Chernobyl —in partnership with Hasbro Entertainment and HBO. According to reports, the series will pick up immediately after the events of Baldur’s Gate 3 , exploring the aftermath of the game’s ending with a mix of returning and new characters. Mazin, a longtime fan of Dungeons & Dragons and Baldur’s Gate 3 , has said it’s “a dream come true” to bring the world and its characters to television, having played the game for hundreds of hours. Interestingly, Larian Studios—the developer behind Baldur’s Gate 3 —is not directly involved in the adaptation, a fact that has sparked mixed reactions from fans and even comments from the studio’s leadership. While some hope the show stays true to the original’s character depth a...

Dark is surprisingly difficult to review without spoilers. Almost anything meaningful you say risks revealing a thread that the series very carefully wants you to pull yourself. For that reason, I will limit myself to the setup established in the first few episodes, and then step back to discuss the series in more abstract terms—what it does well, why it works, and how it compares to other stories dealing with time travel. The series is set in the small German town of Winden, a place that appears entirely unremarkable at first glance. Its only distinguishing feature is a nearby nuclear power plant—an industrial presence that looms quietly over the town and its inhabitants. The story initially follows Jonas Kahnwald, a troubled teenager dealing with the recent suicide of his father, who leaves behind a mysterious letter that Jonas is explicitly instructed not to open until a specific time. Shortly thereafter, Mikkel Nielsen—the younger brother of one of Jonas’s friend...