Hugin & Munin Journal

“Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! Decadent nobles vie to serve the deathless emperor! Skeletons!” Charles Stross’s promotional blurb for Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth works because it is simultaneously accurate and absurd. Usually shortened to “lesbian necromancers in space,” the longer version better captures the novel’s collision of gothic horror, imperial politics, skeletons and irreverent science fiction. The phrase also points towards something larger. The stock fantasy necromancer is an immediately recognisable villain: a solitary figure violating graves, enslaving souls and raising armies that should have remained dead. The books considered here do not abandon that history. They organise it. Necromancy becomes a body of specialised knowledge, an inherited office, a professional obsession or an instrument of state power. The danger no longer belongs only to an outsider breaking society’s rules. Sometimes society has rules for necromancy bec...

Crime fiction has never lacked brilliant investigators who are incapable of managing their own lives. They see patterns that escape everyone around them, violate ordinary social expectations and repeatedly injure the people closest to them. Very often, they also drink. Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole returns to this familiar figure through Harry Hole, the Norwegian homicide detective played by Tobias Santelmann. The nine-episode Netflix series adapts The Devil’s Star , the fifth Harry Hole novel, with Nesbø serving as creator and showrunner. The series does not reinvent the broken-detective archetype. What it reveals, perhaps more clearly than it intends, is the bargain that has allowed the archetype to survive. Harry’s damage must be serious enough to make him tragic, dangerous and dramatically complicated, but it cannot be allowed to destroy the brilliance on which the mystery depends. Addiction may ruin the detective’s relationships, career and physical safety. His deductions remain ...

My first real encounter with cosmology—outside science fiction—came surprisingly early. I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I picked up Isaac Asimov’s The Collapsing Universe . In Swedish it was called 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 schoolchild browsing a library shelf. I found it while preparing a five-minute classroom presentation and ended up reading the entire book twice. The books that followed trace more than an expanding interest in cosmology and theoretical physics. They record a change in what I expected science to give me. I began with the sense that the universe was full of astonishing answers waiting to be explained. Later, I became more interested in how we distinguish an explanation from an elegant possibility. The movement was not from wonder to disillusionment. It was from wonder to uncertainty—and eventually to the recognition that unce...

Returning to Patricia Briggs’s Moon Called , the first Mercy Thompson novel, as part of a broader urban fantasy reread has been a slightly strange experience. The book is still enjoyable. What feels strange is how neatly it complicates the distinction I was trying to draw between older, investigation-driven urban fantasy and the more relationship-centred fiction that became increasingly prominent around it. Moon Called contains a murder, an abduction, hidden experiments and a conspiracy that must be uncovered. It is recognisably a supernatural mystery, but Mercy does not solve it as an isolated detective following a clean chain of clues. She moves through a neighbouring alpha, the pack that raised her, a former lover, a vampire customer, a fae mentor and several communities that trust her only partially. The relationships do not interrupt the case. They make the case solvable. Spoiler note: This review discusses the novel’s opening deaths, the kidnapping plot and the broad struct...

I have found myself drifting back into urban fantasy from the 1990s and 2000s: the early Anita Blake novels, The Dresden Files , Moon Called and several of the series that followed them. Part nostalgia, part curiosity. What did these books feel like when I first encountered them? And what still holds up? This is not a comprehensive history of urban fantasy. The genre was never one thing, and even the books I am rereading do not form a clean chronological sequence. Moon Called , for example, appeared in 2006, while the first Anita Blake novel dates from the previous decade. But across this particular strand of the genre, a shift is visible. The monsters did not disappear. The mysteries did not vanish. What changed was the source of narrative gravity. In many of the books I remember most clearly, the supernatural first appeared as an external problem: a corpse, a predator, a case, something hidden in the city that had to be identified and stopped. In the later and adjacent fantasy...

Slay the Spire looks deceptively simple: climb a tower, play cards, defeat monsters and try again when the run collapses. Its influence becomes clearer when you look at how many later games now speak its design language. There were roguelikes before it, deckbuilders before it and even earlier games that combined the two. What Slay the Spire accomplished was not invention from nothing. It refined the mixture until the parts seemed inseparable and, in doing so, established the template for a modern subgenre. The decisive idea was not merely card-based combat. It was adaptation under uncertainty. The game rarely lets you construct the exact deck you imagined in advance. It gives you cards, relics, routes and risks in an unpredictable order, then asks whether you can recognise what this particular run is becoming before it kills you. Slay the Spire  starting screen. Gameplay screenshot captured by the author. A Template Rather Than an Invention Mega Crit rele...