Hugin & Munin Journal

Fantasy has always had too many orphans. The child raised by unpleasant relatives. The foundling discovered at the edge of a forest. The farm boy whose father never speaks about the past. The girl carrying a pendant that belonged to a mother nobody will discuss. Somewhere along the journey, an old retainer notices a familiar face, a sealed letter is opened, or a dying wizard reveals what several adults have apparently known for years: the insignificant child is the lost heir, the final descendant, the rightful bearer of a name that once mattered. The obvious explanation is practical. Dead parents cannot forbid the quest, demand that the protagonist return before dark, or ask why a twelve-year-old has been entrusted with the survival of the kingdom. Orphanhood gives a young character freedom that would otherwise require implausibly negligent adults. Convenience explains why the trope is useful, but not why fantasy so often fills the space left by the parents with royal ancestry, m...

The Killing Dance , the sixth Anita Blake novel, has plenty of plot. What it lacks is a single case capable of organising everything else around it. Someone has put half a million dollars on Anita's head; Richard's struggle with Marcus is reaching its conclusion; Jean-Claude is becoming increasingly difficult to keep at romantic distance; and Anita's own supernatural abilities are starting to behave in ways nobody quite understands. After Bloody Bones pulled the procedural engine back into the foreground , The Killing Dance lets all the competing elements of the series crowd the stage at once. The assassination mystery is good, and once the person behind it becomes clear, the motive and earlier pieces fit together satisfyingly. It simply never controls the novel in the way the investigation did in its predecessor. This time Anita is less the detective than the case to be solved. That makes The Killing Dance messier than Bloody Bones , but also more consequential. Ani...

Official poster for Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). © 2017 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and LSC Film Corporation. Used for purposes of review and commentary. Watching the Spider-Man films with the kids has produced our first serious disagreement. They preferred Spider-Man: Homecoming to Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3 , although the original Tobey Maguire film remains their favourite. I went almost exactly the other way. Homecoming is funnier, cleaner and easier to follow than the later Sam Raimi films—and, to me, less interesting. The reasons have less to do with Tom Holland than with what happened to Spider-Man when he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Raimi's films could be melodramatic, excessive and occasionally ridiculous, but they built Peter Parker's story around guilt, responsibility, romance and personal failure. Homecoming strips much of that away and replaces it with something more controlled: a high-school comedy about an enth...

Spoiler warning: This essay contains major spoilers for Memento , Before I Go to Sleep , Soldier of the Mist , and 50 First Dates . Memory loss in fiction usually points backward. A character wakes without a name or history, and the plot becomes an excavation of the person they used to be. Anterograde amnesia creates the opposite problem: the past may remain partly intact, but new experience cannot reliably become part of an accessible autobiography. The person still has experiences. Conversations happen, decisions are made, relationships change, and consequences accumulate. What fails is the ordinary process by which those events become part of a life story that can later be recalled and revised. Christopher Nolan’s Memento turns this condition into a detective story. Leonard Shelby knows his name, remembers his wife, and understands the world around him. He can reason, speak, and pursue a goal, but he cannot preserve a continuous account of what he has recently learned. He a...

Cover image: Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers, HarperCollins US paperback edition. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. I read Dorothy L. Sayers’ Whose Body? a couple of years ago and was more impressed than I expected to be. Its combination of Lord Peter Wimsey’s frivolity with a surprisingly gruesome mystery made the book feel stranger than my vague idea of Golden Age detective fiction had suggested. Clouds of Witness , the second Wimsey novel, did not hit quite as hard. The mystery kept me guessing almost until the end, but I am not convinced it gave me enough information to have solved it. What surprised me is that this mattered less than it should have. Published in 1926, the book is now almost exactly a century old, and the social world surrounding the murder has become almost as interesting as the murder itself. That gives Clouds of Witness a second function it did not originally need. It remains an entertaining detective story, but it is also an acci...

Spoiler warning: This essay contains major spoilers for Remember Me , Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic , Recursion and There Is No Antimemetics Division . Imagine waking with a new memory—not a vague image or uncertain impression, but a complete recollection. You remember a friend betraying you. You remember forgiving someone who never apologised. You remember choosing a career, ending a relationship or committing an act that changed the direction of your life. The memory fits. It explains things. Perhaps it explains them better than the version you held yesterday. Would you know that it had been inserted? Fiction often assumes that an altered memory would feel artificial. The victim notices a seam, experiences a flash of contradiction or senses that something authentic remains buried beneath the replacement. The original past survives somewhere inside, waiting to reassert itself through dreams, bodily reactions or a sufficiently dramatic confrontation. A badly integr...