Reviews

This page collects Hugin & Munin reviews of books, films, television, and games. It is organized for browsing rather than as a raw archive: books are grouped by broad type and, where possible, listed alphabetically by author.

Some entries are strict reviews; others are rereads, adaptation notes, or review-adjacent essays built around a specific work or series.

Book Reviews

Fiction, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

• Joe Abercrombie — Best Served Cold — Grimdark revenge, moral exhaustion, and Abercrombie’s brutal variation on The Count of Monte Cristo.
• Dan Abnett — Eisenhorn — A return to Abnett’s Warhammer 40,000 inquisitor novels and their mix of faith, corruption, investigation, and imperial decay.
• Dan Abnett — The Magos — A look at how The Magos extends the long shadow of Eisenhorn and the appeal of Abnett’s grim investigative SF.
• Lois McMaster Bujold — The Assassins of Thasalon — A Penric and Desdemona review about small stories, accumulated meaning, and Bujold’s late-series craftsmanship.
• Patricia Briggs — Blood Bound — Mercy Thompson, vampires, violence, and the theological problem of evil inside urban fantasy.
• Patricia Briggs — Moon Called — The first Mercy Thompson novel as crime story, relationship web, and early-2000s urban fantasy template.
• Patricia Briggs — Iron Kissed — Mercy Thompson, survival, trauma, and the limits of returning to normal after violence.
• Pierce Brown — Golden Son — The Red Rising sequel as acceleration, escalation, and the point where revolutionary momentum turns dangerous.
• Pierce Brown — Red Rising — Revenge, empire, violence, and the making of a revolutionary monster.
• Steven Brust — Agyar — A vampire novel built around voice, seduction, and the slow recognition of what kind of story is being told.
• Steven Brust — Vlad Taltos / Dragaera — A return to Brust’s Dragaera books and the pleasures of old fictional universes that still have room to move.
• Jim Butcher — Blood Rites — The Dresden Files in transition, balancing noir, monsters, family revelations, and long-series momentum.
• Jim Butcher — Dead Beat — The Dresden Files reaches a stronger balance of mystery, escalation, character, and long-series momentum.
• Jim Butcher — Proven Guilty — A Dresden Files mystery built around incomplete evidence, missing pieces, and the consequences of what Harry cannot yet see.
• Jim Butcher — White Night — A stronger central mystery weighed against a Dresden novel whose larger machinery works less well.
• Jim Butcher — Harry Dresden reread — A broader reread check-in on The Dresden Files: what still works, what has aged, and why the peak may still lie ahead.
• Seth Dickinson — The Traitor Baru Cormorant — Empire, complicity, economics, and the poisonous logic of trying to defeat a system from inside it.
• William Gibson — Neuromancer — A return to the origin point of cyberpunk and the strange afterlife of a future that partly came true.
• Laurell K. Hamilton — The Lunatic Cafe — Anita Blake at the point where monster investigation, supernatural politics, and the relationship triangle begin to collide.
• Laurell K. Hamilton — Bloody Bones — Anita Blake returns to bodies and investigation, while the series can no longer fully return to its earlier shape.
• R.F. Kuang — Babel — Dark academia, translation, empire, and the ethics of knowledge.
• Seanan McGuire — A Local Habitation — October Daye as locked-room mystery, fae politics, and the limits of urban fantasy investigation.
• Seanan McGuire — An Artificial Night — October Daye turns toward dark fairy tale, childhood terror, and mythic confrontation.
• Seanan McGuire — Rosemary and Rue — A reread of the first October Daye novel and the foundations of McGuire’s faerie-noir series.
• Seanan McGuire — Late Eclipses — October Daye becomes increasingly about accumulated choices, loyalties, and consequences rather than isolated cases.
• Seanan McGuire — One Salt Sea — October Daye turns belonging, loyalty, and attachment into sources of danger.
• Seanan McGuire — Ashes of Honor — A look at how an increasingly capable Toby Daye can still be threatened without simply escalating the opposition.
• Brandon Sanderson — Legion: Skin Deep — Identity, dialogue, mental architecture, and Sanderson’s compact speculative thriller mode.
• John Scalzi — The Dispatcher — A murder mystery built around one altered rule of death, and the social logic that follows from it.
• Martha Wells — The Rising World / The Witch King — Martha Wells’s recent fantasy as worldbuilding, power, memory, and the difficulty of entering a dense imagined world.

Nonfiction

• Bryan Caplan — The Myth of the Rational Voter — Voter irrationality, democratic incentives, and what it means when electorates get the outcomes they choose.
• Sean Carroll — Something Deeply Hidden — Many-worlds quantum mechanics, explanation, and the limits of intuitive understanding.
• Richard Dawkins — River Out of Eden — A compact review of Dawkins’s gene-centered account of evolution and the larger territory it points toward.
• Harry G. Frankfurt — On Bullshit — Frankfurt’s short philosophical essay on truth, indifference, and the difference between lying and bullshit.
• Robin Hanson — The Age of Em — A review-adjacent essay on copied minds, emulated workers, and one of the stranger possible futures of intelligence.
• Sam Kean — The Icepick Surgeon — Science, ethics, ambition, and the darker incentives behind discovery.
• Marc Levinson — The Box — Containerization, logistics, globalization, labour disruption, and the hidden machinery of modern trade.
• Michael Lewis — Liar’s Poker — Wall Street culture, incentives, risk, and the prehistory of modern finance.
• Eric Berger — Liftoff — SpaceX’s early engineering risks, organizational pressure, and the fragile path to private spaceflight.
• Eric Berger — Reentry — SpaceX’s transition from proving reusable rockets could work to turning launch capability into routine infrastructure.
• Marc Milstein — The Age-Proof Brain — A practical reading of brain health research and what is worth taking from it.
• Kevin Mitnick — Ghost in the Wires — Cybersecurity through Mitnick’s memoir, with social engineering and the human side of hacking at the center.
• Siddhartha Mukherjee — The Song of the Cell — Cell biology, medicine, and how understanding the cell reshapes the way disease and treatment are understood.
• Thomas Nagel — What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Consciousness, subjectivity, and the limits of explaining experience from the outside.
• Ryan North — How to Invent Everything — Civilisation as accumulated shared knowledge, framed as a practical guide to rebuilding technologies and institutions from first principles.
• James Palmer — The Bloody White Baron — Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, warlordism, state collapse, and the violence surrounding the Russian Civil War.
• Steven Pinker — Rationality — Reason, bias, institutions, and the difficulty of being rational in practice.
• David Quammen — The Tangled Tree — Evolution beyond the simple branching-tree metaphor, and the discoveries that complicated that picture.
• Martin Rees — On the Future — Technological possibility, systemic risk, and the difficulty of forecasting a future whose different parts move at very different speeds.
• Ray Kurzweil — The Singularity Is Nearer — Acceleration, technological optimism, AI futures, and the unease beneath grand predictions.
• William B. Irvine — A Guide to the Good Life — Stoicism as a usable philosophy rather than a perfect answer to modern life.
• Aaron van Wirdum — The Genesis Book — The prehistory of Bitcoin through cryptography, digital-cash experiments, and the ideas that preceded Satoshi.
• Benjamin Wallace — The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto — A search for Bitcoin’s anonymous creator and the evidentiary problems that make Satoshi Nakamoto so difficult to identify.
• Zach and Kelly Weinersmith — A City on Mars — Notes from current reading, including space settlement, practical constraints, and nonfiction curiosity.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky — Inadequate Equilibria — When to trust systems, when apparent inefficiencies may be real, and how rationality changes the question of whether institutions know best.
• The Wrong Stuff — The space race seen from the Soviet side, with failure, secrecy, and technical ambition in view.

Rereads, Series, and Review Essays

• Urban Fantasy Reread — A gateway post connecting Anita Blake, Dresden Files, Mercy Thompson, and October Daye rereads.
• Anita Blake reread — Early urban fantasy, crime structure, erotic power, and why the magic of the series changed over time.
• Urban fantasy, Wicca, and crime fiction — A first look at Harm None and the overlap between witchcraft, crime fiction, and urban fantasy conventions.
• When Urban Fantasy Was About Monsters — A genre essay on monsters, desire, danger, and the early shape of urban fantasy.
• Urban Fantasy in the Age of Smartphones — How modern technology changes secrecy, investigation, and plausibility in urban fantasy.
• Rediscovering hard science fiction — Why hard SF offers a different pleasure from fantasy in space, with Greg Egan as a reference point.
• Rereading The Wheel of Time alongside the adaptation — A reread framed by the television adaptation and the question of what survives translation to screen.

Film and Television

• Alien: Earth — Style, atmosphere, franchise inheritance, and the problem of structure.
• Dark — Time travel handled with rigor, recursion, and narrative difficulty.
• Detective Hole — Jo Nesbø’s brilliant-but-broken detective archetype translated into crime drama and adaptation.
• Lockwood & Co. — Netflix’s adaptation as a ghost story that gains maturity and confidence on screen.
• The Mummy (1999) — Adventure cinema, charm, pulp energy, and the absence of modern superhero machinery.
• The Night Agent, Season 3 — Thriller plotting, twists, and the limits of escalation.
• Scarpetta — A restless crime adaptation caught between forensic procedure, prestige drama, and franchise expectations.
• Shōgun — Memory, adaptation, and a long fascination with fictionalized historical Asia.
• Spider-Noir — Superhero spectacle filtered through noir, period style, and the appeal of powers that still feel impossible.
• Stranger Things — A look back before returning to the Upside Down.
• True Detective, Season One — A revisit of the first season as atmosphere, philosophy, crime story, and modern television landmark.
• True Detective, Season Two — Expectations, disappointment, ambition, and the burden of following a modern classic.
• The Wheel of Time, Season One — A retrospective on the first season after the adaptation’s larger trajectory became clearer.
• Young Sherlock — Holmes and Moriarty as friends, prequel logic, and the temptation to explain icons.

Games and Interactive Worlds

• Across the Obelisk — A roguelite deckbuilder that rewards planning, party composition, and controlled risk.
• Baldur’s Gate TV Series — Adaptation prospects for Baldur’s Gate and the difficulty of translating interactive choice to television.
• Brotato — A compact arena-survival game and an example of how much depth can be extracted from an aggressively simple premise.
• Cultist Simulator — An occult card game whose obscurity and friction are inseparable from its strange brilliance.
• Darkest Dungeon — Stress, attrition, madness, and the cost of survival as game systems.
• Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri — A 4X classic remembered for ideology, atmosphere, faction design, and strategic storytelling.
• Slay the Spire — Deckbuilding, roguelike structure, and the game that defined a genre.
• Solium Infernum — Strategy, diplomacy, betrayal, and the pleasure of ruling badly in Hell.
• Stellaris — Grand strategy, accumulated DLC, and the tension between expansion and coherence.
• Torment: Tides of Numenera — Choices, companions, identity, and the burden of following Planescape: Torment.