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.
• Robert Jordan — The Shadow Rising — A reread of the fourth Wheel of Time novel at the point where the series reaches extraordinary worldbuilding and character depth while some of its recurring structural weaknesses become harder to ignore.
• 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.
• William Poundstone — The Doomsday Calculation — The Doomsday Argument as a route into Bayesian probability, observer selection, the Great Filter, simulation, consciousness, and the strange problem of reasoning from our own existence.
• 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.
• When Urban Fantasy Has to Change — Phase shifts in long-running urban fantasy series, and why durable series eventually have to alter the balance between mystery, power, relationships, danger, and accumulated continuity.
• 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-Man (2002) — Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man as a reminder of an older superhero-film language built around sincerity, melodrama, practical texture, and a hero who still feels embedded in ordinary life.
• Spider-Man 2 (2004) — Responsibility pushed into melodrama as Peter Parker’s obligations collide with work, love, exhaustion, and the fantasy of simply being allowed to live his own life.
• Spider-Man 3 — A revisit of Raimi’s overstuffed third film that asks whether its awkwardness lies less with Tobey Maguire than with a story trying to carry too many villains, arcs, and tonal demands at once.
• 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.
• The Henry Stickmin Collection — A comedy game in which failure is not punishment but content, turning bad choices, repetition, references, and deliberately absurd outcomes into the central mechanic.
• 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.