Hugin & Munin Journal

Most fantasy and science fiction assume that a person is bounded. A body contains a self; a mind has an inside. Magic, possession, telepathy and technology may complicate the border, but stories usually return to the same moral architecture: someone chooses, someone suffers, someone remembers, someone is guilty and someone can refuse. The hive mind attacks that architecture. It presents bodies whose individuality is unclear, absent or organised in a form that ordinary moral language struggles to describe. Is each body a person, or is the collective the person? Can one member be innocent while the whole is guilty? Can there be love without privacy, dissent without separation or courage without an individual will standing apart from the group? This is why hive minds recur so persistently in fantasy and science fiction. They threaten more than the hero’s body. They challenge the assumption that the individual is the natural unit of meaning. A dragon can be slain and a tyrant overthr...

Rome has a way of resurfacing when you are not looking for it. It appears in science-fiction empires that span galaxies, in fantasy legions marching under unfamiliar banners and in systems so vast and orderly that they seem less like governments than permanent features of the world. I have felt that pull for as long as I can remember. As a child reading Asterix , I was supposed to root for the unruly Gauls, yet I often found myself studying the Roman camps instead: the straight rows of tents, the palisades, the almost hypnotic suggestion that everything had been assigned its proper place. Much later, lectures on the Roman food supply made the attraction clearer. Rome depended on tax grain, private shipping, ports, warehouses, officials and distribution systems capable of feeding a city on a scale that its immediate surroundings could not support. The empire was not simply an army or a culture. It was a machinery for turning conquest into routine. That may be why speculative fict...

Fantasy and science fiction often place power on a throne and then quietly distribute the machinery that sustains it elsewhere. A ruler commands in public, but a sisterhood, magical order, religious body or professional tradition may decide who is trained to advise, which knowledge is preserved, what makes a dynasty legitimate and whether its heirs survive long enough to inherit. These organisations are often described as exercising “power behind the throne”. The phrase captures their distance from conventional sovereignty, but it also narrows them too quickly into secrecy and manipulation. The Aes Sedai possess a city, an army of servants and recognised diplomatic authority. The Adepta Sororitas wage holy war in power armour. The Bene Gesserit prefer influence exercised across generations, yet they can also command a body or a room directly. Terry Pratchett’s witches barely qualify as an organisation at all, but rulers still learn to take them seriously. What connects these exampl...

Dan Abnett’s The Magos occupies an interesting and slightly awkward position within the Eisenhorn series. It is neither simply a fourth novel nor merely a short-story collection. It is both: twelve shorter works gathered into a casebook, followed by a substantial new novel that depends upon the history they establish. That awkward structure is also the book’s method. Read in sequence, the stories turn Eisenhorn’s past into evidence. Decisions that once appeared to be isolated necessities begin to form a pattern, and when the main novel finally removes Eisenhorn’s first-person narration, the reader is forced to consider what that pattern looks like from the outside. Cover image: The Magos by Dan Abnett, published by Black Library. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. A Novel Inside a Casebook The volume collects twelve stories written across many years before arriving at the full-length novel itself. Some follow Eisenhorn directly, while other...

When I was young, I read an unreasonable amount of media tie-in fiction. Dragonlance , Forgotten Realms , the occasional Planescape paperback—those slim mass-market volumes with wonderfully lurid covers. They were inexpensive, plentiful and set in worlds I already knew through games and daydreaming. At the time, I was not especially concerned with literary merit. A tolerable plot, a few interesting characters and another journey into a familiar universe were quite enough. Some of the author’s TSR-era Forgotten Realms novels by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb, beginning with Azure Bonds . Photograph by the author; cover artwork shown for purposes of commentary. Then, sometime in my late teens, the habit simply evaporated. Other genres crowded in. I drifted towards more “serious” literature, then nonfiction, then whatever happened to cross my path. Somehow, decades passed without my picking up anything resembling the shared-universe fiction of my childhood. I ha...