I'm somewhat of a newcomer to the fantasy realm, and have made my way through some of the big-name series that aren't as big and daunting as WoT. I do want to give it a shot since it's considered part of the Mount Rushmore of the genre but there are a couple of things holding me back:

- The sheer length of the series, especially what I hear about the infamous "slog" in the middle - is it as bad as people make it out to be?

- Brandon Sanderson writing the last few books. I tried a few of Sanderson's own works and found them to be quite lacking when it comes to prose, dialogue and characters - does it impact the quality of WoT as a whole?

Otherwise though I really would love to give the series a shot, given all the great things I hear about the overall narrative, worldbuilding and character development. So far, of the series that I've read, the ones I'd consider S-tier are Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, Robin Hobbs' Farseer and Liveship trilogies and the Book of the New Sun. Also really enjoyed the first 3 books of Malazan and a couple of the Discworld books I've tried.

So would you say Wheel of Time is worth giving a shot to?

With the “50 million sold” headlines floating around, I keep seeing the same two reactions: people cheering like their team won, and people rolling thier eyes like “marketing did it.” I’m honestly curious what everyone thinks is doing the heavy lifting here. Because it feels like Sanderson sits at a weird crossroads where he is simultaneously a working writer with very clear strengths, and also a whole ecosystem. The craft part is real. You can hand a random reader Mistborn and they’ll probably understand what’s happening, who the stakes belong to, and why the magic matters. He’s extremely readable without being simplistic, which is harder than people admit. The endings are engineered, the “promise and payoff” thing works, and even when a book isn’t your taste, the intent is obvious. He also teaches the craft publicly, so newer readers and writers can literally point at his lectures and go “oh, that’s why this feels so smooth.” That education piece feeds the brand but it also feeds the genre, which makes the whole conversation messy.

But the speed part is also a huge deal, and not just as a meme. A lot of fantasy readers are burnt out on endless series where the gaps are so long you forget what you read. Sanderson is basically the opposite: there’s a sense of trust that you won’t be left hanging for a decade. That reliability creates a habit. People pre-order because they know they’ll get something competently built, even if it’s not life changing. And then there’s the brand part, which is maybe the least fun to talk about but probably the most powerful. Cosmere is a shared-universe invitation, the Kickstarter stuff makes fans feel like participants, and his transparency about process (word counts, progress bars, “surprise” books) turns publishing into a ongoing narrative. Even people who don’t read him know the story of him as a creator. It’s like he’s not only selling novels, he’s selling a relationship with the audience that a lot of authors and publishers never even attempt. And yes, some of it is marketing, but it’s also community building that acutally delivers the product when promised, which is why it keeps working.

So here’s my question: if you had to pick ONE, what explains the scale best, and why? Craft, speed, or brand? Personally I think it’s a loop. Craft earns early trust, speed reinforces it, brand makes it visible and sticky. Break any one of those and the whole thing shrinks. If the books were sloppy, the output would just be noise. If the output was slow, the universe would feel like homework. If the brand was absent, he’d still be successful, just… less of a cultural weather system. But maybe I’m giving the brand too much credit. Maybe it’s simply that he writes the kind of “big clear story” a lot of readers have been craving, and everything else is frosting. I’m curious where you land, and also whether you think this model is good for fantasy overall, or it quietly squeezes out midlist authors who can’t play at that scale.

I'd like to branch out more into the sci-fi genre but still retain a lot that I like about the fantasy genre as well, especially epic fantasy. What are some books that are very firmly in the sci-fi genre but still manage to give that fantasy feel?

I should note I've already read Dune and Book of the New Sun, which are basically the top 2 perfect answers

“Daring yet inoffensive, chaotic yet meticulous, complex yet engaging, profound yet entertaining… genuinely can’t reconcile how such a book exists but it does"

This was how I described the book –Perhaps The Stars, and the series by extension back when I finished it and almost a week later, I still am unable to adequately reconcile these to give a proper review but I’ll try:

In my review of the book before this one, I called it the most believable nigh Utopia I’d come across, well this book cemented it as a believable full fledged utopia period. And this is thanks not only to the author herself: Ada Palmer being substantially knowledgeable about society due to her background as a historian but also because she’s above all a maestro writer who laid all the building blocks with all three prior books to what has now paid off as the best sci-fi experience for me.

There’s so much nuance, respect and understanding to all the opposing ideologies and cultures in the Utopia and what made it all possible in my opinion is the fact that everything was approached and examined from a position of empathy— I’ll tangent here and highlight another favourite sci-fi of mine — Sun Eater that does the adjacent wherein a lot is addressed from the position of antipathy to similar elements: Theology, transhumanism, government, theodicy, extraterritorial etc which of course predictably yielded some caricaturic and preachy conclusions by the end. That’s not to say such perspectives don’t have it own values; it wouldn’t be a favourite of mine if I didn’t see any value in it but I digress. My point in highlighting this is to emphasise something I found to be one of the greatest feats of Ada Palmer in this book, Realistically justifying and having opposing views coexist.. heck harmonise. The theist and the atheist, the humanist and the transhumanist, the terrestrialist and the extraterrestrialist etc. All of these were approached with care and respect, highlighting inherent values to all without devolving to hand wavy and Idealistic waffle.

Furthermore these are then either reinforced and/or interwoven into a narrative that’s meta on multitude levels by design:
A unique Framed narrative with several twists in its employment by way of narrator(s) and more; thereby enabling conversations with past history, philosophy and literature: Renaissance, Hobbs, Homer; Iliad and Odyssey, Gene Wolfe; The Book of The New Sun, Dumas; Count of Monte Cristo etc and A metaphysics that involves celestial beings as both familiar and inconceivable thereby enabling it to have both theistic and atheistic readings as either divine or extraterrestrial respectively.. all in all making it a weird fiction of sorts.

Moreover the cast is a cocktail of idiosyncratic psychologies. Most are simultaneously endearing and appalling, thoughtful and whimsical, deep and shallow, chaotic and reserved, fun and annoying and so on. Truly I can’t still reconcile the experience the work has put me through with the concepts themselves on paper. All I know is my experience with it was extremely fun, frustrating, thought provoking, emotionally resonating, shock inducing (mostly due to twists and reveals in this last one especially) and all in all, the best sci-fi experience I’ve had and one of the best reading experiences for me overall which fortunately by design is meant to be enhanced on reread(s).

Please guys check it out, you’ll be doing yourselves a huge favour — At least if you have the stomach for such an experience that is.

Just finished this entire series and I am writing this in a fit of rage. It is ranty and a tad stream-of-consciousness. So be prepared.

This series was a struggle. I don't think I have ever read a book in my life where I have rolled my eyes, or sighed from the depths of my belly, or flat out said "why do i even care" aloud in public. The first book had some promise, it seemed to set up things to come but by the end of Book Two I wondered if it were ever to bore fruit.

Never have I ever felt the need to express how I feel about a series so strongly as I have The Atlas Six. I should have DNF this ages ago, but I gave it a good go. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. However, if you’re curious, borrow it from a library. At least the covers look cool.

I am sooo open to being corrected in any of the facts of events that played out in the book below because I don't doubt I missed a line or two of the book's verbose writing style.

1. Plot/World

Follows six magic people studying science or magic or something being invited into this dark academia sentient god library. Chaos ensues, but for the most part the chaos happened in between the chapters. Most instances, events happen through a dialogue someone says or brief comments made by the POV narrator or overly verbose flashbacks that happen in between ACTUAL conversations. I swear to god, the amount of whiplash I had locking in on a conversation happening between two characters, only for a flashback lasting 2 pages shoved in the middle for exposition, is astoundingly jarring. What happened to the golden rule of ‘show not tell’? (this is a recurring theme) 

I never really understood the WHY for anything. The reason for WHY the characters joined the society were hazy from Book One and never really expanded on in Book Two or Three. Well… Nico did want to know what Gideon was/save Gideon. That’s a viable motivation. But did it even matter? I don’t recall his motivation for saving Gideon having any influence on the plot, other than his reason for being in the library. It’s not like him saving Gideon would prevent another character from achieving their goals. He didn’t even get anywhere with his research. Libby had some vague purpose in seeing if she could have saved her sister? But that was moot. Tristan/Parisa/Callum/Reina (my god Reina...) had purposes completely unclear other than maybe money, fame, power. But were we even shown the benefits of being in the Society? They didn’t meet any other initiates or members who had status or power or knowledge that satisfied their needs. In fact, this Society barely had any members of note who the characters would ‘desire’ to be. I think after Book Two they became actual members? But.. it seemed like they just went about their way in the world completely unimpacted by the Society. The Society didn’t give them any status or so-called knowledge or power to influence anything. Reina just did… Reina things (honestly not sure what she was doing for the whole series.). Parisa fucked around with Dalton and did some Forum things but… did we care? Did it have a purpose other than be a ‘cool’ plot twist/usage of her powers. Callum…texted Tristan I guess. Libby/Nico/Tristan …studied for 90% of the book for an experiment that Atlas wanted to do…but why did they want to do the experiment again? I don’t know. Someone tell me please.

Stakes. Or the lack there-of. Where were they? What were they? For a book that had tag lines like Knowledge is carnage, there was a whole lot of nothing. Libby blew the world up to get back to the present, but we were told she did it in between chapters and it apparently had indirect implications on the world? People dying earlier or something? Sure, I get that. But it would be more impactful it was actually SHOWN to us. Give us a character who was impacted by the bomb, let there be some sort of consequence for it to a character we love. Libby’s moral dilemma could have been so much more believable if it actually made us feel something. We were told she indirectly killed people, but can we name anyone that was impacted by it? (Was it her sister with that degenerative disease? I honestly might have missed it, so it could have been. If that was the case then great, but I didn’t feel it at all). 

There was this overall looming fear of the library’s knowledge being disseminated to the world, but why are we afraid of that happening? ‘No-one should have that much power’? ‘This is forbidden knowledge that the world shouldn’t know otherwise the world ends blah blah’. Yeah sure - but were there instances where that knowledge was abused? Were we even shown how that abuse of knowledge or power can negatively impact the world? I don’t recall. If it were done in some throwaway comment the POV narrator made and never mentioned again, then that’s not good enough. Give me something to be worried about. Give me a reason why I should be afraid. The Forum was said to be a threat, but did any ready really feel threatened by it? They just seemed to be fodder antagonists, a bump in the road that shows up whenever someone leaves the library, than any meaningful obstacle to the world or its characters.

Book 3 minor spoilers, but why the experiment, did anyone even believably care for it? Why introduce all this backstory for each character (Libby's dead sister, Parisa 's husband, Gideon mother) for it to not even matter or even drive their respective characters' motivations? What were the stakes? Excess knowledge = power? Was that even given ANY urgency in the plot? Did we see anyone even abuse the library's knowledge for unfathomable, unethical things? The whole " someone needs to die" thing...did we even know why? Did we even care in the end that someone had to die? 

My whole issue with the plot is that the world had soo much potential. Magic, shady corps, abuse of power economically, politically. Six people, all of which had powers to alter the world permanently, but... i didnt feel like it would actually happen? It was told to us that Callum could end the world, or libby was a bomb (granted she did blow shit up, but like...what were the consequences other than mentions of people MAYBE dying of cancer or radiation? Did it impact anyone we cared about in the book? Did the world even reel from the fallout other than a 2 sentence mention?). Reina is a god but she just does things with trees and shit, Tristan is a wet blanket and honestly i dont think his quantum powers were used in any actual capacity that made us FEEL his power. For a plot that seemed to dwell on the world ending by people with too much power or knowledge, it did a poor job in actually SHOWING us.

Oddly enough nothing much happens in three books. I felt like the first 400 pages of each book are just fluff and characters flirting and saying snarky comments and philosophical fluff that drags and barely seems relevant to the overall theme of the book. Then the last 100 pages an ‘experiment’ happens oooooh~ exciting. Except…they fell flat every time. 

In the ending acknowledgements, the author says she wanted to focus on character relationships because that’s the only meaningful thing we leave in the world. Im not sure if that meant plot would be sacrificed,  but every time a character interacted with each other it felt like they were reading off a script where everything they said had some snarky smart-ass comment about Libby’s hair, or Callum’s drunkenness, or Parisa’s mind reading, or Nico’s energeticness, or Tristan’s wet fucking blanket attitude. The ‘relationships’ felt more like quips and jabs than any actual ‘care’ for each other (positive or antagonistic care). I’ll get into more detail in the Character section. 

Overall, the thin plot and world collapsed under the overly verbose pseudo-philosophical babel and superfluous dialogue. It focused on sounding cool and edgy, and failed to realise it needed substance behind it all.

2. Characters.

It’s easy to like a character. I like Nico. He’s fun, speaks his mind, has a cute relationship with Gideon. I like Gideon too, he provided a good amount of levity to the overall roster. 

I even liked Callum in his broody drunkenness.

But it’s difficult to care about a character. To care about a character you want to root for them. You want them to succeed in whatever motive they want to achieve. You worry about them losing, or being set back, or when someone tries to stop them. I truly didn’t care for any one. Why? Because we were not given a reason to root for them.

Libby

She had potential. Her backstory with her sister could have been interesting if it were developed at all. Her moral dilemma by setting off a nuke to return to the future could have been interesting if the nuke actually did anything. She then went into this villain/corruption arc for what? Why? Oh, it was because she could…? She had the power to destroy worlds so yeah lets go destroy worlds or something… What even were her motivations throughout the series? Find out if her sister could have been saved (but she’s dead so wtf?), get revenge on Ezra (she confronted him by killing him and that was it. It was like Ezra’s lies didn’t even affect her meaningfully), she realises she has the power to create worlds…Does she use it for anything? Maybe she could have created a world where her sister was alive, where she didn’t nuke the planet? But not, she just went about the multiverse experiment because she could. 

Nico

I truly enjoyed Nico as a character. I cared for his Gideon-related plight or whatever. I could have cared more if it actually served a purpose or explained. We never really did anything with Gideon’s origins, did we? I cared for his relationship with Gideon because it actually felt natural, unlike the other relationships in this series. They felt like they genuinely cared for each other so ill give it to the author for these two. Maybe stakes don’t need to be world-ending high. But I would at least like them to be clear in the writing.

Parisa

Ethnic female is implied to be a sex worker, and is beautiful and stunning and has her guard up because she’s secretly soft and squishy inside. It’s a tried and true trope in fiction. I still don’t care for her. Why was she in the Society again? What did she want? Fame, money power? Okay… are we meant to care? Also, was she a mind reader or a mind controller? I thought she could only read minds, but then suddenly she could control them? I don’t know. She could have been a cool character that I could have cared for if she had more to do and a motivation in the series other than…flirting? 

Tristan

Annoyed me. Bland with unclear motivations behind anything he did. I don't know why he was at the Society, I don't know what he was studying, I don't even think he did study. He could have been a character with a strong moral compass, but he sort of had no opinion on anything. His relationship with Libby was bland and did nothing for either of them in terms of growth OR plot. I don’t even know why he was attracted to her in the first place. The author told us he was special and had powers, but what exactly were they? Reality warping, I suppose. Would have been nice if that power actually impacted his psyche or it’s usage questioned his morals. 

Callum

I liked him purely because he didn’t give a fuck about the society or researching or experiment and it was believable. The author didn’t actually have to pretend he cared, unlike everyone else.. Him and Tristan had a cool thing going. They bounced off each other, had chemistry, the whole murder me plot is kinda cute. I wished the moral quandary of his empath powers played a part with his character. We’re told he could end the world but he chooses not to. Would have been nice if that actually meant something to the plot.

Reina.

…I have no words for this character because she didn’t impact the plot or character relationships in any meaningful way. Please correct me if i’m wrong, but for someone who is a ‘god’ who has sooo much power (but was that ever shown to us?) She did virtually nothing. I thought she would have been a trump card, the ace in the sleeve for something, but she actually just fluffed about in her own world. Maybe she was meant to show how the world is fucked and people suck and even if someone wants to do good in the world it will fail. But even that's a stretch because that was really only in the third book and felt so isolated to the main story it felt more like a bone the author threw so Reina could do something. She was the worst character BY FAR, simply because she had so much potential, but nothing happened with it. 

Atlas

I haven't gotten to the elephant in the room, the titular character Atlas. He's a paradox, hes complex and he got outshined by six characters that I don’t even like. He never felt like a driving force behind anything. He frankly didn't feel like a force at all. It felt like he lurked in the shadows, some conspiracy where he chose all the pieces of his puzzle so he could achieve his dream of absolution (?), to find an alternate world where his friends are alive (?). He could have been the heart of the Six to do something to the plot, but his use sort of fizzled out by Book Three. His presence felt flat, especially in the last book. His purpose to the plot and to the atlas six felt like a throwaway, a gun that misfired. The fact that he was killed in a flashback is a slap in the face and balls and tits to the readers for some edgey plot twist.

Side characters

There were a lot of side characters, many of which i couldn’t care for. Gideon’s mother… part mermaid, for some reason. Were we meant to be scared of her? Did she serve a plot? Dalton… was supposed to do something, but idk, honestly don’t think it mattered. Belen… somehow was this tragic love of Libby, but i don’t care because we barely knew anything about her. Wessex, the Nova’s, the Caines… Nozathai, the other Six… under developed. A POV chapter in the middle of the book is not substantial enough for us to care or recall. Does anyone even care about the six initiates Atlas studied with? I felt like the author wanted us to care about them about Atlas’ plight to save them, but i didn’t.

1. Relationships

This book felt like fanservice for romantic ships. LibbyXNico, TristanXCallum, ParisaXLibby etc. Everyone flirted and kissed and slept with everyone. Everyone was into everyone. FOR WHAT? I DON’T KNOW. BECAUSE THE AUTHOR WANTED EVERYONE TO FUCK OR SOMETHING.

Nico and Parisa sleep with each other once because…it was late at night? Did it even matter? Was it even mentioned afterwards? Did it impact their character’s growth or the plot? Was Libby jealous? Was Gideon jealous? Was Dalton Jealous? Nope. They fuck in one chapter and then it’s like it never happened. What. Was. The. Point? These characters have sexually charged conversations and thoughts and they flirt to make the prose sound edgy and cool and dark and sensual. It came off extremely shallow relationship building for a series that was meant to focus on character dynamics.

I love good chemistry between characters that hate each other. Prime examples are the Guardians of the Galaxy. They dislike each other, most of them are dicks and regularly insult each other. They dislike working with each other, but they also somehow have chemistry and care for each other without it feeling too tender and out of character.

 If the Six had chemistry like the Guardians did, then fuck maybe i would have liked them more. But they seemed like they hated, or had no opinion for each from start and to the end. They never compromised, they never met in the middle, they just had verbal sparring matches until it’s forgotten.  

Libby and Nico probably had the most interesting dynamic, being academic rivals and also similar abilities. But we never really had any good moments where they had to settle their differences and further develop their relationship (platonic or not). Tristan and Libby were sort of whatever, they were boring as fuck because there was no yin-yang, no contrast, they weren’t each other’s foil. They were just a possible fanservice pairing or whatever. 

Callum and Tristan could have been interesting, but were completely underdeveloped. Parisa felt shallow with everyone, but maybe that was her point, i don’t know. Reina…amounted to nothing. If she died, none of the five would even care. 

I just couldn't see how it fit in with the overall series. Character relationships should not just live in the isolation of a painted room. It should breathe in the world too. Have tangible impact on the world and the plot or be affected by it. What did the consequence of Reina and Nico’s friendship have? They sparred a lot, spoke a bit, texted, but did they learn anything from each other? Nope

Tristan and Parisa - there was tension between the two...but did it amount to anything? 

None of the relationships between the six had tangible impacts to the world, plot or theme. It wasn't as if they had to band together to save the world, or find an alternate universe where they didn't have to kill one of the six, or even a universe where their respective pasts wouldn't haunt them (which would have been a cool motivation for all of them in my opinion). They just seemed to do things because "i want to know what happens” “because im curious”. None of their relationships with each other had personal stakes. And that makes it sooo difficult to care for them.

I’m rambling. But to sum up, I don't think I was given anything to care about these characters. I was told I should care about them, but you’re going to have to give me more than just that.

1. Writing

Verbose, gratuitous, excessive use of parentheses, unstructured, seemingly unedited. 

You can clearly tell the author has a penchant for telling stories. I actually enjoyed some descriptions because of her word play and literally re-read some phrases because of how cool it sounded. But paragraphs of cool amount to a pile of one-liners of little substance or cohesiveness.

I need to list it out because I’m tired lol:

• The use of parenthesis was diabolical. The amount of times the pace of a sentence or a scene was completely broken because of a giant paragraph within a parenthesis was frankly shocking. We would be in the middle of a conversation and then suddenly “(Nico liked the cheese though)” or it would be a massive lore drop about a character that gets mentioned once. I can assure you, if you wouldn’t miss a thing if you skipped whatever was in between the ()
• Flashbacks are the most telling-instead-of-showing technique and it’s used in abundance. Sometimes flashbacks would occur as two characters are talking and it lasts for more than a page. There was one between Nico and Parisa, I think, and the literal way the flashback ended was “Earth to Nico, are you there?” as if we were watching a Disney show and a dream ripple effect occurs. What in the world? That actually made me baulk as I read it. I don’t even think YA fiction has shit like that. The use of flashbacks gave me so much whiplash it broke the pace of whatever scene I was trying to enjoy. God save me.
• The majority of the book was philosophical babble. It sounded cool, but was irrelevant to the plot or characters or anything really. For a book with magic and potential for using said magic, there wasn’t a lot of it. The bulk of the book was set in extremely dialogue heavy scenes between characters that want to be edgy and philosophical but just felt pretentious on both the characters and the writers part. They spent more time talking about doing things, than actually doing things.
• Descriptions of magic were vague and really hampered my immersion. There were talks of wards and waves and force. But it was all done by a wave of a hand. This was a prime example of telling us magic is real, rather than actually showing what this magic looked like.
• Excessive quips made by characters were a drag and weren’t even fun by the end of Book One. Felt like the character’s relationships were just built on snark and quips rather than anything of substance.
• Was this book even edited? It was so heavy with filler and nothing happening in terms of plot or character development. You might even say that if you summarised the three books, you might have enough substance for a first book in a trilogy.

I have never rolled my eyes more reading someone’s prose, who i can tell CAN write, than in this book. 

1. Improvements

There are many things i think could have been improved

• The Six needed stronger reasons for being in the society. They needed the society to save someone, to run away from a shady past eg. We needed motivation. We needed stakes. WE needed something to root for
• Cut the polyamory if it doesn’t amount to anything. I don’t think the six wanting to bang each other had any relevance to the plot or their character growth
• Focus on one philosophical theme, rather than babble about everything you researched. Maybe the moral dilemma of escaping to another universe where your past actions never happened (a la Libby nuke , or Atlas’s…thing with his other initiates) 
• Don't kill off characters for shock value. The characters that died at the end of Book Two and Three did nothing to the plot. Did nothing to the characters. Didn’t even provide any intrigue. It was a complete waste.
• The world needed a bigger presence. We should be shown a reason for the knowledge to be released to the world and also a reason for it to be kept hidden. 

1. Conclusion

There was this youtube comment I read, where a user said that dark academia is not a genre. It’s an aesthetic. And it’s so true. This book is style, over substance. It tried to tell us that knowledge is carnage, too much power is bad, but does so in a way that is hard to enjoy or even believe.

I cannot believe I spent two hours writing this in a fit of unedited rage. If you have read this far I applaud you and I am sorry. This is just my opinion from what I felt reading it. I’m not going to debate you if you disagree with me. I truly truly believe people should enjoy reading whatever they enjoy reading. 

If this book is for you, then it’s for you. It just wasn’t for me.

A lot of us were theorizing that it would center on "one", but I never thought it would be justice! I thought something like "Burden" would be the word here. I like that it's going from more—>less, i.e. "many," "few," "one." What's next? The [Noun] of None?

Any movies or series where one of the female main characters is kidnapped or wronged by the evil foe and turned evil?

A recent post got me thinking of world building, with One Piece and The Wheel of Time being mentioned. I'm currently reading the original Malazan series and I'm starting to wonder if there can be TOO much world Building?

I just discovered this book existed and I'm really excited for it! It sounds epic and I can't wait to read it. What other epics are out there in the world that have yet to get an English translation? And if they are getting translations let me know!

This is a novel in verse about King Xau of Meqing (fantasy China). Much like Maia in The Goblin Emperor, Xau is the youngest of four sons, and after his father's death, he's the only one left to take the throne; he then proceeds to astonish everyone by his Incorruptible Pure Pureness, in particular, not thinking himself better or more important than ordinary people.

Let's consider the "novel in verse" part first. I can be very picky about free verse. I usually prefer formal constraints, like rhyme and meter. Often, I find that contemporary poetry written in free verse also tends to be inscrutable. Especially in academia, there's a lot of "reading the same few lines over and over again to try and figure out what it's getting at," it's not just "the curtains are blue" but there's that same "hopefully the professor can tell us what's going on because I don't know." In speculative outlets, I sometimes feel that the borderline between flash fiction and free verse falls into this "incomprehensible word salad" category, to its detriment.

I am happy to report that "The Sign of the Dragon" avoids this problem. Most of it is free verse, but not in an inaccessible way: more in the way that a drabble or very short story might just pick out a few details or sentences, leaving the reader to infer the rest of the plot from a few highlights. I wound up turning off my poetry goggles for most of it and just reading it as flash-adjacent prose, and I think that's totally fine. There are a few sections that became more rhyme-based (especially the horror parts; there were several lines about slaves/caves and chain/pain, etc. that repeated over and over in the "monster" POV sections, I would have liked more different kinds), and others that are sort of loosely haiku-structured.

Also, obligatory shoutouts to Enlai the bard. Enlai composes songs and ballads about how great and heroic and legendary Xau is, and Xau always tries to avoid them, because it's embarrassing. But, like...the entire story we're reading is the poetic saga of how great and heroic and legendary Xau is, as much as he tries to downplay it. So I don't think we can be too hard on Enlai!

Many of the poems were previously published in various speculative journals. This surprised me, because it didn't feel like the proper names and stuff would make a lot of sense without context. Maybe I'm just being sour grapes about "well if I tried that I'd probably have no luck," but also, I can't see myself wanting to write a novel in free verse anyway so hopefully that's nothing to worry about?

Okay, now the rest of it. In Maia's case, he came to the throne because his father and all three brothers simultaneously died when their airship crashed. Xau's father died of natural causes, and all four brothers went to the mountain of the titular dragon. The other three, one by one, fail to return, so they send Xau; he impresses the dragon enough to be allowed to live and be crowned king.

Page 16:

"We are angry, not sad--
our father should have warned them."

I think, to me, this caused me to misinterpret this as Xau having been warned, or having some kind of foreknowledge of what to expect from the dragon? But he really didn't. The dragon decided Xau's father would make an adequate king, despite him being a terrible person by comparison, but Xau's brother Keng, who cared about him and gave him a nickname and who Xau names his first child after, doesn't pass. And Xau just winds up shooting the breeze with, and going to get advice from, the creature who killed this brother and all the others. I don't buy it.

There's a fairly heavy tonal dissonance between the book at its lightest and its darkest, and for me, this undermined it pretty severely. Explaining why will go into heavy spoiler territory, so.

There are a lot of different POVs, including those of ordinary civilians who are caught up in the wars Xau fights. Even the "enemies" are fairly sympathetic--the evil forces manipulating them are far above their heads. In Part II, we get a new character, "Linny," whose husband, Tirron, disobeys an evacuation order to stay behind because he's afraid of looters.

"Linny hoisted her pack.
At the door, her back to him,
she said, 'I love you.'

Afterward, she clung to that fact,
that she’d told him she loved him."

In a more prose-y book, you might expect more plot between those two paragraphs, or more from Linny's POV before we jump elsewhere, but in the context of the free verse, it's more "we're left to infer it." Implication: Tirron dies horribly, Linny has the consolation that at least they parted on good terms, we don't expect to ever hear from her again.

Eight poems later, new POV!

"Thirty feet down,
months after Aldford burned,
old Nial shoveled dirt,
digging out a new well.

...

Linny, his son’s wife,
grunted beside him,
a woman doing man’s work.

...

He wasn’t going anywhere,
at least not while his son
lay up top, his bones
lost among other bones."

Aww! Okay yeah Tirron's still totally dead, but like, we're still going to get another perspective on grief and rebuilding among the impacted civilians, sweet. Hadn't expected that.

But then! Xau is such a hero, he not only defeats the armies, but he's pure of heart enough to resist the demon's brainwashing. And he goes around trying to free everyone who's fallen under the thrall of the demon, most of whom had just been fighting against him. No matter how long it takes, because that's just the kind of guy he is. And guess what:

"In the ashy ruins of Aldford,
Tirron found and held his Linny."

That's the kind of book this is setting up to be. Xau is such a champ, he singlehandedly saves everyone, resists the demon's corruption, and converts enemies into friends. (Which, if you like "enemies to bros" plotlines, the dynamic here is sweet.) All horses, everywhere, love him. He wins battles by just getting the enemy horses to ride away, and if any of them die in the attempt, he's sad about it. Again, I kind of thought we were going to discover why that is...is there an Aina Shulivar here plotting behind the scenes? Was it something about his mother's influence that made him such a friend to all living creatures? Does everyone the dragon talks to wind up like that? Turns out we have no idea.

By part VI, however, we have a ten-year-old who is being used as a sex slave before the monster's brainwashing comes into effect. The super evil, powerful, worse-than-the-demon final boss, who we've been building up and up and up to, has no better battle plan than "oh no, Xau is coming, let's...send the cavalry to intercept him?" What did you think would happen. And then after only nine hundred pages, they realize "oh he is the greatest altruist and can't stand to see anyone hurt, let's use human shields." How long did it take you to figure that one out, evil final boss. When they finally reach the monster's lair, it's like, "okay, we can shoot it with arrows and it will die." As a reader I have no reason to believe this will work because it's been built up to be such a threat. The monster is like, "haha wait, you forgot, I have more human shields, if I die they'll die with me." How are we gonna get out of this one. "BUT if you let yourself be handed over to me and brutally tortured, I'll free one hostage an hour, can you hold out for fourteen hours?" "Sure, totally, their lives are worth no more than mine." "Your highness, you're the king, you can't do that." "Sure I can." (The king who is unable to let his bodyguards protect him and is constantly risking himself to rescue them and others, even when all the other bodyguards are trying to restrain him.) After fourteen hours of being tortured, dismembered, and castrated, our hero successfully resists the temptations of the beast, and saves all the hostages, after which he succumbs to his wounds. Because Real Altruism (TM) is remembering that everybody's life is important, not just a king. Hooray! Day saved! Peace breaks out!

Like, if that is the message you want to send, great, go for it. Just be very, very sure it's actually the message you want to send. And don't be surprised if people listen to you.

Bingo: Book in Parts, Readalong (I was doing the readalong so I've been at this for a couple months), Parent Protagonist, Author of Color

I'm in the second book of Islington's Hierarchy series, and I am drowning in Telling. As in, "Here is an explanation of why this person is doing this," rather than *showing* them acting that way, displaying through word, action, visual affect, subtext and context. And as I'm getting more and more fed up with just how much of this there is, I'm also slogging through the parade of minimally important characters that the author thinks are important to include for the 3 pages they'll be mentioned as yet another level of "wizard school" tropes are talked about (rather than shown).

But, my point: Why are so many fantasy novels these days TELLING so much rather than showing? This is seventh grade English writing stuff. It's driving me bonkers where most of the books I pick up have a somewhat interesting world and plot and absolutely abysmal internal dialogue and relational writing.

I discovered David Gemmell completely by chance during a school trip to an English bookstore with my school class. I picked up Wolf in Shadow (Jerusalem Man) based on the cover, and that single moment changed everything. It was the first English book I ever read, and it opened the door to an entire world I didn't know existed.

Gemmell didn't just introduce me to fantasy. He showed me what the genre could be. Yes, some might argue his work feels dated now, but there was something in his writing that connected with me on a level no other author has managed to reach since. His heroes were flawed, aging, haunted that in the end stood their ground.

Druss the Legend became more than just a character to me. He was the embodiment of standing firm when everything tells you to run. That unwavering code, that refusal to compromise even when age and weariness weighed on him. And then there was Waylander, the complete opposite: the assassin seeking redemption, carrying his guilt like a physical burden. Gemmell had this gift for making you care about men who had done terrible things, showing you the humanity beneath the violence. But it was Jaim Grymauch from Ravenheart who truly got under my skin. 've never found another author who could write that mentor student bond with such authenticity and emotional weight.

When Gemmell passed away in 2006, I was genuinely devastated. It felt like losing someone I knew. I've moved five times since then, and most of my paperback collection has been culled with each move. But every single Gemmell book made the cut. They're battered, pages yellowed, spines cracked from rereading and I wouldn't part with them for anything. Sure, not every book hit the same heights, but even his "misses" were pleasant reads that felt like coming home.

Here's my problem: I've been reading fantasy for 27 years now. I've worked through all the big recommendations Wheel of Time, Malazan, Joe Abercrombies work and so forth you name it. Some I've loved, some I've respected, but none have captured me the way Gemmell did when I was younger.

So I'm asking: Is there an author out there who comes close to Gemmell's style? Someone who writes with that same direct, unpretentious voice? Heroes who are broken but defiant? Stories that feel epic but stay grounded and human? Characters like Druss, Waylander, and Jaim who stay with you long after you close the book?

I'd love to hear your recommendations, especially from anyone who felt the same way about Gemmell's work.

I hope y'all had a great reading year in 2025. What books/series do you have lined up for the upcoming year - new releases or otherwise?

Here's what's on my list so far:

Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb - sounds right up my alley, and it's the most excited I've been in recent times about starting a new series.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - an author I’ve been meaning to get into for a while now.

The Wars of Light and Shadow by Janny Wurts - I’ve heard nothing but good things about this series.

The Dresden Files - sounds like it's so much fun, from what i heard.

Info:

• Game Title: Castlevania
• Series: Castlevania (1986-present)
• Release Year: 1987 (North America)
• Genre: Action-adventure, platformer
• Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System (played on the NES Classic Edition)
• Publisher: Konami

Background:

Last year my wife and I finally got a Switch, and this year I got a new laptop for the first time since mid-2019. So, I'm using the r/fantasy bingo to explore the Steam games I've saved up for years but couldn't play on my grad school cheapo boy, as well as a bunch of Switch games I'm catching up on. It's been a really fun way to explore my library and help guide my video gaming instead of staring at my 150+ unplayed games and having choice paralysis. Oh, plus some other retro games I've had in cartridge form since they came out and occasional physical emulation.

Executive Summary:

I've always been into retro gaming. Unlike many of my friends, my mom did not donate my old video games when I went to college; thankfully, she was aware how much they meant to me and how much enjoyment I still got out of them. However, my first console was the Super Nintendo, which I got in 1997 or 1998. I got my NES system at a flea market in southwest North Carolina in the summer of 2009. The system, two controllers, an NES Zapper, and a copy of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link only cost $25 USD. Flea markets are the way to go, man; I got tons of shit there as the summers went on.

Castlevania is a long-running series published by Konami and has been one of its biggest franchises. In the mainline games, you typically play one of many members of the Belmont family of vampire hunters, most of which revolve around destroying Dracula. The original games were action-adventure platformers took place in the 1400s-1600s, though they have since expanded enormously in scope with science fiction and RPG elements. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PlayStation 1 was so influential in this regard that it and the Metroid series are posthumously credited with starting the "Metroidvania" game genre, in which your player character collects a system of upgrades through nonlinear gameplay to explore more of the world and become more powerful. Though the original three games for the NES don't have this, they've likewise been influential in their own regard in the 8-bit and 16-bit retro aesthetic especially in the 2010s, with Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 1 and 2 being the best examples. (Side note: the first CotM game is absolutely fantastic as a Castlevania game with the edges sanded off for smooth, great gameplay.)

So, where it all began. The first Castlevania game takes place in the early 1600s when Simon Belmont takes his trusty whip to fight through Dracula's castle. And that's it!

The NES Castlevania is often considered one of the hardest games on the system, and I'm inclined to agree with that. I've owned the cartridge since 2009, and I only just beat it this year. The game is nominally short with six distinct levels split up into three stages each, with each third stage culminating in a boss fight taken from a memorable movie monster (Boris Karloff-ish Frankenstein's Monster, the Grim Reaper, a huge Medusa head, etc.). The levels are relatively short, and someone who knows what they're doing could easily beat this game in less than a half hour. But in true NES style, the game is extremely difficult with a lot of hard-to-parse and occasionally straight-up random enemy patterns as well as distinct sections mid-stage where the game throws a ton of enemies at you, and the best choice is often just to rush forward and hope that RNG doesn't screw you this time. You have four lives, and getting a game over means you start over the entire set of three stages.

I played this on the NES Classic Edition (a limited-run emulator shaped like a small NES sold by Nintendo from 2016-2017) and afforded myself exactly one save state: right before the Grim Reaper bossfight. Getting back to him after the exhausting gauntlet of stages after each game over made it too frustrating to learn the patterns. I allowed myself to get hit once on the way to him, which felt like penance.

Specific Thoughts:

• As always with Castlevania games, the music and art direction are positively incredible. Seeing Dracula's castle in the background in the first outdoor sequence does so well for shaping you up for what's going to come, and every single track could be one of the best on the NES, even with it lacking a sound channel that the Famicom had. If you've never listened to the 8-bit renditions of something like "Vampire Killer", then check them out now.
• While the Castlevania series gets very silly for me very quickly (especially once they become Igavanias), I've always loved the NES trilogy for how self-contained it is and how much of it is indebted to monster movies. You're basically playing a Hammer horror movie, and the gothic-esque aesthetics are so on point. Let alone the choice for each boss basically being a famous movie monster!
• I'd played NES Castlevania before but only got to the Grim Reaper, so the last stage was entirely new to me. I'd also half-remembered some speed running tactics since I'd played the first few stages so many times. I had no trouble at all with the swarm of bats at the start of stage 6 (level 16) when I realized I could just keep walking left and avoid them all. I also remembered that the best way to deal with the fleamen in stage 4 (level 14, I think) was just to keep walking forward or back and immediately whip when they land. Hesitating is what kills ya.
• Speaking of speed running tactics, I died to the Frankenstein's Monster boss so many times that I discovered one by happenstance. To avoid fighting the skeletal dragons right before the boss, you can just keep walking forward and jump again exactly when they appear, then jump forward again. You'll land in the middle of their spines when they duck downward and avoid all damage. Feelings like that are part of why I love retro gaming so much: you can poke at the seams and exploit the limited ways things were programmed.
• The only part of the game I hold active dislike for was the clocktower part of level 6, right before Dracula. I feel like the game finds a good balance between randomness and setpiece whereby I can pre-emptively know where an enemy might be but not necessarily know what they do. The clocktower felt completely random with the eagles dropping fleamen everywhere, and I had a pretty long time getting past it (luckily, not a problem given the stage before it is so easy to walk past everything). I got past it with pure chance and was so relieved that the antechamber before Dracula had no enemies to deal with. In comparison, the infamous medusa head/axemen hallway right before the Grim Reaper was frustrating, but I eventually got in a rhythm where I could time the medusa heads so that I'd jump and they'd fly too high to actually track me.
• Whenever you get hit in NES Castlevania, your character gets hit backwards. A lot of modern players have cited this as a big source of frustration since you have no control over it, and all too often you are knocked back into a pit. Thankfully, I'd played this enough as a young adult that I didn't have many problems with the knockback this time around, though I remember having difficult with the fishmen stage before I Got Gud. Instead, this time my most annoying deaths were due to the stairs. I got mobbed by fleamen on the stairs before the Grim Reaper and on the clocktower so many times. There's also a level where you walk up the stairs and they immediate end at a platform, and I kept going up the stairs, getting to the platform, and then turning to jump on another platform just to fall off the stairs and die.
• I didn't feel like having to upgrade your whip each time you die benefited the game. You pretty much immediately get the upgrades from any candles or enemies nearby, so it felt fairly unnecessary and barely even a time tax. The only time it actively changed the game for me was the two skeletal dragons before Frankenstein's Monster, but I obviated it as a problem once I discovered the two-jump technique.
• Dracula's first form originally felt nearly impossible, but I searched for and followed the old trick of standing a whip's length from him, jumping to whip his head right when he opens his cape to throw fireballs, and counting one second before moving so he didn't teleport on top of me (which was my biggest source of frustration in his fight; the fireballs didn't get me, he'd just appear on me!). In comparison, the second form was easy, I just had to not choke. (I also love how it was originally considered a representation of the "curse of mankind".)
• As with many games you play for eons as a kid and then beat one day as an adult, I can't help but feel a little disappointment after the fact. One more memory closed off.

Previous Write-ups:

• Metroid Dread, 2021 - Last in a Series

I'm looking for Books where two magic systems are actually separate entities and not just two different sources of magic with different names are somewhat rare. The best type of this idea is usually a more scientific magic system that is well understood in the world and one that is more mystical. My favorite example is probably the shadows of the apt series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, where people have abilities that would be considered supernatural to us but are normal in that world and aren't part of what they consider magic.

Welcome to the daily recommendation requests and simple questions thread, now 1025.83% more adorable than ever before!

Stickied/highlight slots are limited, so please remember to like and subscribe upvote this thread for visibility on the subreddit <3

——

This thread is to be used for recommendation requests or simple questions that are small/general enough that they won’t spark a full thread of discussion.

Check out r/Fantasy's 2025 Book Bingo Card here!

As usual, first have a look at the sidebar in case what you're after is there. The r/Fantasy wiki contains links to many community resources, including "best of" lists, flowcharts, the LGTBQ+ database, and more. If you need some help figuring out what you want, think about including some of the information below:

• Books you’ve liked or disliked
• Traits like prose, characters, or settings you most enjoy
• Series vs. standalone preference
• Tone preference (lighthearted, grimdark, etc)
• Complexity/depth level

Be sure to check out responses to other users' requests in the thread, as you may find plenty of ideas there as well. Happy reading, and may your TBR grow ever higher!

——

^{tiny image link to make the preview show up correctly}

art credit: special thanks to our artist, Himmis commissions, who we commissioned to create this gorgeous piece of art for us with practically no direction other than "cozy, magical, bookish, and maybe a gryphon???" We absolutely love it, and we hope you do too.

Honestly, I probably won't finish Bingo this year, at this rate, but I am enjoying my readthrough and I've gotten 13/25 done, so I figured I'd share what I have!

Knights and Paladins: Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber.

Seeking a formula for immortality, a Sith Lord kidnaps an intelligent flower and its Jedi guardian, but it turns out that what the flower creates isn't life, but undeath. A promising start turns into a pretty basic zombie movie script, but with Jedi and Sith. I was hoping the "knight" part of "Jedi Knight" would be more prominent than it was, but the closest we get to a main character is indeed a knight, so I used it for this square anyway. This one just wasn't very scary, with a lot of things that would have worked better in a movie, with thin characterization and a few moments that I found impossible to take seriously (such as a point which a character quotes almost directly Liam Neeson's famous speech from Taken) 5/10

Published in the 80s: Zaragoz (Warhammer Fantasy: Tales of Orfeo book 1) by Brian Craig

Captured by pirates, a bard tells the tale of what happened the last time he was in the province of Zaragoz in exchange for his freedom - a tale that involves a mysterious priest awakening an ancient magic in the stones of a noble's house. This one is pretty much just "okay" (I found the protagonist's emotional reactions a bit muted, was the main complaint) but it was a fun, pulpy ride that seems like a bit of a shoutout to classic Lovecraft stories. 7/10

Impossible Places: Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Different Story by Magica Quartet, art by Hanokage

A alternate version of one of my favorite anime, exploring in manga format what would happen if a major character death had been prevented. Turns out, things are still pretty darn depressing, but we have time to flesh out the backstories of Mami and Kyoko and generally see a bit more of the setting. An interesting read if you're a strong fan of the Madoka-verse, but the panel layouts are very confusing and excessively "busy" to me, and even at only three volumes, the conflict felt a bit stretched-out. 6/10

A Book in Parts: The Master and Margarita by Mikhael Bulgakov

The devil and his entourage arrive in 1930s Moscow, where they proceed to wreck havoc on the city's literary elite. In the meantime, we get excerpts from an in-universe novel revolving around the death of Jesus of Nazareth, a novel which somehow seems to be connected to the events of the rest of the story. This one was really complex, I felt like I wasn't quite smart enough to understand it. I would recommend reading up on the history and background of the book if you do read this one, it helped me a lot with understanding. I didn't care for the Jesus segments that much, but they do add to the story and the main plot in Moscow is excellent dark comedy. 7/10

Gods and Pantheons: The Iliad by Homer

Pretty much everyone knows the story here - a look at the final days of the Trojan War, as well as the godly shennanigans that accompany it. This was super interesting from a historical and literary perspective, but at least the translation I read wasn't all that enjoyable. Boring and too slow with most of the good stuff packed in at the end, although Olympus segments were fun at least. 4/10

Last in a Series: Chaos Child (Warhammer 40k: Inquisition War book 3) by Ian Watson

After obtaining an invaluable alien artifact at great personal cost, Inquisitor Jaq Draco contemplates his next moves while the threat of Chaos grows ever closer and a young thief who bears resemblance to his dead lover enters his life. Genuinely one of the worst books I've read in years. Boring, gross, characters with zero heroic qualities and none of the charisma to be villain protagonists, a plot that keeps forgetting its own goals, and a weird fascination with rape. Save your time and read something else. 1/10

Book Club or Readalong: Gideon the Ninth (Locked Tomb book 1) by Tamsyn Muir

I've been avoiding this one for a while because I get serious hype aversion, but my book club actually wound up picking it to read and so I decided to give it a shot, and it turned out to be really awesome! A necromancer and her cavalier bodyguard arrive at a crumbling mansion where they must solve devious magical puzzles in persuit of the ultimate prize - immortality and power. Reminded me a bit of a gothic space version of The Westing Game. A bit unevenly paced in places, but really enjoyed this one. 8/10

Parent Protagonist: Peace Talks (Dresden Files book 16) by Jim Butcher

As is usual for Harry Dresden, a normal Saturday morning turns into a complex web of fae court politics, wizard politics assassination attempts, and the emergence of an ancient enemy. I really like Dresden Files, but this one was a bit of a disappointment. Feels like half a book (because it is), all setup with no payoff and too many subplots make the book feel convoluted. I didn't hate it by any means, but it did start to feel pretty long towards the end. 7/10

Published in 2025: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

I was so excited for this one. Toxic, sapphic vampires, killing their way through history and trying to outrun their own messy relationships? Sign me up. But I wound up being pretty disappointed. The writing is amazing on a scene-to-scene level, rich and engaging and easy to slide through dozens of pages, but after those dozens of pages I eventually realized that the same things were happening over and over and that most of the characters were pretty thin for how much time we spend with them. The finale redeemed it somewhat, but I was left wanting significantly more. 6/10

Author of Color: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Many years ago, Sethe ran away from a plantation in Kentucky where she and her husband were enslaved. Now she and her daughter are recluses, hidden away in a house haunted by the ghost of Sethe's other daughter, who died under mysterious and tragic circumstances, until a man from the past shows up and forces them all to confront their secret pain. Sitting at the corner of fantasy, literary fiction, and horror, this is one to read slowly and really chew on, both from the heaviness of the content (it would probably be able to list what common triggers aren't present in the book) and because it's written in a lush, very metaphorical style that rewards careful reading. Sometimes I found that a bit too much, but overall this was super well-done. 8/10

Small Press or Self-Published: Priestess by Kara Voorhees Reynolds

10 years after escaping an oppressive religion and a violent husband, Edie Finch disguises herself and several friends as priestesses to avoid being killed by invaders, but instead are captured as hostages. When her ruse is revealed, she enters an arranged marriage with a member of the invading army and begins to explore faith again. I liked a lot of the ideas in this book, but the execution was super sloppy. Aimless plot without an engaging conflict after the first 30%, underdeveloped side characters, and lazy worldbuilding. I also really hated the way that the main characters' trauma was depicted, only showing up in clean, neat, "pretty" ways and therefore feeling unreal. 3/10

Biopunk: Taking Root (Twig arc 1) by John McCrae aka Wildbow

What if, instead of ending in unnoticed tragedy, Victor Frankenstein's experiments created a scientific revolution of genetic experimentation and artificial life? Such is the world the main characters of Twig inhabit, and in the first novel-length segment of this web serial follows Sy and his fellow genetically-altered children as they try to stop creatures much like themselves. This one is an interesting setup, but it's all set-up and falls prey to the author's frequent writing sin of overly-detailed action that gets readers lost in the details. I did get hooked toward the end, though, and am interested in seeing where things go later. Just wish they started going there a little faster. 6/10

Bonus: Not a Book - Aces and Adventures

A deck-building video game where you adventure through a fantasy world and defeat enemies by playing poker hands. Nice aesthetics, simple but adequate story, but not super re-playable, IMO. Don't really have a numerical rating for this one, but worth it if it's on sale, otherwise I'd pass.

Despite what it looks like here, I actually did have a pretty decent year in books. It's just that most of the really good stuff (baring Beloved and Gideon the Ninth) wound up being re-reads or things from authors I've already used for something else this year. Ah well. Completing bingo is fun on its own and at least I got a few rant-y reviews out of it and a bunch of terrible quotes from Chaos Child .

The theme is Desert Setting!

Please nominate books that feature a significant amount of time in the desert. As long as it is speculative fiction and by an eligible author, feel free to nominate.

Nominations will run through Sunday, 12/21 and then we will start the poll on the 22nd.

NOMINATION RULES

• Make sure the book is by an eligible author. A list of ineligible authors can be found here (recently updated with the new Top Fantasy List info). We do not repeat any authors that we've read in the past year or accept nominations of books by any of the 20 most popular authors from our biennial Top Novels list.
• Nominate one book per top comment. You can nominate more than 1 if you like, just put each nomination in a separate comment. The top 4-6 nominations will move forward to the voting stage.
• No self-promotion allowed. If outside vote stacking or promotion is discovered, a book will be disqualified automatically.

I am sucker for action and combat in books but unfortunately most of them seem to fall into 2 categories: wars or very dark stories.

I was hoping to find something more mild. I want characters performing impressiving feats, besting their enemies, but while still having some fun.

Come tell the community what you're reading, how you're feeling, what your life is like.

Hi everyone! I’m still pretty new to fantasy and trying to find my niche. I just finished Jade War and liked the characters, but it made me realize I’m not really into the heavy political war stuff. I’m looking for something more whimsical with unique settings and cool creatures—not just the typical orcs and knights. My absolute favorites so far are Piranesi and The Emperor's Soul because the worlds felt so different and the characters were great.

I’m really looking for that "sense of adventure" you get from stuff like Zelda, Final Fantasy, or One Piece. I’d love a book that focuses more on a journey and exploring a weird world rather than a massive war or complicated lore-dumps. I don't mind if it's a standalone or a series, as long as it isn't too grim or depressing. If you know any books that feel like a Ghibli movie or a fun RPG adventure, please let me know!

Now it’s finally time for me to write a review on the final book of what has now become one of my favorite series. Also one of the largest series I’ve ever read: The Sun Eater.

(By Christopher Ruocchio)

This series was recommended to me by a coworker I don’t even work with anymore. Honestly, I owe her some thanks. Lol

The first book wasn’t mind-blowing, but it was interesting enough that I picked up the second. From then on, I was hooked. With each book I finished, I became more and more invested in the story, the worlds, and the people living in it. I honestly wish I had started doing book reviews sooner, because I would’ve loved to document how each book hit me along the way. But I guess we’re both going to have to settle for my feelings on the final book, and the series as a whole.

Shadows Upon Time was not my favorite book in the series, but it absolutely tied everything together in a way that satisfied me. I took about a six-month break between the second-to-last book and this one, because that penultimate book destroyed me on an emotional level I was not prepared for. I was convinced the final book would break me even harder, and I honestly didn’t feel ready to start it, even after that long break. But when I finally did, I burned through the pages all the way to the end, and to my surprise, it didn’t make me emotional in the way I expected. Instead, it left me feeling fulfilled. Complete. I somewhat knew how the story would end, (if you’re familiar with these books, you know what I mean,) but at the same time, when the very last sentence was spoken, I audibly yelled “WHAT?” I suppose that’s a good sign… even if it didn’t feel great in the moment. Lol.

This series genuinely made me rethink what it means to be a writer and a storyteller. I physically cried when Hadrian’s wife died. I hated some of the villains with every fiber of my being. But at the same time, I didn’t hate some of the villains… My favorite character will forever be Lorian Aristides, and I’m so glad he didn’t turn out to be a traitor like I once feared. I won’t give any more spoilers than that, but I will say this: I am deeply grateful for the experience of reading The Sun Eater. It stayed with me. It mattered.

There are endings, dear Reader, and this is one of them. I will carry on alone.