Hello all - I’m the ANA AND DIN MYSTERIES author Robert Jackson Bennett. The third installment of the series, A TRADE OF BLOOD, comes out today.

I’m in Scotland right now, and have been spending the last week or so rambling about the Highlands and finishing up the fourth installment, about which I’ll likely have some news soon. This might make the time difference a bit odd for my US readers, but will keep an eye on this post and be answering questions later in the day!

EDIT, 6:34 UK time - Sorry, will have to pop off to do a live Waterstones zoom event. Thank you all for the lovely questions!

I’m looking for a protagonist who genuinely unintelligent. Not uneducated but clever, not an otherworldly entity whose thoughts are simply alien to human minds, not an “outsider” who doesn’t understand the local culture, not someone who is book smart but lacking in common sense, not someone who is street smart rather than book smart.

I mean someone who is just, on the whole, not very bright.

I’d especially love a restricted POV from the protagonist, either first person or very restricted third person, so the reader is stuck only taking in information the protagonist perceives and understands and has to piece together what’s missing. A non-fantasy example is the book Forrest Gump. When Forrest gets involved in world events, he doesn’t understand their importance, so he gives the details that are interesting to him, like the kind of soda he drank, and not the ones that reflect global significance, like the treaty being signed in the background. …

I’ve been on a bit of a trilogy streak lately and I keep running into the same problem. Book one is great, book two feels like 500 pages of moving pieces around, and then book three has to sprint through every payoff at once. Or the opposite happens and the first book is clearly just setup for a story that only really gets going later.

I know that structure works for some people, but I’m looking for a trilogy where each book genuinely feels worth reading on its own.

By “stays great” I don’t necessarily mean every book has to feel identical. I’m fine with a slower middle book, different POV focus, bigger scope, whatever. I just don’t want that feeling of having to push through one installment because everyone promises the next one gets good again.

Ideally each book has its own satisfying arc while still building toward a finale that feels earned. Bonus points if the third book is actually the strongest one, because that seems weirdly rare in the series I’ve read.

So …

It could be a regular trilogy, but what about 3 consecutive books in the middle of a series?

“The “A Song of Ice and Fire” franchise author took to his blog for the first time in nearly six months on Monday, sharing that any posts after February were written by his “mighty minions.”

“Remember me? It’s been a while, I know. My last blog post went up here on February 19,” Martin wrote. “The posts that came after were made by my mighty minions. I am lucky enough to have a great staff of assistants… though even with their help, I kept falling further and further behind.”

As Martin went on, he admitted that “this year has been… stressful, to say the least.””

Anne says towards the end of this “Dear old world, you are very lovely and I am glad to be alive in you”. To which I thought, I am so glad to be alive and have read this book. A little cheesy but that’s genuinely how i was feeling.

Through the book, right from the beginning, Anne shows so much joy, so much love to the world she is living in, to the things that are happening, to the people around her. She loves and cares with abandon and hates with a passion. She lives her life so fiercely and brightly that it made me realise how little I have lived in the past few years. Somewhere as part of being an adult, work had become all of my life. If I were to describe last few years as a color palette, it is mostly a dreary grey of monotone routine. So to read this book where this orphan child so unabashedly expresses her appreciation for life was like activating a part of my brain that I haven’t used in a long time.

Reading this book, I was appreciating the world …

Note: I posted this already but it got automatically removed in error for a link missing context, and I was never able to contact the moderators of this subreddit to correct the error. Now that I’ve read pretty much all the things I have the time or desire to read, I am re-posting it because I put thought and effort into these reviews.

The Hugo Awards finalists have been released! I have seen some say that this seems like a very safe, “boring” list, with a lot of the nominees coming from the same publisher and from authors who have already been nominated or won Hugos in the past. I nominated the novel The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes and am a bit sad it didn’t make the cut. I’m not that into following awards in the genre, but I was at last year’s Worldcon and plan to vote for the Hugos and go to this year’s Worldcon, where the winners are announced.

#Novels

• A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape): Sequel to …

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Looking for a science fiction book for my vacation. I am an engineer in the construction industry myself and a science fiction reader. In the past, I have only read epistemological SciFi or rather Literary SciFi (works like Deus Irae or Blindsigth).

Now I would like to dare to read some “engineeringporn” (😆). Since I detest the mainstream, I would like to leave the above books out for now. What can you suggest?

If you haven’t read it I would recommend it.

Text can be located here:

https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf

Ok r/printSF, let’s have some fun. We are more than a quarter of the way through the 21st Century. Pick your top five SF books of the 21st Century thus far (i.e. published after 12/31/2000). Use whatever criteria you want (your favorites, five best representative of the styles of the decade, five greatest works, even though you didn’t enjoy them all, etc.). Just remember to tell us what criteria you’re using!

If Orson Scott Card had finished writing Ender books in 1987, his achievement would have been immortal. Had he stopped in 1999, he would have been a great writer, but flawed.

But he keeps writing sequels. Alas, what can one say?

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I finished John Langan’s The Fisherman recently and was wondering if there were any other well written cosmic horror or otherwise Lovecraftian novels that were written more recently?

It was such a pleasure speaking with all of you! Thank you for your kind, thoughtful and heart warming questions. This was so much fun and I look forward to speaking to all of you again XO

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Hi reddit, Michael Mando here to answer all your questions. You may know me as Scorpion in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Nacho Varga in Better Call Saul, and Vaas Montenegro in Far Cry 3. Upcoming projects include Bane in Batman: Knightfall, an undisclosed role in the limited series Criminal as well as the live-action Gundam movie. Check out the comedy 72 Hours, I also make a fun appearance in that.

Besides movies, I am currently working on a music album scheduled for release in fall/winter 2026. The idea is to make intimate live concerts to better …