Hi all - I am author Robert Jackson Bennett. I wrote the fantasy murder mystery The Tainted Cup and its sequel A Drop of Corruption, which came out on the first of this month. I also wrote The Divine Cities Trilogy and The Founders Trilogy. I also dug an extremely good French drain in my backyard in 2019.

Please fire away with your questions and I will be back to answer them at around 2 PM Central today. Thanks!

UPDATE: I am going to pause for a moment but thank you all for the kind questions.

I will summarize a few of the most-asked questions I here to save you some scrolling:

1. Biggest influences are Gene Wolfe, Margaret Atwood, Susana Clarke, and Neil Gaiman (sorry)

2. I don’t know how many Leviathan books there will be. More than 3, sure. But 6? 9? 12? You can decide this via dollars, and the buying of them.

3. The character most directly based on me is obviously Din, because he is an extremely beautiful and sexually desirable man. (This is a lie.)

4. “How do you do …

Do you ever find yourself hearing about a fantasy book or series and becoming really intrigued and thinking “oh yeah this sounds great, I might have to get into this” until you discover one aspect of its setup/premise and immediately switch to ”ah, nope, not for me?”

For me it’s when I discover something like the protagonists are actually normal modern day people that have been transported to a fantasy world, or that the world is actually a far-future post-apocalyptic world that has just resorted to a medieval way of life and magic or whatever. Like I don’t inherently mind those things but it’s not what I go to fantasy for - if I want to read post-apocalyptic fiction I will go and read that, but I don’t really want it encroaching on my fantasy books.

What’s this for you?

As the title says, I wanted to ask the older members of this sub about which fantasy authors/series/books were massive and extremely popular when they were younger but have since faded into obscurity. A lot of older books are still popular or at least still well known today like the Elric Saga, Earthsea, LOTR, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn etc. but there has to be a few out there that were massive in terms of popularity but have faded away into obscurity.

Andrea herself has also posted a video HERE.

Long story short - she felt it was time, as she was beginning to run out of voices and burn out and she felt TWI deserved more than she was able to give.

Much respect! Her work was outstanding.

In case anyone doesn’t know the story, in Roald Dahl’s The Witches the unnamed protagonist is sent to live with his beloved grandmother after his parents are killed in a car crash. His grandmother, who in her youth was a ‘witchophile’ (someone who studies and tries to catch witches), warns him that there are still a lot of witches around and that he has to be careful to be able to identify them and learn how to avoid them. In spite of his grandmother’s warnings, the boy still manages to end up on the wrong side of the witches when he unwittingly infiltrates their AGM, they catch him and turn him into a mouse. The boy nevertheless found out enough about their plans before they caught him that he and the grandmother are able to turn the witches themselves into mice instead.

The book is quite unusual and controversial for its depiction of the boy’s transformation into a mouse and the subsequent conversation with his grandmother. Surprisingly, the boy …

This is an interview of the last week i’ve just read and her passion about writing touched me

I just played the Harry Potter video game called Hogwarts Legacy and it feels like I’m literally living in the Wizarding World. I can roam around Hogwarts Castle, attend wizarding classes, visit Hogsmeade, etc. This game gave me a wave of nostalgia for the HP book phenomenon back then. After Harry Potter, I’ve never seen anything quite like it again. You know, back then people were really hyped about the new HP books. Fans, both kids and adults, gathered at bookstores around the world often dressed as their favorite characters. There was extensive media coverage from TV and newspapers to magazine. Fans speculated and debated potential plot twists, character fates, storyline and among many other things.

Do you remember the hype when the new Harry Potter books were released? Do you think we’ll ever see that kind of excitement again or something similar like in the next 50 years?

The Naval Academy canceled a speech by author and podcaster Ryan Holiday after he declined a request not to reference 381 books and literary works removed from its library as part of a review of diversity, equity and inclusion materials, according to an opinion piece he authored for The New York Times.

I honestly didn’t have any expectation while picking up ‘Project Hail Mary’ by Andy Weir in the store but I liked the back summary so much I thought of giving it a chance. I just finished reading it and I have to say I am ‘amaze’. I also realized that my earlier skepticism stemmed from my semi-liking of The Martian (movie) which I thought had pretty cool science but lacked any sort of danger or emotion (acting or screenplay problem, I don’t know). But PHM was so much in line with what I have come to like in a sci-fi novel - hard (and fun) science, likeable and competent characters and emotions, lots of it.

Ryland Grace, the teacher, might not have been the perfect candidate for this mission but the way Andy Weir allowed him to rise above his shortcomings (by way of the alien Rocky or due to his own inquisitive nature) was nothing short of extraordinary for me. It felt like there was a real problem to solve and the only way to solve it was to work as …

I am utterly awed by the scope and depth of this book, and more generally by Stapledon’s perspective on life and the cosmos.

Reading this book made me both happy and sad.

Happy because I got to witness what the human spirit is capable of when it realizes its full potential. Stapledon seems to navigate fluently between science, history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, like the polymaths of old, but within a modern setting. Also because of the wildly inspiring perspectives he opened up regarding the understanding of who we are and what the universe is.

Sad because it highlights in contrast how little developed the rest of us (or at least myself) are, intellectually and spiritually. My absolute best ideas and realizations, fruits of a life of thinking, seem to be nothing more than the starting point of Stapledon’s ideas, which he speedily improves upon and transcends. This guy seems to belong to a different species, and I feel sad for him that he had to live with the …

What are some of your favorite SF novels written in the 90s that really capture how the future was depicted based on the culture of that era?

Just a quick bit of advice to anyone reading or considering reading the book, I personally found the first quarter to be quite dull, they found a big space object, the board of scientists met, and committee notes were taken. A few aging academics had a spat about their pet theories.

A few other Clark books have not stuck with me. I read 3001 in high school and it was fine but I don’t remember much of it. I read childhood’s end at some point and also didn’t really care for it. But this subreddit has said many positive things about Rendezvous with Rama so I wanted to give it a try.

I was listening to it in audiobook form so it’s hard to say exactly at what point the book really picked up the pace, but it was right about the point where I was considering that maybe the book wasn’t for me in that it had been overhyped. I want to emphasize, the book was absolutely worth it. At the beginning I could not really understand how it won so many awards and by the …

Every time I wrap up a longer (600+ pages)novel I need a shorter book or I find my attention strays.

300 pages or so seems to be the sweet spot.. but so much good scifi is LONG

What fits into this category?

I can confidently say I’ve never encountered a work of fiction that left me feeling so conflicted.

There were many things I absolutely loved about this book. The writing is superb, and the development of the ship’s AI is masterfully done. Telling the story primarily from its perspective as it gradually becomes more self-aware is one of the most unique and impactful narrative choices I’ve ever read. Although this is the only generation ship novel I’ve encountered, I thought the design and depiction of the ship were both excellent. I genuinely loved the book’s vision and setting.

But that brings me to what didn’t work for me: the actual story.

Let me start by saying I don’t completely disagree with Robinson’s message. Expansionism for its own sake shouldn’t be a priority, and any real attempt at interstellar colonization would no doubt face extreme challenges. That said, the way this message is delivered feels heavy-handed at best, and clumsy at worst. The first third of the …