I love both Narnia and LOTR, so this isn’t a criticism of either, not at all! Just a tidbit that I noticed while doing a reread.

Lewis seems a bit….allergic to having his female characters fight in the climactic battles/wars in his books. In LWW, Father Christmas just straight up tells Lucy that “battles are ugly when women fight”. Neither Lucy nor Susan take part in the final battles of either LWW/PC, and even Jill Pole, who’s an experienced archer, takes a backseat during The Last Battle. Combine this with “lipsticks and nylon” being the reason Susan can’t come back to Narnia immediately, and some aspects definitely haven’t…..aged well, to say the least.

Meanwhile, Tolkien is the opposite. The second most important villain of LOTR (the Witch - King) is taken down by Éowyn, who calls out Aragorn when he forbids her to come to battle. When you get to The Silmarillion and the broader Legendarium, you get Haleth, Idril and …

I’m a real sucker for this now-unfashionable fantasy trope. Does anyone have some good series recommendations that have the classic “farmboy rises from nothing to become the hero” premise, particularly newer stuff from the last couple of years? (If there are any left!)

Looking for recommendations: fantasy where magic is addictive, toxic, or ruins the people who use it. Not “corruption” as a metaphor exactly. I mean systems where every use costs the user something real in their body or mind, and people use it anyway.

I’ve read Mistborn and The Poppy War and loved the costs in both. What else scratches this itch?

I hadn’t thought about these books in many years, probably not since I first read them as a young guy back in the 1990s. Then they randomly popped into my head a few minutes ago, and I tried to recall what I thought about them, and the online discourse surrounding them at the time.

I remember absolutely loving the first book, Wizard’s First Rule. I initially wasn’t aware of the controversy surrounding the books and the author, and I don’t know if that would have changed my perception of it.

What I remember enjoying:

I found the part where Richard crosses the boundary trying to avoid those shadow people things being absolutely terrifying.

I thought Darken Rahl was a great villain.

The relationship between Richard and Kahlan was touching, at least to my young mind.

I found the Mord-Sith to be cool at the time, but cringy as hell in retrospect.

That said, the culmination of the relationship between Richard and Denna was actually one of the few times I can …

I just finished reading Foreigner, which is my fifth book of hers (Faded Sun trilogy, Cyteen) and I just can’t get over how good she is. I feel like she doesn’t get enough love. Obviously people who read sci-fi know and love her, but I feel like she should be in the Asimov, Le Guin, Heinlein, etc category where non sci-fi readers know her name. My review of Foreigner is here (but it has a lot of my thoughts about her in general):

I’m obsessed with Cherryh’s style. She’s so good at sci-fi.

She always starts pretty slow, which I’ve come to realize is a feature, not a bug. She does an incredible job of building not only a world, but a full alien culture through conversations and deliberations within characters’ minds. There are no information dumps and very few purely descriptive passages, but you slowly start to piece together this new alien race and how they think as you experience the world through the main character’s eyes. Her …

The Analog/Asimov’s publishers released this bonkers statement on 10/9/26 on Bluesky. Here’s how it starts off:

“We previously commissioned illustrators to create covers as work-for-hire when they were asked to adapt authors’ original stories for elements such as cover art.

“This will be changing.

“The rights granted to MRM by authors are limited, and therefore we can’t protect the intellectual property and rights of the original author of the story, if we at the same time grant the authors’ rights to the illustrator so that the illustrator can then retain an adaptation copyright. We don’t acquire rights from authors that allow us to grant illustrators broad unencumbered use of the worlds, characters, and other elements created by the author.”

The entire nonsensical statement can be read at https://file770.com/must-read-magazines-issues-statement-on-cover-illustration-contracts/

This seems to be MRM’s reaction to having been publicly …

I came to SF through Foundation and Dune. What newer book would you put next to them, not because it copies the same ideas, but because it gives you that same feeling of discovering a much bigger world? Station Eleven stayed with me, although it’s a very different kind of book.

I’ve been reading scifi/fantasy for almost 40 years. Lately, I’ve been rereading some of my early favourites. The experience is almost invariably disappointing. This made me doubt my recommendations to people over the years. Is this feeling common? Should I even bother rereading stuff or just keep the fond (partial) memories of the first reading? How do other people handle rereading?

(To be more specific, I reread The Helmsman by Bill Baldwin, Heechee books by Frederik Pohl and even The Forever War by Haldeman seemed emptier, thinner and ending less heart catching.) I am now afraid to reread Scalzi’s Old man’s war books and Card’s Ender series. I love them too much to risk spoiling the memory.

I’m re-reading all of Iain Banks’ works, and it seems like his hostility toward organized religion is blunter than usual in his earlier books. In “Against a Dark Background”, allegedly drafted when he was in his 20s, he’s particularly comically dismissive (“…buncha religious fuckwits.”, “humourless hysterical dickshits” etc etc).

And books like”Phlebas” and “Games” cast religious groups/cults/theocracies as villains, while other early works constantly drop anti religious asides (“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present…” - “State of the Art”).

I haven’t started re-reading his later novels, so maybe he maintains this blunt trend to the end. A large part of me suspects he does (20-year-old and 50-year-old Banks seems to maintain the same politics).

Anyway, curious about if he ever talked about religion outside his novels, I came across a …

UPDATE: This post blew up a little more than I expected. I am not objectively dissing the movie. I am suggesting that if you have not read the book simply because you had already watched the movie, it is recommended that you read the book because so much content was left out of the movie.

I read Project Hail Mary around 6 months before the movie came out. I was really excited for the movie especially because I enjoyed The Martian movie adaptation. I was aware that Ridley Scott was not directing PHM but was all pumped up nevertheless.

Personally, I was disappointed by the PHM movie. In case someone did not read PHM just because you have watched the movie, I would suggest you read the book. It is way better!

English summary: AI allegedly deletes entire season of ‘The Challenge Sweden’.
The entire upcoming season of ‘The Challenge Sweden’ has reportedly been deleted by an AI agent, forcing TV4 to postpone its premiere until 2027, just weeks before the originally intended premiere.

According to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, the production company Mastiff had allowed an AI agent access to its server. The AI allegedly deleted the fully edited season, and the project could not be recovered. Key points from the article:

• Hundreds of days of work lost: The deletion reportedly wiped out the completed season, representing months of production and editing work involving hundreds of people.
• Premiere postponed: The show was originally scheduled to premiere on November 22, 2026, but has now been pushed back to 2027.
• TV4 confirms a technical failure: The broadcaster confirmed that edited footage had disappeared and that the season would need to be edited again from scratch.
• AI …

Hi reddit, I’m Alex Gibney, director of documentaries including TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE, GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF, ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM, THE INVENTOR: OUT FOR BLOOD IN SILICON VALLEY, and CASINO JACK AND THE UNITED STATES OF MONEY.

My new movie, MUSK, is out in theaters starting this week, and I’m here to answer your questions. I spent years doing a deep dive into the life and mind of Elon Musk, and this movie is the result.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/eY_8SyndC10?si=3gH0pEap43qu6uxm

Synopsis:

MUSK is Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s latest exploration into the corrupting influence of power. Through meticulous research and reporting, Gibney reframes all we know about the tech titan Elon Musk, revealing that the so-called “visionary genius” is little more than the 21st-century reincarnation of a confidence man. Using Musk’s own words, Gibney proves that even his most heralded accomplishments are rife with illusion and …