I’ve been re-reading Terry Pratchett lately, and it made me realize how rare genuine warmth has become in modern fantasy. So many recent series lean into cynicism, trauma, or grimdark tones, which can be powerful, but I kind of miss stories that make me *feel safe* again. Do you think the age of hopeful fantasy is gone, or are we just too jaded as readers?

It’s been years since a book made me grin like an idiot. the tone felt like someone telling me a bedtime story after a long day of bad news. It was funny, hopeful, and somehow gentle even when it hurt. I kept thinking, this is what I missed in modern fantasy - a sense of wonder without the cynicism. When I closed the book, it felt like the world was a little less heavy for a while.

For an $18 minimum donation, Humble Bundle is selling an ebook bundle of Glen Cook’s ‘Chronicles of the Black Company’, ‘Instrumentalities of the Night’, and the standalone, ‘The Tower of Fear’ on sale for the next 20 days in the USA and Canada.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/glen-cooks-chronicles-black-company-more-books

It’s been a long time since a book pulled me in like that. I went in expecting heavy politics and slow pacing, but somehow I ended up crying over dragons at 2 a.m. The worldbuilding was so rich it felt like stepping into another life. I know some people say it drags, but for me that’s what made it beautiful - it gave every scene space to breathe. Nnow I’m sitting here feeling weirdly empty, like I just said goodbye to old friends. What’s the last fantasy book that left you like this?

Similar to Gon from Hunter x Hunter or Naruto? Where their instinct or observational ability, or some other supernatural ability gives them an edge, yet they’re traditionally not so smart? Any books like this?

Edit: thanks everyone for the wonderful recommendations!

Link without paywall: https://archive.ph/3xMmR

I read Recursion, by Blake Crouch in one day. I started around noon and literally did nothing else but read. What a great book.

Original Post.

First off thank you so much for the recommendations. I have enjoyed reading these. In total, I read 15 recommendations and DNF 3.

The Best

• Hardwired by by WJ Williams - Anyway, this book was fantastic. Great story arc, believeable near future backdrop, and the characters were fairly well done. If it weren’t for smoking in a hospital room and payphone existing (plus costing a dime), you would think this book was written in the last few years. Somehow I had read the sequel, liked it but didn’t read this one.
• Cold as Ice by Sheffield - Fantastic read. I previously read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and thought it was just ok. But this? Well done! I particularly enjoy the more hard space opera style and this fit the bill. I did find some of the characters one dimensional but some were well developed enough to continue. This is the only book where I read the sequels immediately, although they didn’t deliver like this one.
• Enemy Mine by Longyear - I remembered …

One of the best things about reading sci-fi is getting a glimpse of futures that will never be but of all those works released century some must’ve come closer to others.

I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time yesterday. The novel basically follows parallel storylines between humans embarked in a survival mission on a giant spaceship with whatever’s left of humanity, and spiders in a wild planet getting genetically engineered for intelligence and sentience by a rogue virus. The spiders evolve fascinatingly across various generations, starting from 0 (fully wild arthropods) to developing communication, empathy, communities, animal herding, agriculture, to genetic engineering and biotechnology of such sophistication that it becomes the foundation of all engineering from civil and military to computing and spacefaring. The humans, meanwhile, are shown to be so ridiculously juvenile and idiotic they keep infighting and wasting away generations to devolve from an originally intelligent race to space baboons. I foolishly kept thinking their behavior was just a part of some character development to help empower them and come out …