We often criticize fantasy books for having “unrealistic” plot twists or characters with too much plot armor. But the more I study history, the more I realize reality has terrible writing.

My favorite example is from WWII: The US Navy (the “Good Guys”) is losing ships in their own harbor. They are desperate. So what do they do? They literally go to prison, find the “Dark Lord” of organized crime (Lucky Luciano), and cut a deal to have him run security for them.

If I read that in a fantasy novel, I’d roll my eyes. “Oh, sure, the King just hires the head of the Thieves Guild to save the kingdom? Too convenient. Too edgy.”

Yet, Operation Underworld was 100% real.

It makes me wonder: What other historical events sound like they were written by a fantasy author who had too much coffee?

(Caesar getting kidnapped by pirates and demanding they increase his ransom comes to mind too).

I was reading a new epic fantasy last week and once again there was this ancient empire that fell five thousand years ago but somehow everyone still uses the same language, the same symbols and even the same laws. It always pulls me out of the story a bit. In real life stuff changes fast. Even a few hundred years makes places feel unrecognizable. But in fantasy you walk into some ruined city and it’s basically a dusty version of what people still live in today. Same scripts on the walls, same gods, same political borders, just broken. I get that it makes worldbuilding easier and keeps things readable, but sometimes it feels like time has no weight in these settings. Like history is just a backdrop instead of a force that shapes cultures and people. Does this bother anyone else or am I just overthinking something most readers dont care about?

Hi there,

So I am just rereading The Name of The Wind after over 10 years (about 500 pages in). I remembered it as one of the best books I had ever read, but now that I am almost finished, I found myself having to rescind that opinion.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love the prose, the magic system is phenomenal to me and I don’t mind a character being very good at what they do (though it is borderline in this case). I greatly enjoyed the music aspect and enjoyed whenever Kvothe played the lute, I liked the coziness of many settings. I found many character interactions very charming, some nice bantering here and there… but I just can’t with the depiction of women, of which there aren’t that many mind you. I guess going from teenager with no real experience in love and no female friends to near thirty with very many female friends changed my perspective quite a bit on that, who would’ve thought!

I still like the book and I will read the second one …

New sequel to the Blacktongue Thief is out October 2026 and I’m only finding this out now. For anyone else late to the party I’ve included the blurb below.

Can’t

F*cking

Wait

The Thrice-Bound Fool is the epic, rollicking next chapter in the bestselling and “awesome as hell” (Nicholas Eames) fantasy adventure series that began with The Blacktongue Thief.

Professional thief and inveterate trickster Kinch Na Shannack has always enjoyed a good book. But now his life, and the future of all of Manreach, depends on him deciphering a very bad book indeed; a stolen, sentient tome that tries to kill him every time he opens it—and often when it’s closed.

Galva, veteran of the goblin wars and death’s sworn handmaiden, has vowed to protect Kinch while he mines the book for its dark magic and even darker secrets. She does so not for Kinch’s sake—though the cheeky bastard is growing on her—but because the book is the key to stopping the shadowy tyrants out to kill the queen she serves, and …

So- I downloaded The Princess Bride 30yr anniversary edition on kindle the other night. it’s one of my all-time favorite movies and i wanted to finally read the book. However within this copy there’s constant author interjections and anecdotal paragraphs about the editing process, personal stories from reading etc. I was wondering if a version I can purchase where this all doesn’t exist is available. I want to be fully immersed in the story like you are in the movie and the constant interjecting doesn’t help. i figured this would be a pretty good sub to start my search in as it’s so broad. thanks!

edit: my bad y’all had no idea it was part of the bit, was genuinely curious blame the ‘tism

When Oklahoma passed laws that pressured teachers to remove books on race, gender and sexuality from their classrooms, she refused. Other teachers resisted, too — but Ms. Boismier did so loudly. She plastered her 10th-grade English classroom with signs of protest, posted to social media and advised her students on how they could find books online. Eventually she resigned.

She knew that in her conservative state she would be criticized, but the reaction was much more severe than she expected. And in 2024, the state took away Ms. Boismier’s teaching license.

In a new survey of primary, or elementary, school staff conducted by the UK charity Kindred Squared, the teachers estimated that nearly a third of students in reception class — the equivalent of pre-school in the US — did not know how to correctly use books. At times, some children even tried to swipe or tap the pages like a smartphone.

Books were flagged by librarians for possible violations such as:

“unclothed anthropomorphic animals, violence”

“Adam and Eve nude in the Garden of Eden; Violence”

“underpants shown during cartwheel”

“An image capturing an affectionate gesture where a girl gives a boy a kiss on the cheek on the school bus during Valentine’s Day.”

“Fictional male rabbits get married”

“Civil War Hero, Mary, dresses in pants, history of undergarments present and modeled by chickens”

“Kissing”

“Words “ass” appears for donkey and “cock” for rooster”

“2 male neighbors speaking to one another, one has a rainbow and his produce bag”

“LGBTQIA+ rights”

“implied breastfeeding”

“nude mummified body”

“classroom discussion of book bans and censorship”

“discussion of teen getting period”

“woke”

Popular titles flagged and pulled include Aesop’s Fables, two Magic Treehouse books by Mary Pope Osborne, multiple Harry Potter books by J.K Rowling, and a Charlie Brown book by …

I’ve gotten back into reading a few months ago after five years or so of not reading books and brainrot. Been reading mostly sci-fi, and Exhalation was the second book in my current run of literacy.

My short review: just banger after banger. I really like the writing process of introducing a piece of sci-fi tech to one aspect of a character’s life and seeing what happens. I can’t glaze it enough. Written in creative ways, one story didn’t have any dialogue, one was a plaque on a museum exhibit, one was just two pages, and another was half the book. The Life Cycle of Software Objects changed the way I view (the prospect of real) AI. Each story left me with stuff to chew on. The first story set the tone nicely, I thought we were gonna start in some spaceship or something, but nah, we’re in ancient Iraq. And it was beautiful.

It’s refreshing. Before, when I consumed sci-fi media, I’d subconsciously expect decades old stale themes. Like uploading …

I just read this book about spiders and humans, and internally I wished they would co-exist in the end and live together on the green planet. And they did. They found a way to communicate.

And then I think about humans in real life and how we’re killing each other for literally no reason at all. It’s either black or white; one side or the other. People placing themselves in a group and sticking to that group even if it goes against their morality, or against all morality.

It’s just sad to think about real life after you read a good book sometimes.

So often, aliens end up with similar values, and psychology, and want to have nice conversations with humans. They come across essentially as the elves and dwarves of sf. A good counterexample is Roadside Picnic: the aliens might not even know we exist, and if they do, there’s no evidence they care, and if they care, there’s surely no evidence of communication or coherent motives or even what they are. I recognize it’s hard to build a narrative, and therefore to sell commercial fiction, around aliens like this (they aren’t really “characters”) hence its rarity. If there’s even a conflict, it’s most appropriately described as man vs nature.

Posting this to look for recommendations, as well as to see how common this complaint is.

I’ve often seen recommendations for science fiction detective/crime stories, and I’ve read many of the more modern ones: Altered Carbon, Titanium Noir, Leviathan Wakes and lots of indies. I’ve only run across one indie set on a generation ship, however, but it was largely a thriller.

I thought I was rather clever when I launched my own hardboiled detective series set on a generation ship in 2023. Then, late last year, Alastair Reynolds’ Halcyon Years came out (in the US tomorrow–still waiting to get my hands on it), and today I read there are two others due out in 2026: A Hole in the Sky by Peter F Hamilton and The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed.

Considering that traditional publishing moves much more slowly, this probably means we were all thinking about this concept at the same time, and I find it a little eerie if this isn’t a more common trope than I realize.

So, I’m wondering: is 2026 the year of the detective/crime story on a …

When Paolini isn’t stuffing the novel with out of place Aliens references and mashed-together sci-fi tropes, he’s taking the narrative on tangents just to explore some neat worldbuilding detail he came up with. Some examples (not necessarily bad examples):

• There’s an entire sequence at least 100 pages long where the main characters travel months to a never-explored planet chasing a McGuffin, only to find out it’s broken. Said McGuffin is barely mentioned again, and the only lasting effect is one crew member is injured, and a new enemy is introduced (who also never appears again).
• The backstories of multiple supporting characters are exposited to the main character back-to-back.
• We also get detailed backstories for several characters, who then go on to die right quick without affecting the plot.
• Starships aren’t managed by an AI, but by “ship minds”: humans who have had their entire bodies replaced with a life support coffin, save for their …

I’m looking for books that just go and never stop until the last page. Like if Hardcore Henry was a book. I looked, it’s not.