Hi all! I had the pleasure of attending a Q&A / book signing for T. Kingfisher in NYC this week, and thought the sub hive mind may appreciate a brief recap.

First: she is hilarious. The format of the event was essentially “bookstore employee gingerly hands her a microphone and backs away, and away she goes.” I learned a lot about all sorts of things, to include botflies, the demeanor of roadrunners, and antique devices that let you reinflate deflated caterpillars.

Of particular interest to sub-goers, she dropped some hints and information on her upcoming books:

• The sequel to Swordheart is titled Daggerbound, and comes out this August. There will be a third book titled Shieldborn.
• Judith gets the last Paladin book.
  
  • She doesn’t know what Judith’s deal is yet but is excited to find out.
    
  • “After the first book came out, people kept on telling me they wanted to know how the god died. I asked, ‘you care about that?’ And it turns out they …

WELCOME TO BINGO 2026!

It’s a reading challenge, a reading party, a reading marathon, and YOU are invited!

r/Fantasy Book Bingo is a yearly reading challenge within our community. Its one-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new authors and books, to boldly go where few readers have gone before. 

The core of this challenge is encouraging readers to step out of their comfort zones, discover amazing new reads, and motivate everyone to keep up on their reading throughout the year.

You can find all our past challenges at our official Bingo wiki page for the sub.

RULES:

Time Period and Prize

• 2026 Bingo Period lasts from April 1st 2026 - March 31st 2027.
• You will be able to turn in your 2026 card in the Official Turn In Post, which will be posted in mid-March 2027. Only submissions through the Google Forms link in the official post will count.
• ‘Reading Champion’ flair will be assigned to anyone who completes the entire card by the end of the …

Title pretty much says it all, I just wanted to shoutout Steven Erikson for yet again making me laugh out loud while reading the most in depth, complex fantasy series I’ve ever read. I’m reading Reaper’s Gale right now (book 7 of the main series) and the amount of times I’ve been dying laughing from Tehol and Bugg is ridiculous. I don’t think any other fantasy or sci-fi author that I’ve read other than Pratchett has made me laugh as consistently or as hard. Feels like a good reward as well for how hard this series makes you work sometimes.

Hello everyone, I wanted to share something I’ve been thinking about for a while after recommending Malazan to probably a dozen people over the past few years and watching almost all of them drop it before book two.

The common explanation you hear everywhere is that Gardens of the Moon is just too complex, too many characters, too much worldbuilding with no hand holding, and while that is all true, I dont think that’s actually why most people quit. I’ve read a lot of dense fantasy and most readers who enjoy the genre can push through complexity if they feel emotionally invested. The thing about GotM is that it was written before Erikson had a publishing deal, and it reads that way. The characters are introduced at a speed that makes it genuinely hard to care about any of them before the plot has already moved on. You’re asked to process a lot of grief and weight for people you’ve barely met.

Compare that to book two, Deadhouse Gates, which I think is one …

Just finished it two days ago as part of a Le Guin readthrough I’ve been doing and I need to talk about this because I wasn’t ready for how current it would feel.

The thing that gets me is that Le Guin isn’t making an argument. She’s not telling you what to think about gender or identity or any of it and that restraint is what makes the book so much more effective than most contemporary fiction that tackles the same territory because the second a book starts explaining its own themes to you it stops being literature and starts being a lecture.

What she does instead is put you on a planet where the biological foundation of gender just. Doesn’t exist the way it does here and then she watches what happens to everything that’s built on top of that foundation and the answer is that almost everything we think is fundamental turns out to be contingent and that observation lands differently depending on who you are when you read it and I think that’s …

Most alien contact fiction is secretly about us. The aliens are a mirror, a threat, a lesson, a gift. Strugatsky brothers did something different: the aliens just stopped by, left their trash, and left. They were not interested in us. They did not come to communicate or destroy or uplift. We were not significant enough to warrant any of those things. The Zone is not a message. It is litterally a roadside picnic site, and we are the animals sniffing around the abandoned firepit trying to figure out what the strange shiny objects do.

What makes this so uncomfortable and so good is that it removes the assumption that has been underneath almost every contact narrative since Wells: that encountering something vastly more advanced than us would at least mean something. That we would be noticed. Roadside Picnic says maybe not. The Stalkers aren’t decoding a mystery with cosmic significance, they’re scavenging. The most honest character in the book is Redrick, who never …

Okay hear me out. The Fremen live in the deep desert. Water is the most precious resource in existence. They recycle everything. Every drop of moisture from dead bodies, from breath, from sweat. They wear stillsuits that capture every bit of water their bodies produce.
So what happens when someone needs to poop. Like seriously. The stillsuit recycles urine into drinking water. Thats mentioned multiple times. But solid waste has water in it too. Are the Fremen just… carrying little bags of dehydrated poop around? Do they have stilltent bathrooms? Is there a secret Fremen composting ritual that Herbert just glossed over.
I mentioned this to my book club and now nobody will look at me. But I think its a valid question. Paul becomes Emperor of the known universe but did he ever have to dig a hole in the sand and bury it like a cat. Someone who knows the extended lore please explain.

Everyone knows what happens, like actually everyone, it’s one of those books where the twist is just cultural knowledge at this point and I went in completely aware of where it was going and Keyes still got me and I’m a little annoyed about it honestly.

The thing I didn’t expect is that the intelligence doesn’t just show up in what Charlie says or thinks, it shows up in the writing itself, in the sentence structure and the way he observes things and the vocabulary and so when it starts reversing you feel it happening in the prose before you’ve consciously registered what’s going on and by the time you put it together it’s already well underway and there’s nothing you can do with that information.

And the part that really got me wasn’t even the ending which I think surprises people when I say it, it was somewhere in the middle when Charlie is at his absolute peak and you’re reading and you can see with complete clarity …

I picked up We Are Legion as a light read and thought I knew what I was getting myself into but STILL wasn’t prepared. This is the most Elon-core book Ive read since Ready Player One and Im struggling mightily, my eyes hurt from the eye rolling.

My question is this: given how fanfic ultimate STEM mary sue handwavy everything style the writing is I genuinely cant comprehend how this series could be more than one book, and yet Ive seen infographics about the huge scope and there seems to be smart people who actually like this. So does it like… do something? Have a purpose? Or just idk get better? Or is it just what it seems to be: pure 2010s reddit geekslop; and I should bazinga myself out of there

What a brilliantly harrowing read that was.

The fact this was published nearly 70 years ago makes it even more harrowing - a very poignant read indeed.

Almost screaming at the book at some parts for them to stop doing what they’re doing re making ‘discoveries’.

I was a little confused at first at the purpose of the wanderer, but I think I understood at the end - aside from the obvious religious influence of the character, he was a representation of the human conscience, the human awareness of what we are and what we will always continue to do. Thought the contrast between him and Rachel was brilliant, true innocence, young in every aspect of her life, a signal of hope against the wanderer’s brutal way of life, who has seen it all happen time and time again and who appears destined to walk the same path over and over as we humans likely will.

The scene at the end where the abbot finds the skull of Brother Francis really hit me, just ties it all together that small decisions made …

Starting Wednesday, April 1, Tubi will add 250 episodes of “Sesame Street” spanning from the beginning of the series to Season 38 under a deal with Sesame Workshop. Tubi said that on a quarterly basis, 10% of the episodes will be replaced with additional episodes.

“Few brands have shaped young minds and sparked imagination quite like Sesame Street,” said Adam Lewinson, chief content officer at Tubi. “By bringing hundreds of episodes to Tubi for free, we’re giving today’s kids access to joyful, foundational learning while inviting parents to share a piece of their own childhood with the next generation. It’s a powerful example of how Tubi connects audiences through stories that stay with you for life, making meaningful, educational entertainment accessible to all.”

Joseph Giraldi, chief operating officer at Sesame Workshop, said that bringing “Sesame Street” to Tubi “allows us to expand our reach and impact — and we are thrilled that our beloved characters and proven educational media …

I recently found this clip from King of the Hill and didn’t even realize they were referencing my story.

I lost my arms in a farm accident years ago, and I actually did call 911 using my nose at first, then a pencil with my teeth.

Just thought it was wild to see it mentioned in a show like this.