How I Would Vote: 2025 Hugo Awards

The Nominees

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

The Actual Results

TO BE DETERMINED

How I Would Vote Now

No Award
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Explanation

As if yesterday’s post wasn’t controversial enough, I’ve decided to jump feet-first into this particular tempest (though thankfully, it appears to be a tempest in an ever-shrinking teacup). And I suppose the thing that makes this particular post so interesting is that I could actually cast this vote, if I had no qualms about giving the clowns who run the Hugo Awards any of my hard-earned money. But I do have qualms, so I won’t give them my money, which still makes this a hypothetical exercise, even though I’m posting this three weeks before the 2025 Hugos are awarded.

To be perfectly honest, I have not read any of these books all of the way through. I’ve read enough of two of them to DNF them, and one of them enough (including the epilogue) to know that I will eventually read the whole thing. And I screened all of them first with AI, which told me enough to know that three of them were not worth reading at all.

First, Someone You Can Build a Nest In. According to ChatGPT (and frankly, the back cover description itself), this book is chock full of body horror, trauma, abuse, and sexual depravity. It is also quite possibly the wokest book on the ballot, which means that it probably has the best chance of actually winning. Which also means that you couldn’t pay me enough money to read it. So much for that.

The Ministry of Time also appears to be woke, with anti-colonial and LGBTQ themes. However, the thing that really turned me off were all of the content issues that ChatGPT listed, such as frequent strong language, lots of F-bombs, and several erotic “open-door” sex scenes. So yeah, I’ll give a pass on that one too.

It’s much the same story for The Tainted Cup. A few woke elements, a subtle M/M romance (which I’m sure plays into the “All True Love is LGBTQ Love” trope that I cannot abide), and a lot of explicit profanity, with some prostitution to round it out. Not interested.

I forget why I DNFed A Sorceress Comes to Call. All I remember was that when I tried to read it, I felt repelled from it like a magnet. Since that has been my experience with basically everything else that T. Kingfisher has written, I didn’t feel compelled to try again.

Which brings us to the two books by Tchaikovsky. I really enjoyed his Children of Time, though I didn’t really get into the sequel (just didn’t feel compelled by any of the characters). He is a good writer, and specifically a good science fiction writer, though his scientific materialism strikes me as outdated.

Alien Clay didn’t appeal much to me, though—honestly, I found it difficult to believe that a government that would expend so many resources to transport their prisoners halfway across the galaxy wouldn’t also spend the tiny fractional cost to make sure they all got there alive. So right from the start, it felt like a melodramatic parody of all the left’s fears about “fascism.” And skipping to the end, it basically turns out the way Halo would have ended if the Flood had won. So I decided to DNF it, even though it wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever DNFed. And also, I don’t think that any one author should have more than one book on the ballot in any given year. So that’s why I’d put it under No Award.

Service Model, though, is pretty good. The best way I can describe it is Murderbot meets Kafka. It’s sort of an absurdist comedy in a post-apocalyptic world where the humans have (mostly) vanished, and the robots are malfunctioning in hilarious (and sometimes disturbing) ways. Not my favorite kind of book, and it probably could be improved by ruthlessly editing it to half the length, but I was enjoying it right up to the point where someone else put the library copy on hold, and I had to return it without renewing it. Skipping to the epilogue, I found nothing particularly objectionable, so I will pick it up again, and will likely finish it.

Which is more than I can say of most Hugo-nominated books in the last ten years.

[ETA 23 Feb 2026: I’ve decided to DNF Service Model after all, not because of anything objectionable that I read, but because I just couldn’t bring myself to pick it up again and finish it. It just wasn’t compelling enough for me to want to finish it more than I want to pick up something new. I could be persuaded otherwise if I heard someone really gush about it, but right now, I’m just not going to bother.]

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

The key to understanding the Middle East (and possibly the world)

I just finished Douglass Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults, and wow, is it an incredible book. Difficult to read, simply because of the grim nature of the subject, but a very powerful and very timely book.

My own thinking on Israel and the Middle East has changed a lot since the October 7th attacks. For the record, I studied Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic in college in the 00s, traveled throughout Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and Palestine / Judea & Samaria while I was pursuing my degree. I’ve kept up with geopolitical developments over the years, including during the Arab spring, and have helped some of my Arab friends navigate those developments.

The apocryphal Churchill quote that “if you’re not a liberal by your 20s, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by your 50s, you have no brain” very much describes my own experience. I used to be very sympathetic toward the Palestinians, but after the October 7th attacks, my position has shifted almost 180 degrees.

The thing about the Middle East is that even though it’s complex, it’s not really that complicated. Within the Middle East, there are basically three kinds of people:

the Jews,
the people who want to kill the Jews, and
the people who really don’t care.

This dynamic has defined the politics of the region since at least the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 600 BC, and possibly quite longer. Possibly, in fact, since the very first Hebrews migrated to the region during the Bronze Age Collapse.

(As a side note, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Levant since our first historical records of the Jews. In other words, this is the one place in the world where the Jews are indigenous. Therefore, anyone who argues that the Jewish State of Israel is a “colonist” state is, in effect, arguing for the extermination of the Jews, because there is no other place in the world where the Jews can live and not be considered colonists. At the very least, they are laying the foundation for the ideological position that the Jews should always and everywhere be treated as subhuman.)

With the above dymanic in mind, there are only two configurations that possess any sort of inherent stability. The first is that the Jews are the people in charge of the region AND constitute the majority of the population. That way, even if all of the non-Jews fall into the kill-the-Jews camp, they are still not powerful enough to carry out their plans.

This was the state of affairs from the days of Ezra and Nehemiah basically to the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Following the Babylonian exile, the Jews returned to their homeland under the (mostly) benevolent rule of King Darius of Persia, who allowed them to rebuild the temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed. When Alexander took over the region and the Greeks began to Hellenize it, the Maccabees and other Jewish rulers still managed to hold their own.

But all of that changed when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD. They put down the Jewish revolt with utter ruthlessness, making a desert and calling it peace. They drove the main body of the Jews out of their ancestral homeland, making sure it would never be such a hotbed of rebellion again. They also renamed the region “Palestine,” after the ancestral enemies of the Jews, the Phillistines. The name “Palestine” was originally an insult to the conquered Jewish people, just like the name “Britain” (ie “land of the painted people”) was originally an insult to the conquered Celts. And just like the British came to own the term, the Jews also came to own the term “Palestine” until it was appropriated from them by the Levantine Arabs who wanted to kill all the Jews.

From 70 A.D. until the early 20th century, the Jews were a minority in their own homeland. And so long as their numbers didn’t get too large, things were relatively stable. Sure, there were plenty of people who still wanted to kill them all, but so long as the Jews mostly stayed out of sight, most of the non-Jews frankly didn’t care. It was only when their numbers began to grow that the I-don’t-care faction bled into the kill-them-all faction, leading to pogroms and mass rapes and all sorts of insane atrocities.

But then, in the 19th century, the Jews began to migrate back to the region in large numbers. This led to an inherently unstable configuration which persists to this day, where the Jews and non-Jews are roughly equal in number. The Jews formed the State of Israel with help from their Western patrons, who provided a degree of metastability. But the situation is not long-term stable, and hasn’t been for the last 150 years.

The Americans tried to solve this problem by bringing together the Jews and the people who want to kill the Jews—as if they could ever make peace. This was incredibly naive. So long as there are Jews, there will be people who want to kill them. Individuals may be persuaded to change their positions, but the ideologies of antisemitism are as persistent as the Jewish people themselves. The death cult will never be satisfied until all of the Jews are dead.

What October 7th showed us is that the three-way dynamic of the region is still very much in play, and that the kill-the-Jews faction is still far too strong. And given the way things are changing here in the United States, I suspect that the Jews have, at best, another generation before their Western patrons become unreliable, and the metastable nature of the current configuration begins to deteriorate.

The Abraham Accords are changing things in a very positive way. For once, instead of trying to get the Jews to make a deal with the people who want to kill them, we are moving away from that silly nonsense and cutting those people out of the equation by making a deal with everyone else (like we should have done in the beginning). And with the way that Iran was utterly defeated in the latest war, it looks like that might actually work. But even then I don’t think the situation is going to be long-term stable unless it ultimately leads to a mass resettlement of the Palestinians, because that’s the only thing (aside from the senseless massacre of millions of Israeli Jews) that puts us into a stable configuration.

I think the Israelis know this. And I think that Israel is going to get a lot more aggressive in the coming years, much to the consternation and perplexity of their friends here in the West who do not understand this three-way dynamic (or who think that the key to peace is for the Jews to play nice and not fight back, so that most of the non-Jews fall into the I-don’t-care camp).

Because here’s the thing that almost no one is talking about: the impetus for the October 7th massacre was the transportation of several red heifers to Israel from a ranch in Texas. In order to build the third Jewish temple, the land of the Temple Mount (where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stand) needs to be ritually cleansed by the ashes of a pure red heifer. The reason Hamas called their operation the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was to appeal to their Muslim brothers to defend the temple mount.

From what I understand, most Jews do not currently want to rebuild the temple, and the State of Israel itself has taken strong measures to suppress those who do. But every time the Jews have had a commanding presence in their own ancestral homeland, they have built or maintained a temple on the Temple Mount. So once they feel they’re strong enough, they will probably do it again. And when that happens (or as it is beginning to happen, perhaps even now), I think that this three-way dynamic will become much more of a global phenomenon.

Fantasy from A to Z: P is for Prayer

What would fantasy be without religion? Probably much the same as us, when we don’t have religion: aimless, drifting, and lost.

Religion is more than just a useful aspect of worldbuilding. It’s something that lies at the very core of what makes us human—and thus, it’s something that any story needs to at least touch on if it is to be meaningful or important. Most likely, it won’t be meaningful at all unless the religious aspect is incorporated deeply within its bones.

But what is religion? For our purposes, religion is how we, as humans, relate to the powers that are higher than ourselves. It’s not about painting a cross on your cover, or a star of David, or a crescent, or an omh, or whatever else. It’s about how we act in regards to the cosmic and the transcendent. It’s about how we understand how to orient ourselves in this vast and terrifying universe, and find our own place within it.

I grew up in a time when religion was one of those taboo subjects that you never brought up in polite society. Politics, religion, and sex were all taboo like that. Granted, those taboos were already beginning to fray by the time I was old enough to hold an uninformed opinion on any of that, but even in the 90s, the post-war liberal consensus still held.

What was the post-war liberal consensus? It was the set of rules and norms that we all (or those of us in polite society, at least) agreed to live by, after the tumultuous catastrophe of the World Wars. From 1914 to 1945, more than a hundred Europeans died from political causes—and that was just in Europe. For thirty long years, the whole world was drowned in blood.

The wars ended with the invention of the world’s most devastating superweapon, which for the first time in the history of this planet gave us the power to literally annihilate our own species. So at the end of all that, our grandparents felt a very strong need to keep those weapons from ever being used again. Hence, they developed the post-war liberal consensus.

The greatest value of the post-war liberal consensus was tolerance—but they didn’t think of that as a value in itself. The idea was that instead of elevating the values of any one group over another, they would create a world where everyone tolerated each other. Everyone could keep their own culture and religion, along with their own unique (and often contradictory) cultural and religious values, so long as they didn’t try to impose those values on anyone else.

The trouble with that, of course, is that tolerance itself is a value. Which means that in order to maintain the post-war consensus, they had to be intolerant toward any culture or religion that threatened it. Which meant that they had to push their globalism and multiculturalism on everyone, superseding all of their own cultural and religious values. This gave rise to the global urban monoculture, which ultimately gave us the clown world we now live in. Which is currently falling apart.

Religion should not be off-limits, especially for good storytelling. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that stories should bash you over the head and try to convert you to whatever church the author happens to belong to. Indeed, some of the most religious stories aren’t about any particular church or creed at all.

An example of this is Epic: The Musical. Beyond the old Greek mythology that runs through the story, the religious view is that the universe is utterly unpredictable, the gods (or higher powers) are arbitrary and capricious, and that the ends (getting home to Penelope) always justify the means. Indeed, any means that aren’t justified by the ends are immoral and wrong. Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves. How do we sleep? Next to our wives.

Those aren’t the religious views that I subscribe to, but those are deeply religious views. How? Because they show us how we stand in relation to powers that are higher than ourselves. In the 19th century, it became fashionable to throw out religion, and reverence man himself as the highest power in the universe. Where did that get us? It gave us the 31 years that killed 100 million Europeans and drowned the whole world in blood.

G.K. Chesterton said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Now, more than ever, the world needs religion.

Of course, one of the nice things about writing fiction is that you can explore all sorts of religious ideas that may or may not have a direct counterpart in our world. Indeed, that’s part of what makes fantasy so rich. Tolkien created a whole race (the elves) that is bound by magic and immortality to this earth, contrasting with us humans, who are “strangers in a strange land.” In fact, Tolkien’s entire oeuvre is rich with religious elements, not just in the worldbuilding and the mythology, but in the Christian symbology—and he does it so subtly and so deeply that it draws you into his world, rather than kicking you out. It’s all in service to the story.

There’s a reason why the best stories in the world are in the Bible (and most of those are in the Book of Genesis). Which is one of the reasons why I’m drawing on the life of King David for the fantasy epic that I’m currently writing (The Soulbound King). But I’m also drawing on symbology and mythology as well, to make sure the religious elements aren’t just skin-deep. There is so much fascinating tree-related symbolism within the Jewish/Christian tradition. So much rich and wonderful stuff to draw on for creating a fantasy world.

Don’t be afraid to play with religion in your own fantasy stories. After all, on the deepest level, creativity itself is something of a religious act.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

New book! Out now! Bloodfire Legacy

I published a new Sea Mage novel last week! Check it out!

Bloodfire Legacy

A murdered wizard. A desperate thief. A daughter on the brink of damnation.

Corin has never been more than a streetwise nobody and a petty thief. He can also hear the voices of the dead, whether or not he wants to. So when the ghost of the royal court magician begs him to help save his wayward daughter, Corin reluctantly accepts, even though it means he must become something he's never been: a hero.

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About the Book

A murdered wizard. A desperate thief. A daughter on the brink of damnation. Corin has never been a hero. A streetwise nobody and petty thief, he’s survived this long by keeping his head down and his fingers quick. He can also hear the voices of the dead—whether or not he wants to. But when the ghost of the royal court magician begins to haunt him, all of that begins to change. His daughter has been dabbling in the dark arts, seeking to avenge his death. In doing so, she has fallen in with the very people who killed him. Corin is the only one who can help him save his daughter. But to do that, Corin must turn from everything he knows and become something he’s never been: a hero.

Details

Author: Joe Vasicek
Series: Sea Mage Cycle
Genres: Action & Adventure, Dark Fantasy, Epic, Fantasy, FICTION, General, Romance
Tag: 2025 Release
Publisher: Joe Vasicek
Publication Year: July 2025
Length: Novel
List Price: $14.99
eBook Price: free!
Audiobook Price: $4.99

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Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek fell in love with science fiction and fantasy when he read The Neverending Story as a child. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Genesis Earth, Gunslinger to the Stars, The Sword Keeper, and the Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic at Brigham Young University and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus Mountains. He lives in Utah with his wife and two apple trees.

Other Books in the "Sea Mage Cycle"

The Call of the Tide

The Sea Mage Cycle: Omnibus 1

Rescuer's Reward

The Widow's Child

The Winds of Desolation

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Fantasy from A to Z: O is for Orcs

Is anyone in this world inherently and irredeemably evil?

That is the moral question at the heart of the fantasy race known most often as “orcs.” They are occasionally called by other names, of course: goblins, tuskers, blackbloods, etc. Sometimes, you will also find different but similar fantasy races filling the same niche: trolls, kobolds, trollocs, ogres, etc. But the thing that ties them all together is that they are both inherently and irredeemably evil.

…or are they? In some iterations, the orcs aren’t necessarily evil, just savage—kind of like Robert E. Howard’s Conan, or his many stories extolling the barbaric hero who stands against the corrupt forces of a decadent civilization. I played around with that myself in my novelette “A Hill On Which To Die.” More recently, such as in Amazon’s Rings of Power series, the orcs are played up as sympathetic creatures, whose only true fault is that they come from a different culture than our own.

Here’s the thing, though. While I enjoy a good redemption arc, or a heel-face turn when it’s done really well, I also believe that there are some people and some cultures in this world that are wholly and irredeemably evil. They may not have started out that way—indeed, my faith teaches me that we are all children of an eternal Heavenly Father who loves us—but my faith also teaches me that evil also exists, and that there are some in this world who cannot be saved, because they have become sons of perdition.

Traditional publishing (and the entertainment industry more broadly) is currently dominated by people who skew to the left in their politics and their cultural values. As such, they are heavily influenced by the philosophies of thinkers like Rousseau, who posited that all people are inherently good, and that evil originates from social structures and institutions. That’s why they are so obsessed with “systemic oppression,” or with stories that obsess over victimization and victimhood—as if being a victim (especially of “colonization”) makes one inherently virtuous.

I don’t think that’s true, though. I think that some cultures are more virtuous or morally good than others. For example, when Columbus discovered the truth about the Amerindians he’d first made contact with—that they were the remnants of a tribe that had been conquered by cannibals, who had slaughtered all their men, put their women on an island, and were now farming them out for meat, visiting them once a year to devour all their infant children, then raping and impregnating them again before leaving—I believe that Columbus was justified in concluding that the culture of this vile cannibal tribe was inherently and irredeemably evil. And I believe that the world was made a better place after this culture was exterminated.

The term “orc” has its origins in Old English, especially in the epic poem Beowulf, where the word “orcneas” refers to monstrous beings who make an appearance in the poem. Tolkien was a scholar of Old English, so when he needed a name for his race of inherently and irredeemably evil creatures, he came up with the name “orc.” Tolkien also saw action in the trenches of WWI as a British soldier, and that undoubtedly influenced him as well.

It is an unfortunate reality of war that in order to fight effectively, you need to dehumanize the enemy. This is true, whether or not the enemy deserves to be dehumanized. World War I was perhaps the most senseless war in history, where the cause that everyone was fighting for was ultimately a suicide pact made by the incompetent and incestuous European royal branches. I honestly don’t know that the Germans were the bad guys in that war (though WWII is a very different story). I honestly don’t know if there were any bad guys—or any good guys, for that matter. The whole war was just a senseless cluster of a catastrophe.

So even though I do believe that some cultures are inherently evil, I can also sympathize with those who take a principled anti-war stance and say that we should all take a step back and focus on the things we have in common before rushing off to war. In our own day and age, there are many corrupt and evil warmongers who are working very hard to dehumanize the various groups that they would have us go to war against, whether those are Jews, Arabs, Russians, Ukrainians, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, or Trump voters. In such a complex world, there is a very real temptation to listen to such voices, and embrace the view that the other side is inherently and irredeemably evil.

And yet, there is such a thing as pure evil. There are some people who cannot—or will not—be redeemed. For that reason alone, I think there is still a place in our fantasy literature for creatures like the orc, who are inherently and irredeemably evil.

The best (and funniest) explanation of US politics on the internet

It’s been ten years, and this skit is still as relevant (and funny) as it was when it first aired. If anything, it’s even more relevant today.

“…Maria would be delighted.”

Those last words of Collins’ were still running through Hornblower’s mind. He would have to leave the Hotspur; he would have to say good-bye to Bush and all the others, and the prospect brought a sadness that quite took the edge off the elation that he felt. Of course he would have to leave her; Hotspur was too small to constitute a command for a post captain. He would have to wait for another command; as the junior captain on the list, he would probably receive the smallest and least important sixth-rate in the navy. But for all that he was a captain. Maria would be delighted.

C.S. Forester, Hornblower and the “Hotspur” (last line)

Fantasy from A to Z: N is for Noblebright

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

While the quote comes from Warhammer 40k, a science fiction franchise, it very soon became applied to the “darker and edgier” fantasy that started coming out in the 80s and 90s. Indeed, the quote itself spawned the term “grimdark” for a fantasy subgenre that became very popular in the 00s, with the rise of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and subsequent Game of Thrones TV series.

Grimdark combines the scope and feel of epic fantasy with the savagery and moral greyness of sword & sorcery, ramping up the violence and savagery to levels that would have made even Robert E. Howard blush. It often features twists that subvert the old fantasy tropes, such as killing off the “chosen one” hero who would typically be the protagonist, or presenting a horrifying dystopia of a world that is the utter antithesis of an escapist fantasy.

In part, I think the grimdark phenomenon was a reaction to the Tolkien formula that dominated fantasy for so long. After J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings became wildly popular, his publishers tried to replicate that success by explicitly creating a formula that they wanted their writers to follow. This resulted in a bunch of Tolkien clones, such as Terry Brooks’s Shannara series and David Edding’s Belgariad series. For a couple of decades, these dominated the fantasy shelves, until writers began to revolt, and their books began to take off. After all, Game of Thrones was originally published in 1996.

But while there’s some truth to that theory, I don’t think it’s sufficient to explain the rise of grimdark. After all, Stephen R. Donaldson was rebelling against the Tolkien formula back in the 70s, and while his Thomas Covenant books were quite successful, they didn’t spawn a new subgenre (though arguably, they paved the way for later writers like Martin and Abercrombie). Instead, I think there’s something generational about the grimdark subgenre—that it’s the sort of thing that only could have arisen in the 90s and 00s, because of how the generational cycle works.

I wrote a lengthy blog post about this, which remains one of my more popular posts. My basic thesis is that the fantasy genre goes through generational cycles just like history goes through generational cycles. In its simplest form, the cycle looks something like this:

Hard times create strong men.

Strong men create good times.

Good times create weak men.

Weak men create hard times.

During the hard times, we tend to resonate more with stories that feature grim characters and dark fantasy worlds—hence, the rise of grimdark. But during the good times, we tend to resonate more with noble characters and bright fantasy worlds.

(It’s a little more complicated than that, of course. The fantasy cycle is offset just a little, since we tend to resonate less with darker stories as we become exhausted from living in a darker world. Indeed, the yearning for the next phase of the cycle drives us to tell more hopeful stories, which in turn drive us to build a more hopeful world. But to read the full analysis, go check out my original post.)

So what is noblebright fantasy, then? It’s basically the antithesis of grimdark—a backlash against the backlash. And while it hasn’t yet manifested as a distinct subgenre, with a George R.R. Martin or a Joe Abercrombie to champion it, I think it’s only a matter of time before we see an author who rides this cultural wave to massive literary success. And as soon as that happens, I think we’ll have a much better idea of what “noblebright” actually is.

In other words, noblebright fantasy is currently in the process of being born—and after it has emerged fully formed into the world, it will probably take a different name. Indeed, “noblebright” as a term is itself merely a knee-jerk reaction to “grimdark.” To subvert the original Warhammer 40k quote:

In the Noble Brightness of the far future, there is only HIGH ADVENTURE!”

Currently, there are only a handful of writers who are explicitly labeling their books as “noblebright fantasy.” I am not one of them, though I suspect that my books (and my readers) have a lot of overlap. As it exists right now, noblebright is characterized by heroic quests and the triumph of good over evil, with an emphasis on hope, virtue, and making a positive difference in the world. It’s also very common for these authors to include Christian themes, though from what I can tell, the books aren’t explicitly religious.

While I haven’t yet joined the pioneers of this budding new subgenre, I expect that I will in the not-too-distant future. I’m currently working on an epic fantasy trilogy based loosely on the life of King David, which features many of these noblebright tropes and themes. But it’s going to be a while before I release the first book, since I want to publish the books of the first trilogy all within a month of each other. Since these books are going to fall in the 150k to 200k word range, a lot of things can change between now and then. Perhaps the term “noblebright” will have been abandoned, with people looking down on it as a passing fad of the early 20s.

But I don’t think the broader trend toward brighter, more hopeful fantasy is going to reverse course anytime soon. In fact, I think it’s generational. Whether or not it takes the name “noblebright,” I think that we’re going to see a new subgenre of fantasy emerge very soon. It’s starting right now as a backlash to grimdark, but as the wave crests and it begins to gain some staying power, I expect that it will stop defining itself by the thing it opposes and start to define itself in a more independent way.

I’m really hoping to catch this wave, and I think that my Soulbound King series has some real potential to do so. But whether or not I catch it, I know that this is the kind of stuff I like to write, and I hope to be able to write it for a long time to come.

Mid-July Update

The heat of the summer is upon us, and our air conditioning is… struggling. Hopefully we get it fixed soon, because my wife really can’t stand the heat, and if she can’t sleep, neither can I.

Not much happening around here. We’re just plugging away, me at my writing, Piper at her thesis. She just finished her user study, so all she needs to do is write up the thesis itself and defend it. That’s currently the top priority in the household, so I’m doing my best to write around it.

I’ll be at Writers Cantina later this month, where I’ll be on a panel about AI and writing, and moderating a couple of other panels, including one with Larry Correia. That one should be fun. Writers Cantina is a fantastic little convention, started by a bunch of us local writers who occasionally get together at the IHOP up in American Fork. We started after Life, the Universe, and Everything went a little crazy in 2020, mandating vaccines at the very last minute and pulling all sorts of other woke shenanigans. Writers Cantina isn’t explicitly anti-woke, but it’s definitely not woke either. It is a lot of fun, though! Kind of like what LTUE was back in the 00’s, except without a dealer’s room, and the hallway is the main attraction. Oh, and lots of great snacks.

Other than that, there’s not much going on around here. We’re going up to Canada right after Writers Cantina, and as soon as we get back, we’re moving back to Orem. I am both looking forward and really not looking forward to that. Hopefully we can get everything moved over with a minimum of chaos (especially since my wife is starting her new job at the same time). And then we’re having a baby. Yay!

Fantasy from A to Z: M is for Magic

Magic! What would fantasy be without it? About the same place as science fiction if you took out the science. Speculative fiction is all about the sense of wonder that it makes you feel, and the main way that fantasy does that is through magic.

In Brandon Sanderson’s writing class (which he has generously made available to the public, by videotaping and podcasting his lectures), Sanderson divides magic into two broad types: hard magic and soft magic. And while some fantasy readers take issue with the way that Sanderson leans more toward hard magic in his own books, the division he draws between hard and soft magic is still quite useful.

Soft magic is the kind of magic that isn’t fully explained, and is mostly left up to the reader’s imagination. Magical things happen, and we don’t know how or why, but it helps to instill a feeling that the world is vast and wondrous. As such, soft magic is primarily used as a way to enhance the setting.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a good example of this is the elves. We know that they are immortal and that they are far more glorious than most other races, but we never really know the full extent of their capabilities. Gandalf is another example of this. Just what was he doing with the Balrog, and how did defeating that ancient beast in a marathon spelunking-hiking-wrestling match? Who knows!

And that’s the biggest criticism of soft magic: if you don’t know how the magic works, how do you know that the heroes won’t just pull a rabbit out of their hat to save them at the last possible moment? Or summon the eagles, which amounts to the same thing. For that matter, if the eagles are so awesome, why don’t the heroes just fly on their backs all the way to Mount Doom? I mean, can you believe what it would have been like if they had to walk the entire way? Somebody might have died!

Hard magic, on the other hand, is the kind of magic where everything is explained. It’s not just magic, but a whole magic system, which operates by rules in the same way that our physical universe works according to rules. In essence, it is the fantasy inverse of Clarke’s third law, where any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from science. The reader might not know all of the rules, but the writer does, and he drops enough hints throughout to make the reader confident that there are rules.

In Lord of the Rings, a good example of hard magic is the ring of power itself. What does it do? It makes you invisible if you put it on (though it makes you shine like a beacon to Sauron and his ringwraiths), and it tempts you with false promises of power, with the goal of leading you back into the clutches of Sauron. If Sauron ever gets the ring, it’s game over, because he will regain all of his powers. Oh, and it also stretches out your lifespan, at the cost of your quality of life (and quite possibly your sanity).

Because we know the rules the govern the magic of the one ring, we aren’t upset when Tolkien uses that magic to advance the plot of the book. Indeed, that is the biggest strength of hard magic: that it can be used in all sorts of interesting and creative ways to advance the plot.

“But hold on!” the advocates of soft magic will say. “If you reduce your magic into a fancy plot device, it kills the sense of wonder that comes with the best magic systems.” After all, there’s a reason why Tom Bombadil is in the book. There are two big things that happen when the hobbits make their detour to his house: first, Tom Bombadil puts on the ring and shows that it has absolutely no effect on him; and second, when Frodo puts on the ring and goes invisible, Tom Bombadil demonstrates that he can still see Frodo.

It’s subtle, but it’s there—and believe it or not, it’s there for a reason. By demonstrating that there are higher or more powerful forces that can supersede the laws of magic surrounding the one ring, Tolkien preserves that sense of vastness and wonder that more rules-based magic systems tend to lose.

There is a rejoinder to that point, however. When hard magic is done well, it creates its own sense of wonder, more akin to what we feel when we’re playing a good video game. It’s the wonder that comes from imagining what it would be like to exercise the kind of magical powers that we see the characters exercise. Brandon Sanderson is a master of this, and my favorite example is from his novella The Emperor’s Soul. By the end of that book, I couldn’t help but daydream what I would do if I had my own set of soulstamps. One of them would make me an awesome writer, the other an awesome marketer, and the third an awesome publisher. How cool would that be? (Okay, maybe you have to be an indie author yourself to fully get it… but still!)

As you can probably guess, though, the best fantasy novels feature a blend of hard and soft magic—and Sanderson says as much in his lectures. There’s a reason why he draws from Lord of the Rings for examples of each, much as I’ve done here. And ultimately, it’s less of a binary and more of a spectrum. The important thing is to know when to lean more toward the soft side, and when to lean more to the hard side. The best authors can play to the strengths of both to capture that magical sense of wonder that makes fantasy such a pleasure to read.

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