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What to Read After Dungeon Crawler Carl

Three weeks ago I said Dungeon Crawler Carl is the reason I started writing LitRPG of my own. This is the list I'd hand you once you've caught up, and it's short on purpose: only books I've read. First, what you liked It changes the recommendation, so it's worth pinning down. Som…

Lord of Light: The Hugo Novel Behind the Argo Cover Story

The Novel Behind the CIA's Fake Movie In 1979, Jack Kirby, the man who drew Captain America and the Fantastic Four, was hired to design the sets for a $50 million science fiction movie. The sets were supposed to become a theme park in Colorado afterward. The movie never got made.…

Vor Game vs Ender's Game

Two Boy Geniuses and an Unlawful Order Put Ender's Game and The Vor Game side by side and the resemblance is almost silly. Both won the Hugo, and both hand military command to an undersized boy years before anyone should. Then they give opposite answers to the same question: what…

Is Dungeon Crawler Carl Worth the Hype?

Dungeon Crawler Carl has sold more than 10 million copies across its first 8 books. The first one spent 19 straight weeks on the New York Times list, book 7 won a Dragon Award, and Peacock has a live-action series in development. That's a lot of weight for a book about a man and …

Time Travel Books Where Knowing the Future Doesn't Help

You finished one of these and went straight to a search bar. I've done it twice. What you're after is specific: the book where somebody gets the second run we've all privately wished for, walks in carrying everything they know, and finds out the knowing is the problem. Watching t…

The Diplomat Who Walked Around the Horses

On the evening of 25 November 1809, a British diplomat named Benjamin Bathurst stood in the yard of an inn called the White Swan, in the Prussian town of Perleberg, and stepped around the heads of his carriage horses. He didn't come out the other side. Bathurst was going home. He…

The Unfinished Problem

I stopped after book one on purpose I read A Game of Thrones around the time the second book came out. Call it 1998. I liked it a great deal, and then I put the series down and walked away from it for good. I'd already been burned by series that sprawled out past their author's a…

The Stack and whether it was worth it

I found a security hole in my own code Back in the second post I told you how I made one codebase run two separate sites, and how proud I was of the test that guards them. A few days after that, I sat down and tried to break my own work on purpose. I found a hole. Not a data spil…

The Hero's Journey as Scaffolding

The hero's journey is scaffolding you build with, then take down The hero's journey is a circle with seventeen stations on it. Ordinary world at the top, then the call, the refusal, the mentor, the threshold, all the way around. You've seen the diagram. I've leaned on that circle…

21 Books, Free, Including 7 You've Never Heard Of

Episodes 1 through 7 of Book Battles are now open to everyone. No account, no paywall. That's 21 books and series argued over across 7 episodes. 8 of them have dropped out of the conversation, and those are the ones I'd start with. What Book Battles is Each episode does 3 things …

The Character You Shouldn't Like

Walter White. Amy Dunne. Tyrion at his worst. The Jackal from Red Rising, who I have no business rooting for and root for anyway. You have your own list. And you know the feeling on it: the small private embarrassment of being on someone's side while some other part of you files …

A World You Can Play In

A book page is a poster Back in the first post I said I write worlds with rules you can poke at, and that I wanted a reader to actually poke. This is the post where they can. Here's the thing a static book page can never do. A reader finishes the sample, falls for the world, and …