About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my brother David had introduced the kids to D&D via Muk, a module for introducing your kids to D&D. Unfortunately, it was written for an experience adult D&D player or DM to DM for the kids, so we had a few fails with my first time as the DM. Then we moved on to DnD Adventure Club. That was, and continues to be, a huge hit with the kids.

This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Decoder Ring. The most recent episode had a very interesting title: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…Will he want a Welfare check? I don’t remember this book from my childhood, but I do remember reading this one (and others in the series) to my kids. The podcast explores the fact that, starting around 2015, this book started to become known by conservatives as an allegory against the welfare state. While this podcast episode eventually interviews the author and confirms this was not her intention, I can certainly understand how the book could be read that way. It’s a great example of how art (literature, movies, images, music) becomes “property” of the culture once the creator releases it into the world. In many ways it doesn’t matter what the creator wanted (although I always find that fascinating), but what the culture does with it.

I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes.

Politics

5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting this book. Boy am I glad I did!

How to describe this book? One of my thoughts was Ender’s game meets Harry Potter, but with college kids. But then I cam up with a better comparison: RF Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy (first book: The Poppy War The Poppy War, but with Western settings. Is it dark academia? I’m not sure. I was a kickstarter funder for a few dark academia anthologies, but haven’t read them yet. No matter how it’s classified, it does (eventually) have some really graphic sex. Like, the beginning of the book has a warning about all the violence and how graphic the sex is. I think if you’ve read a romance book before, it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before. But if you’re used to the usual sex scenes in SFF, this is quite a bit more.

Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons: Deluxe Edition by Patrick Rothfuss

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve been watching Rick and Morty since the first season and I can’t imagine that I would find this collection if my kids hadn’t gotten me into D&D a year or so ago. Almost all of the humor comes from D&D jokes and Easter Eggs.

Fault Tolerance by Valerie Valdes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Valerie Valdes continues the Gen X/Millenial pastiche that the Chilling Effect in this third, and final, entry.

A few of the references across the trilogy:
- Voltron
- Portal (from previous books)
- Smash Bros (crash sisters)
- Death Star-like weapon
- Solid snake reference?
- Transformers
- Pokemon (in previous books)
-Captain Planet

Sometimes the references are just in the chapter titles and other times they are important plot points. The insane thing is that this WORKS for three whole books! You may or may not shake your head, but this doesn’t feel like Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. This feels like a real, cohesive universe. It’s not jokey (although it’s not overly dramatic). I don’t know how Valdes pulled this off.

Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 114, November 2019 by John Joseph Adams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Science Fiction
———————
The Concubine’s Heart (Matthew Bright) - I could not even Begin to predict the turn the story would take. It was quite a fascinating story. I wonder at the culture (a sort of sci-fi Chinese culture) that would lead to the events in the story. Very well done.

Her Appetite, His Heart (Dominica Phetteplace) - a continuation of the world we first saw in “One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit” back in Lightspeed #111. Interestingly, most of the story is a character study and it’s not until the end of the story where we see the consequences of the events of the previous story.

Wrath of Empire by Brian McClellan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m usually not a fan of the middle books in planned trilogies. They often can’t resolve anything because most trilogies are just one gigantic book split into three. While that’s also somewhat true in this book, McClellan has done a great job giving us a mini try/fail cycle that makes this book pretty satisfying on its own. We learn a TON about Ka-Poel. There’s also a good amount of character growth for Vlora and Ben Styke.

First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)

Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.