Lucas Stoffel

The Bright Sword Book Review: Lev Grossman already proved with The Magicians trilogy that he could take beloved fantasy tropes and make them feel dangerous and real and emotionally devastating. Now he's done it to King Arthur, and the result is extraordinary.

Dune is the book that every other science fiction book is either descending from or reacting against. Frank Herbert published it in 1965, and sixty years later it still feels like the most complete world anyone has ever built in a novel. Every detail — the ecology, the religion, the politics, the economics, the technology, the biology — connects to every other detail with a precision that borders on obsessive. This isn't worldbuilding. This is world-engineering.

I read this book in Bali, riding a motorbike down the same roads Elizabeth Gilbert made famous, and the tropical world she writes about in this novel was literally surrounding me — the humidity, the density of green, the way plants take over everything if you let them. It was the perfect place to fall into this book, and I fell hard. Book Review