We hope everyone’s enjoying their autumn festivities and gearing up for THPloween with our themed articles and fall playlists! A tradition we started earlier this year was to round up a few books that make up a solid reading list for each season. We’ve done spring and summer already, now let’s get into our new fall book roundup!
This fall has been jam packed with fantasy and contemporary novels we can’t help but love, in both print and audiobook format. Here are three more fall books to add to your TBR!
Content Warning: The Honey POP encourages mindful reading and checking the author’s website for content warnings.
Flip By Ngozi Ukazu
Image Source: Macmillan Publishers
Our first fall book is Ngozi Ukazu’s newest graphic novel, Flip! High school senior Chi-Chi Ekeh keeps crushing on rich white boys who don’t know she exists. Her life completely flips around (get it?) when she sends Flip Henderson—AKA the most popular guy in school—a video promposal and gets publicly rejected by him. By some force of nature, Chi-Chi and Flip start to switch bodies, forming an unexpected friendship and possibly something more. This graphic novel speaks on self-worth and how our perspectives can change once we see ourselves through other people’s eyes.
The next book in our fall roundup is Jill Tew‘s new dystopian romance, An Ocean Apart! Set in 2190, Miami has become the flooded Marshes region. Eden Lowell and the Marshers fight for survival each day. Meanwhile, the corporate elite, or “Cruisers,” have taken to sailing the seas rather than face the environmental damage they’ve caused. When one Cruiser family hosts a dating competition for their heir, Theo Desjardins, Eden makes it her mission to infiltrate the show, break Theo’s heart, and bring the prize money back to her community. That is, until Theo turns out to be the change maker Eden’s been wishing for all along.
The final fall book we recommend is Kika Hatzopoulou‘s romantasy, Moth Dark! You may know her from her Threads That Bindduology, and this new novel is just as rich in storytelling. Ever since her world collided with the world of the Dark, Sascia has been intrigued with it. She somehow pulls a person out of the Dark, Nugau, who also happens to be the heir to the Darkworld and set on delivering her death sentence. Sascia and Nugau share a bond spanning countless timelines neither one understands. Just as they grow ever closer in their love, so too do their worlds tread closer to war.
Did any of these fall books speak to you? Which ones are you adding to your TBR? Let us know on Twitter! You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram.
Summary: Thea has a secret. She can tell how long someone has left to live just by touching them. Not only that, but she can transfer life from one person to another—something she finds out the hard way when her best friend, Ruth, suffers a fatal head injury on a night out. Desperate to save her, Thea accidentally kills the man responsible and lets his life flow directly into Ruth.
Thea comes to understand that she has a godlike power, but how to use it quickly becomes a question of self-control. Is it really so wrong to take a little life from a bad person—say, a very annoying boss—and gift it to someone who’s truly good? Realizing she needs to harness her newfound skills, Thea creates an Ethical Guide to Murder. But as she embarks on her mission to punish the wicked and give the deserving more time, she finds good and bad aren’t as simple as she first thought.
How can she really know who deserves to live and die, and can she figure out her own rules before Ruth’s borrowed time runs out?
Image Source: Courtesy of HarperCollins
The premise sounds like something dreamed up after a late‑night crime podcast binge: what if you could see the exact moment someone will die just by touching them, and what if you could siphon off their remaining hours for someone else? That’s the hook of AN ETHICAL GUIDE TO MURDER, the debut novel by Jenny Morris. The story follows twenty‑six‑year‑old Londoner Thea, a self‑described flake who barely scraped through law school and now works in HR while living with her medical‑student best friend, Ruth. During a night out celebrating Ruth’s success, Thea brushes her roommate’s hand and suddenly knows she will die at precisely 11:44 p.m. When Thea later snatches life from the drunk man who knocks Ruth over, transferring his remaining years to save her friend, she realizes she’s stumbled into a power normally reserved for comic books and ancient myth. Those early pages set up the novel’s central dilemma: if you could decide who deserves to live and who deserves to die, what rules would guide you?
So, She Wrote An Ethical Rule Book
Faced with a godlike ability, most of us would panic. Thea makes a spreadsheet. Together with Sam, a high‑powered lawyer and former flame, she tries to codify her newfound talent into something altruistic. The result is the “ethical guide to murder,” a checklist of justifications she’ll use before taking someone’s life: the target must have caused excessive harm, shown no remorse, and be likely to hurt others again. Bonus points if they’ve already killed someone. These rules, borrowed from her own conscience rather than any legal code, sound simple until they collide with messy reality. A belligerent stranger at a club or a corrupt boss might seem like easy marks, but Thea quickly learns that people rarely fit neatly into columns of good and bad.
This tension between intent and action is where Morris has fun. When Thea lends extra years to a masseuse as a generous tip or takes a few months from an annoying colleague, you start to feel complicit. It’s disturbingly relatable to fantasize about redistributing time from the unpleasant to the deserving. The spreadsheet isn’t enough; morality leaks out around the edges, and Thea’s attempts to play judge and jury feel more like someone gamifying guilt than a righteous crusade.
Dark Humor In A Morality Play
One reason the novel might resonate with younger readers is its tonal agility. Morris is a behavioral scientist with a PhD in cognitive psychology. That background peeks through in the way she balances ethical debate with deadpan humor. Thea’s existential crisis is peppered with observational jokes about HR bureaucracy, London nightlife, and the absurdity of trying to quantify morality with bullet points. In one scene, she refers to her power as a “life‑hack” that would make productivity gurus blush. Thea may be saving lives, but she still complains about office politics and ends up planning kills during spin class. That juxtaposition feels very twenty‑first century: serious questions about justice delivered alongside memes about procrastination.
Morris never lets the humor undermine the stakes. Beneath the quips lies a grieving woman traumatized by her parents’ deaths in a hit‑and‑run. The accident left her with a constant need to right wrongs, and her vigilante streak is as much about revenge as altruism! As Thea’s body count rises and Sam’s influence grows, the tone shifts from quirky urban fantasy to thriller. Theirs is a relationship built on shared secrets and convenience; Sam pushes Thea to kill for his own vision of justice, and we’re left wondering whether she’s fallen for him or for the ease of having someone else make the hard decisions.
Characters You Love To Side‑Eye
Readers expecting a plucky heroine may be surprised. Thea is messy. She flunked her bar exams, half‑heartedly chases a career she doesn’t really want, and uses her supernatural gift as both a coping mechanism and a power trip. Her best friend Ruth is grounded and earnest, a doctor who believes in the Hippocratic oath even when it clashes with Thea’s vigilantism. Sam, with his endless legal connections and questionable ethics, oscillates between ally and antagonist. He sees Thea’s talent as a business opportunity, a way to remove obstacles and curry favor, and his moral compass points wherever the money flows. Even Thea’s crusty grandfather, who raised her after her parents’ accident, brings complexity; he embodies the traditional values Thea flouts yet quietly approves of her loyalty to Ruth.
This cast makes Thea’s world feel like a dysfunctional found family. Their dynamics lean into the blurred lines between friendship and co‑dependence: who hasn’t kept a toxic ex around because they feel like there’s unfinished business? Thea’s loyalty to Ruth is the novel’s beating heart; their bond, forged through childhood illness and shared trauma, anchors the narrative. When Thea’s actions threaten that friendship, the story’s moral stakes become personal.
When The Fantasy Gets Uncomfortably Real
The novel’s high concept might sound fantastical, but many of the themes mirror contemporary debates: restorative justice, cancel culture, and who gets to decide what accountability looks like. Morris asks you to confront your own biases. Would you shave years off a murderer’s life to save an innocent? If a corrupt CEO loses a few months of retirement, is that justice or vengeance? And what about smaller, pettier infractions; the commuter who pushes past you on the train, the politician who lies on television? Thea’s internal monologue touches on all of these, and it’s hard not to imagine one’s own ethical spreadsheet.
The book also critiques the allure of vigilantism. It’s seductive to believe in personal retribution, yet the plot shows how quickly righteous action becomes self‑serving. As the story progresses, Thea becomes addicted to the rush of playing god and justifying her choices by cherry‑picking examples of bad behavior. This slippery slope is dramatized when her and Sam’s schemes veer into financial crimes and personal vendettas. The once‑clear lines blur until she’s unsure whether she’s acting to protect others or to soothe her own unresolved anger.
Tempo, Twists, And The Payoff
Pacing can make or break high‑concept fiction, and AN ETHICAL GUIDE TO MURDER mostly delivers. The first half feels like an episodic series of vignettes in which Thea tests out her rules and stumbles through moral messes. Some readers may find these chapters repetitive; the thrill of discovering a new superpower gives way to a rhythm of identification, judgment, and redistribution of time. However, the back half accelerates as Thea and Sam’s enterprises unravel. A financial scandal, an investigation into Ruth’s extended lifespan, and Thea’s hunt for her parents’ killer converge in a taut finale that justifies the slow burn! The climax forces Thea to confront the very question she’s been avoiding: can one ever balance the scales when playing with life itself?
Why It Clicks With Younger Readers
There’s a reason this book has been popping up on BookTok feeds and in DMs between friends. The central premise, a woman with an Excel file deciding who deserves more time, speaks to a generation raised on side hustles and moral complexity. For an audience that grew up watching superheroes dismantle systems but also wrestles with the consequences of “canceling” someone, Thea’s story feels like an allegory. It asks whether individual action can substitute for institutional justice, a question that resonates when trust in systems is low.
The novel’s mix of gallows humor and genuine philosophical inquiry also reflects the way many young adults process trauma: through memes, sarcasm, and earnest conversation in equal measure. Thea’s penchant for witty asides while discussing murder invites the kind of darkly comic commentary that thrives on social media threads. Even the ethics spreadsheet has inspired readers to create their own “life‑swap bingo cards” online. The book’s cultural footprint shows that high‑concept crime fiction can be both thought‑provoking and wildly entertaining!
The Verdict
AN ETHICAL GUIDE TO MURDER is messy, provocative, and undeniably fun. Its central conceit will stretch your suspension of disbelief, but its characters and the questions it raises about justice and self‑interest will keep you up at night. Young readers will appreciate the mix of dark comedy and serious introspection, and even those who find Thea unlikable may still be captivated by her journey. Ultimately, the book succeeds not because it tells us who should live or die, but because it forces us to confront why we feel qualified to make that call. It’s a novel that invites you to argue with yourself, jot down rules, cross them out, and then throw the list away! If you’re craving a fresh voice in crime fiction that doubles as a philosophical thought experiment, this one’s worth your time.
Maybe the real crime isn’t the kill, but how casually we assume we’re the ones who should decide who gets to live!
io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The Last Lucid Day” by Dominique Dickey. Enjoy! (You can also listen to the story here).
THE LAST LUCID DAY by Dominique Dickey
You’re asleep in dreams of your father holding your head underwater, so the call from Magnolia Assisted Living goes to voicemail.
“I didn’t raise a son of mine to count on his fingers,” your father says in the dream—because ah, yes, it’s all of your worst moments rolled into a single nightmare.
You hear the beeping of your alarm and you know you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up any more than you can pull yourself free of your father’s hands. He holds you down and tells you to count the seconds, show him how long you can hold your breath, but the only way to make sense of the numbers is to tally them on your fingers. He pushes you down deeper. He walks away.
It always ends with him walking away.
It always ends with you splashing in the deep end, alone.
• • • •
When you awake, sweat outlines your body in the bed like a policeman’s chalk drawing. Your alarm has been going off for . . . how long? Too long. You’re running late for work, and today already feels awful.
You call in sick. That’s sorted. What’s next? The voicemail.
The voice of the message is automated. You knew this was coming, but there was no way of knowing when. You figure that’s the purpose of the service—to tell you exactly when.
Well, another hour in bed won’t hurt. You want the feeling of waking up right, from a good dream or even from no dream at all. You set your alarm again and close your eyes but you can’t get back to sleep. You catch yourself thinking about your father’s favorite belt—thick black leather, buckle scratched to hell. You’re a grown man and it still makes you feel wobbly with fear.
You haul yourself out of your sweat-damp bed. You shower. Magnolia Assisted Living is an hour away in traffic. You stop at an ATM on the way and get there just before eleven.
• • • •
You were six when your parents called it quits. Mom got Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthdays. They alternated Easters, a holiday neither of them especially cared about. Dad got every other weekend. Every other Friday, you’d haul your overnight bag to school and stash it behind the receptionist’s desk. Every other Friday, your father would show up in the pickup line in his red sports car.
His bachelor apartment was two hours out of the city. At the halfway point, he’d pull off the highway and circle on the surface streets for a bit, eventually pulling into the parking lot of a mini-mart or a gas station. You’d stretch your legs and then he’d hand you a couple of tens and set you loose on the aisles of junk food. You’d eat together in silence.
That was when you felt closest to him. Not in his apartment, a beautiful place that never felt like home, but in the car in a nondescript parking lot, surrounded by overpriced snacks, his coffee black and gritty as tar steaming in the cupholder between you.
• • • •
At Magnolia, the receptionist tells you your father is in the garden. You pick through the trees and rosebushes until you find him sitting at a wrought iron table with a composition book and a ballpoint pen, scribbling. There’s a long moment before he looks up and sees you. You wish time could stop, could give you space to think about the meaning behind the words he’s writing—or maybe they’re numbers, or diagrams.
Whatever it is, it makes sense to someone smarter than you. Someone with the specialized knowledge required to understand it. Lucid, your father is a genius. He’s the most brilliant man you know.
And then he looks at you. There’s a flash of surprise on his face before he pushes himself to his feet and comes close, his arms held out as if to hug you. “It’s a Thursday, isn’t it? What have I done to deserve this?”
You smile. Even now, he doesn’t know you well enough to know you’re forcing it. “I thought we’d go for a drive.”
• • • •
Your father, a theoretical mathematician renowned in his field, stood over your shoulder as you did your homework. You were a child. You were counting on your fingers. He took off his belt and laid it on the table. He wasn’t actually going to beat you with it, but you didn’t know that—how could you possibly know that? It would take a few more years of this before you saw straight to the bottom of his empty threats.
He never hit you. The threat of violence kept you in line, and that was violent in a quiet sort of way. Every other weekend you eclipsed yourself. You sat at the kitchen table with his belt beside you and you let your mind go somewhere else. You hid in plain sight. You spoke only when spoken to, in non-answers and with a heavy tongue. No, he never hit you, but sometimes he took you by the shoulders and shook you, as if it would bring you back.
You learned addition and subtraction by rote. You learned to swim. You learned to disappear. You learned other things, too, that you were happy to forget.
If he had hit you with the belt, if he had made you count the lashes, you would not have used your hands to find the numbers.
• • • •
You drive for an hour, alternately talking about nothing and humming along to smooth jazz classics on the radio. You pull off the highway, circle for a bit, find a gas station with an attached market. You give him two crisp twenty-dollar bills. Inflation, you think. That ought to cover it.
You follow him inside. He doesn’t look nearly as old as he is, and he wears his excitement like a little kid. He has the cash crushed in one fist, the index finger of the other hand tapping his lips as he paces the aisles. The store’s small, but he takes his choices seriously, and you let him.
After a few minutes of witnessing his indecision, you wander away to figure out your own haul. Potato chips. A bottle of ginger ale, weeping condensation. A styrofoam cup of black coffee that’s somehow burnt even though it’s freshly regurgitated from the machine.
You’re at the register when he slides up to you, impatient—somehow he’s already made his picks and purchased them—and asks for the car keys. You hand them over. You watch through the window as he folds himself into the passenger seat of your practical SUV and begins to eat. The pimply attendant takes your credit card, swipes it, and hands it back.
• • • •
You turned eighteen. You stopped answering his calls and, eventually, he stopped calling. Part of you felt like he was giving up on you, but the bigger part of you felt relieved. You thought of him whenever you went to a gas station or mini-mart—all the time, at first.
The memories faded, as memories tend to do, and you thought of him less and less.
Twenty years passed. You hardly thought of him at all. It was peaceful. It was good. You had the quiet kind of happiness that’s damn near impossible to capture in words. You didn’t think about him, you lived your life, and you were happy.
• • • •
He called after your mom died. He had a new number, but so did you, and you never asked how he got yours. He wanted to come to the funeral, wanted to know if it was okay with you, didn’t want to just show up and surprise you. The thoughtfulness was unexpected—it was easier to see him as the man who would do the blatantly inconsiderate thing.
“Sure,” you said.
“I’ll see you there,” he said.
The funeral was on a hot day. He sat in the back and left as soon as the service was over. You barely saw him, but he looked just the same as you remembered. You wondered if he was wearing the same belt: tarnished silver buckle, black leather gone limp with the years.
Two weeks after the funeral—you spent a week waffling, and another week working up the nerve—you called him. “Come over for coffee,” you said. You couldn’t tell if the offer was for him or for you. You couldn’t tell what you hoped to gain, but you had very little to lose. Your impossible, wordless happiness had already shattered. What could he do to you that had not already been done? What more could he take?
He came to your house on a Saturday afternoon. He was a familiar stranger. He hugged you tightly and came away crying, embarrassing you both. His memory had already gone fuzzy around the edges, the past bleeding into the present, but he still knew you. He missed you. You were right on time.
• • • •
You sit in the car and you eat. You don’t speak—you don’t even look at each other—but you feel close to him.
Maybe this is enough. Maybe this is all you needed.
• • • •
Two years after you got your dad back—two years of awkward biweekly coffee visits, talking around all the things you wanted to talk about—came the fire.
He seemed to slip through time, confusing you with people he used to know, forgetting how old you were, forgetting which stories he’d already told you. He showed you proofs that made no sense, though you blamed your lack of mathematical knowledge for this. He got lost around the corner from his house, once, but his neighbors walked him home and he laughed when he recounted the incident to you.
He forgot he was cooking in the middle of frying an egg. He left a burner on and wandered out of the room. He was at his desk puzzling over an equation, a hand-drawn diagram that only he could understand, when a kitchen towel caught fire. From there it spread to the curtains. He would’ve been fine if he’d fled when the smoke alarm started to beep, but he tried to put the flames out himself.
You brought him gas station coffee when you visited him in the hospital. He had bandages around both his arms and he looked like he’d aged ten years in the time it took you to arrive.
“I’m not going to be stubborn about this,” he said. “I’m not going to do that to you—make you get a court order or else make you watch me die the hard way. I know I shouldn’t live alone anymore.”
In the silence, you wondered if he meant for you to make him an offer—you did have plenty of space, after all, in your mom’s old house. But you didn’t offer, and he didn’t ask.
“I’ll send you a link,” he said. “I already picked out a place. Magnolia Assisted Living. Forty minutes out of the city, specialized in memory care. Just . . . say you’ll come visit me.”
“I’ll come visit you,” you said.
Awkward Saturday coffee had a new location. He wore long sleeves to cover the burn scars. He worked day and night on theorems that you began to see for the nonsense they were. Time and memories flowed around him like choppy water. He was adrift. He was drowning.
You couldn’t save him—you weren’t even sure if you wanted to—but you visited every week.
• • • •
“There’s this thing,” he told you, though by then you’d already done your own research. “A service they offer. An implant. It can tell you when your last good day—your last really good day—will be. The catch is that if the patient knows their time is up, then the white coats say it leads to . . . negative treatment outcomes. It’s a double blind, I guess. The doctors don’t even know. It’s better if they just notify the family.” He scratched his arm through his sleeve. You imagined the way his burned skin went puckered and thin. “I gave them your number. I hope that’s all right.”
There he was: the man who would do the blatantly inconsiderate thing, tossing you into a responsibility that you never wanted, didn’t know how to bear. Reality closed over your head like chlorinated water.
“That’s fine with me,” you said.
• • • •
At the bottom of his bag of chips he licks the dust off his fingers, then looks at you for a long time. “It’s my last day, isn’t it?”
You make a concerted effort not to tense up. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on. My last lucid day.”
You shrug. He doesn’t know you well enough to know your tells. “I thought you didn’t sign up for that.”
“Don’t give me that. They did all the tests. All the implants—even the ones that are still in trials. Comprehensive.”
You shrug again. “You sure you remember your intake that well?”
“Yes I remember my fucking intake—”
“Really? Because sometimes you misremember stuff. It comes with the whole terrain.”
He doesn’t say anything, but his expression is nuclear in its rage. The anger makes you feel small, makes you think of his belt on the kitchen table in the apartment you never felt safe in.
And then the anger goes away all at once, his face slack as he gropes in the footwell for something else to eat. There’s an unguarded moment where he looks hurt, and he looks sad, and he looks very old.
The petty satisfaction you feel at having hurt him is undercut only by your own guilt. You feel like a monster, like you’re no better than him. But what you want from him—it can’t be a deathbed confession. The conversation will lose its value if he knows he’s out of time, if he’s only saying the words because it’s his last chance to do so. You need it to feel organic. You need it to feel real.
You ask the question you have always been afraid to ask: “When you look back at my childhood, do you ever regret anything?”
“No.” He answers so quickly he can’t have possibly thought about it.
“Really?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Wow.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“I just think—”
“The way I see it, I did my best. I provided. And I didn’t have a dad at all, so it’s not like I had a blueprint in that regard. I did my best.”
“But what about . . .” You’re trying to think of a concrete example, one that doesn’t hurt too much to talk about. “What about when you taught me to swim?”
“You learned.”
“You could have drowned me.”
“Eh,” he says.
You think about him tossing you into the water, him pinching your nose and holding your head down so you’d learn to hold your breath, him walking away and leaving you flailing in the deep end. You can feel the fear as if it’s happening right now. You can smell the chlorine and the sunscreen as if it’s on your skin—memory is strange, that way. Funny that you thought you could bring up this story without feeling that familiar unhappy ache in your chest, your gut.
This is why you went so many years without thinking of him at all. This is what you were avoiding. You don’t know what you want. You want him to admit he hurt you. You want to hear him say that he was wrong. You keep pushing.
“I could have died,” you tell him.
“You didn’t. You learned to swim, didn’t you?”
“It’s not just that. I was a kid.”
“You turned out okay.”
“Did I?”
“You did,” he says, with perfect confidence, like he has no idea how wrong he is.
He barely knows you—because you haven’t let him, because there is so much you haven’t told him. He doesn’t know about the trail of wrecked relationships, all entirely your fault, which you blame on your attachment issues, which you blame on him. Your mother is the only relationship you couldn’t entirely destroy, and goddammit you tried. He doesn’t know about the nightmares. Telling him how he’s ruined you would constitute admitting defeat, but he can’t apologize for the pain if you don’t show him the wounds.
You aren’t going to show him the wounds.
He’s never going to apologize.
Why did you even bother? Why did you even hope? He’s going to forget you and he will never, ever be sorry.
Time is kind and memory is cruel. Someday you’ll forget him too.
• • • •
You were in college the first time you lost your father.
“My mom’s an architect,” you said, when the subject of family came up in a conversation with your freshman year roommate.
“What about your dad?”
“I don’t have a dad,” you said. You didn’t even hesitate, and you felt no guilt for the smoothness of the lie. If anything, it made you proud. Look at me, you thought. Look at the life I’m creating without him. Look at how good that life could be.
The grief came later, when you replayed the conversation in your narrow dorm bed—a slow blooming feeling behind your sternum, like blood spreading in water. You realize, now, that it was practice. You’ve already lost him once. You know how to lose him again.
• • • •
It’s an hour back to Magnolia, and you make the drive in silence. He’s not even angry, and maybe you aren’t either. You think you’re mostly sad.
He sips his shitty coffee. He turns on the radio. Saxophone trickles out of the speakers.
“Back to the garden?” you ask, once you’re parked in front of Magnolia. The weather’s still nice, if a bit breezy. If he wants to spend his last good day working on proofs in the sun, you won’t stand in the way of that.
“Yeah.” He gets his notebook and ballpoint pen out of the backseat where he stashed them. He leaves his trash in the footwell: metallic wrappers, an empty styrofoam cup. You tell the receptionist you’ve returned him for the day, then walk him back to his little table. He lines up his notebook along its edge, then turns to you.
Waiting.
Well, what do you do?
You meet his gaze and hold it. This is your dad. He’s your dad and he’s old, and he’s falling apart, and he’s going to die. And then you’ll have a dead dad, who was a shithead in life and had the audacity to kick the bucket without apologizing for any of his shitheadedness.
You miss not having a dad at all. You miss the years of easily denying his existence. The lie that felt more and more true each time you told it. The story that you know you can never slip back into, now that it’s been fractured.
He will never be himself again. You hate him. You miss him already.
You hug him tightly and come away crying, embarrassing the both of you.
About the Author Dominique Dickey is a speculative fiction writer and game designer. As the creative director of Sly Robot Games, they’ve created Plant Girl Game and Tomorrow on Revelation III. They contributed to the Nebula Award-winning Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and the ENNIE Award-winning Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel. Their novella Redundancies & Potentials is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock in 2024. Their short fiction has appeared in venues including Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Nightmare Magazine. They live in the DC area, where they’re always on the hunt for their next idea. You can find their work at dominiquedickey.com.
Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the June 2024 issue, which also features work by Varsha Dinesh, Andrea Kriz, Megan Chee, Dominica Phetteplace, Deborah L. Davitt, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, Shanna Germain, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $3.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy author who nets tens of millions of dollars in book sales every year, which puts him in the same book-selling league as George R.R. Martin. However, his financial success has not really translated into a similar mainstream visibility outside of his specific fanbase—until this week. The tech magazine Wiredpublished a cynical profile about Sanderson yesterday, and the author’s fans are pissed. Things got so heated that Sanderson had to take to Reddit to tell his community to back off.
Sanderson is best known as the writer of The Stormlight Archive,The Reckoners, and Mistborn series—all of which take place in his original fictional universe, called the Cosmere. His books have extensive magic systems in them, and he’s known as the inventor of the concepts of “hard” and “soft” magic. He has also written the final books of the fantasy epic series The Wheel of Time, picking up after Robert Jordan passed away in 2007.
The Wired profile
Despite extensive successes and credentials, Wired editor Jason Kehe did not seem impressed by Sanderson as an author or as an individual. His profile makes some attempts to explain Sanderson’s worldbuilding prowess using his Mormon background, but struggles to connect with Sanderson’s personal life experiences, even though Kehe went to Utah to learn more about the author and the people he surrounded himself with.
As a result, the article is not very flattering. “At the sentence level, [Sanderson] is no great gift to English prose,” Kehe writes. “He writes, by one metric, at a sixth-grade reading level.” It’s definitely not a description that fans are used to seeing from a multi-million dollar selling author who penned decades worth of books.
Neither is Kehe impressed by the personal life that the bestselling author lives, or the manner in which he holds himself. “To my mind, I still haven’t gotten anything real from Sanderson, anything true. I’m not the first person he has toured around his lair to politely gawk at his treasures and trophies and his hallway of custom stained-glass renditions of his favorite books,” he writes. “Sanderson has lived so much of his life and fame openly, self-promotionally. It’s a major reason for his success.”
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“I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame,” Kehe wrote, days before he met the author’s family or his fans. “He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. He isn’t. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable.”
At the end of the piece, Kehe describes Sanderson as a god. Not because of his literary prowess, but because the author had created worlds that had enthralled so many readers over the course of decades. “If Sanderson is a writer, that is all he is doing. He is living his fantasy of godhead on Earth,” he writes. Kehe seemed to struggle to see any humility in a man who had a literary empire within his grasp. Kehe was a visitor from a distant land (San Francisco), and he took the velvet gloves off when he had to leave a review of his travels.
The internet responded loudly. “[The article writer] is nasty, jealous, catty, and uncharitable to someone who delivers value to millions of fans, and never has a bad word to say about anyone,” tweeted one author named Travis Corcoran. “I imagine he’s pissed that Sanderson isn’t nearly as good at ’constructing sentences’ as he is … and yet makes $20M/yr while the Wired editor makes, I dunno, $60k?” Several other people cited Sanderson’s kind personality and financial success as reasons why the profile should never have been published.
Even Activision Blizzard’s poster-in-chief weighed in. “The sneering tone. The gratuitous meanness of insulting a man in front of his family after he has invited you into his home. The bullying cheap shots at people you consider nerds,” tweeted Lulu Cheng Meservey. “Fantasy writing is valuable, being prolific isn’t a bad thing, people can like different things from you, and nerds are the best.”
“My basic feeling has always been: We write stories, and then they belong to readers,” wrote Kehe in an email to Kotaku. “Readers get the last word.”
Brandon Sanderson’s response
Look, nobody is coming for the human rights of fantasy nerds. And a writer who makes several million dollars a year off his own IP isn’t going to be toppled by some mean article. Even Sanderson himself thinks so. He wrote a Reddit thread today pleading for his fans to keep calm. He agreed that his life wasn’t very exciting for a profile, and that his ordinary and trauma-free life “is kind of boring, from an outsider’s perspective.” While he appreciated that his fans were willing to defend him, he wanted them to let Kehe be. He felt that the profile was not an attack on the community, and that the Wired editor had been honest about his opinions. Kotaku reached out for a comment, but did not receive one by the time of publication.
“[Kehe] should not be attacked for sharing his feelings,” Sanderson wrote. “If we attack people for doing so, we make the world a worse place, because fewer people will be willing to be their authentic selves.”
