10 Great Fantasy Stand Along Novels (Part 2)

Legend by David Gemmell

Ok so now we’re getting into the territory of what one might consider “proper fantasy”. Gemmell in his day was the big don-dada of straight up two fisted action adventure fantasy. While he did not write long interconnected series many of his books share a universe with the others. This one, Legend is but the first in a whole series of the  world of the Drenai, who are a sort of western coded people (though not specifically Greek or Germanic or even Celtic) and takes place at a pivotal moment in their long resistance to the incursions of the Mongol-coded Nadir tribesmen (which thankfully manages to dodge a lot of the dodgy orientalist tropes that one can get what fantasy decides to dip into that tainted well for inspiration).

It’s the story of the siege of Dros Delnoch, that last outpost of the Drenai on their northern frontier holding the gap between two great mountain ranges, a choke point that the Nadir must overcome before then can pass into the lands of the Drenai and is told from the perspective of the defenders.

So far so very so very much what one might expect from a fantasy novel, its Helms Deep but a whole book. What makes it special is what Gemmel himself was bringing to it. By all accounts he was a very genial and kind man, but he was a big dude and while he cut his teeth writing as a stringer on the local beat in his home town of Hastings, he was also a bouncer and grew up around a lot of other big tough guys for whom violence was a normal part of their lives like his beloved step father Bill. There’s a lot in here about masculinity of the decidedly non toxic variety. Also, I was not aware of this the first time I read it but on hearing about it made perfect sense; when Gemmell was writing Legend he had had a cancer diagnosis and legitimately didn’t know if this was going to be the only novel he would ever get to write. It was essentially a form of therapy, the siege of the fortress was him resisting the threat of a potentially life ending illness. The characters in the book, particularly the titular Druss The Legend (based on his stepdad) were his imaginative actualisation of the fighting spirits of those people and the lessons they’d taught him over the course of his life deployed against the existential crisis he was facing down.

Luckily for us, he got over the cancer and though he would die relatively young at 58 of heart disease he would go on to give us some absolute bangers, Echoes of The Great Song, Dark Moon and my favourites the 4 part Rigante series, the first two of which are his take on the Arthurian mythos. So if you read and enjoy Legend there’s a whole body of work of admittedly variable but mostly high quality fantasy for you to get stuck into. But Legend is the best place to start. If you are only ever going to read one David Gemmell book this is very much the one.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker

When horror authors jump genre they tend to bring a certain flavour with them. This fantasy novel from
the horror author Clive Barker who created Hellraiser and whose shorts inspired Candyman and The Midnight Meat Train definitely have a lot in them that is of the macabre and horrific. It’s a portal fantasy about magical beings hiding in a world contained, as the title suggests within the warp and weft of an intricately patterned carpet. Set in the Liverpool of the 80s, the shadow of Thatcherism and the radical kick back against that in that city with the poll tax riots and a Trotskyist faction running the city council add a lot of grit and a profound sense of place and moment to the world building. Our protagonists are all decidedly working class heroes, one of the villains seems to be the embodiment of capital and another is a bitter old cop.

Barker has also never been one to shy away from the intersection between the horrific and the erotic and while used sparingly there are definitely some passages in this that are on the spicy side of things so be warned, this is not for kids or anyone who isn’t comfortable with that type of thing. You will likely squirm at one scene in particular, no spoilers but suffice to say that it’s a memorable depiction of the monstrous feminine specifically the mother aspect. What you should get out of this is again a really good story that rollicks along and keeps you guessing as it unfolds with some great flights of fancy and Barker’s elegant and evocative prose.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Clarke came right out of nowhere back in the early 00s with Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a historical fantasy about rival magicians set in early 19^th century Britain. It was a darling of the critics and genre fans alike, one that both the literary world and genre fiction readers could really get behind, like a latter day Doris Lessing. If I had read it myself instead of just watching the apparently very accurate and faithful TV adaptation it might be on here, but I have not. I did read her long anticipated and much shorter though no less lauded follow up Piranesi which came out only a couple of years ago making this the most recent book on this list. Clarke unfortunately for everyone is a long term sufferer of CFS and only produces a book every decade or so, so it behoves us to appreciate them when she does, and appreciate it I did.

Piranesi is the journal of a man with a dodgy memory who finds himself in a huge Gormenghastian mansion which is half full of sea water and has its own tidal system referred to only as The House. As far as he’s aware, this is it, him and the mysterious and enigmatic figure referred to as The Other who shows up occasionally to speak to him are the only two living entities in the entire universe. The human remains of the dozen or so other people he finds around The House are the only other people that ever have existed. Without giving too much away, obviously we as the reader know that there’s something not quite right going on there, particularly as The Other makes to us what are clearly ominous references to places and things from the real world. It’s a short book and it gives up the goods in a nicely paced and well executed fashion so if any of that has you intrigued enough to look into getting a copy and having a look for yourself, you’re in for a treat.

Jerusalem by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is for my money the greatest living writer at least in the English language. After blazing a trail through the comics industry becoming the undisputed king of 80s/90s writers he, after a lot of provocation and bad deals took a sickner with that whole side of the cultural sphere and concentrated on writing fiction. 

His first novel Voice of The Fire was a psycho-geographical exploration of his home city from the first human settlers in that part of the world through to the present of 1997 when the books was written, which is essentially him writing in first person as he takes a walk around his neighbourhood. As great as that was, and indeed worth reading in its own right, it was but a taster for Jerusalem, in which he draws on local history, his own family history and such knowledge as he has gleaned from his own esoteric investigations (the man is a fully accredited practicing IRL wizard) he restates the case made in Voice of the Fire for Northampton city, and specifically his local district The Burroughs being not just the geographical centre of Britain but also of the world in general, indeed of life the universe and everything.

It’s a weighty tome, the longest book on this list by far and its not always an easy read. It is one which will sometimes require careful study to get your head around certain parts of it, especially the section where he’s in character as Lucia Joyce and goes full on Finnegan’s Wake with the prose (no one will blame you for skipping that section tbh), but it’s eminently readable and rewarding for those prepared to pull up their big boy smarty pants and make the effort. It is about a lot of things, the nature of time and reality itself. The Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence, the degradation of life under what once were important and thriving urban centres by neoliberalism. Its about art and the necessity of making art, ever if its not something you’ll make a living off and its just for you (aka why I keep writing this fucking blog that nobody reads lol). It is rich, textured, funny as hell and if you’re in the right frame of mind for it may rewire your consciousness and cure your todesangst, if that’s a thing you’ve had to deal with in your life.

..........

And so we come to the last and by no means least book on this list. A few years ago I would 100% have had Coraline by Neil Gaiman on here and be talking about it right now but since all the stuff came out its just like nah. As much as the books themselves are all great and whatever weird shit he got up to in his private life very little of it ends up on the page, unlike other problematic authors, looking at You Marion Zimmerman Bradley (and yes I did read a pirated copy of The Mists of Avalon out of curiosity and after knowing what we know now about her, and fuck me as great as that book is in the abstract it is really hard going when you have the full context, genuinely uncomfortable and squicky the way horror fiction is meant to be and this was definitely not written as a horror novel). So yeah, Coraline, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Good Omens, which he did with Terry Pratchett are great stand alone fantasies and read them if you must but please for the love of god buy second hand, pirate or better still, shoplift a hard copy from your local non-independent big book chain retail store if you have to. Whatever it takes, just do not legally purchase a physical or digital copy because even if his numerous accusers are just money grabbing bitches who are exaggerating to fill their pockets (which funnily enough is exactly the same line taken by Rolf Harris about his accusers) if he only did the stuff that he’s admitted to himself, that cunt does not need nor deserve penny one of any residual sales from his work from now until the end of time. 

So with that out of the way, what to do? Like I do love Terry Pratchett and technically all his books in the Discworld series are stand alone but I’ve done a whole other long essay on here about him and his work which you can find here. The TL:DR being, if you’ve not read any of his stuff before, Small Gods, Guards Guards!, Wyrd Sisters or The Wee Free Men for younger and particularly female readers are all good.

Which brings us to someone who I am a massive fan of, haven’t written about on here before and at least to the best of my knowledge hasn’t fucked any of his twenty-something unpaid domestic servants and what I feel is the best jumping on point for him and his whole schtick

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

Joe, aka Lord Grimdark, writes much like David Gemmell, good straight up two fisted violent action adventure fantasy. For many people he’s the go to after they’ve read all the Game Of Thrones books. He, Like GRRM does morally dubious complex characters against a complicated and dark setting animated by a black humour (and he’s actually capable of finishing a series once he’s started so there’s that…). There are some horror elements and implied science behind the fiction so it's at least New Weird adjacent. I actually first heard of him through a hit piece by a highly strung traditional fantasy author kvetching about the turn away from fantasy with a firm Christian moral basis into the modern trend of nihilism. I can’t dig up the exact quote but it was something along the lines of: imagine if at then end of the Lord Of The Rings it turned out Gandalf was just as much of a dick as Sauron and only wanted the one ring destroyed so he could be the undisputed power in the land himself and Aragorn was just some useful dupe that he’d installed, to which my immediate response was That sounds dope as fuck, sign me up, and I have been on the Abercrombie train ever since, binging through everything he’d had out up to that point and reading every new book of his as they’ve released.

Joe writes in something like the traditional fantasy style, the main series set in the First Law universe is a trilogy, followed by three stand alone books set in other parts of the same shared world peripheral to the Union, the main setting of the first three, followed by a trilogy set a generation after and starring the children of some of the characters from the previous books and recurring characters from the stand-alones. As a fan and disciple of terry Pratchett he has purposefully written each book so that they really could stand alone and be read out of order, even the individual parts of the two trilogies, but probably better if you don’t tbh. No no, my recommendation is that if you just want to read one of these books to get a flavour of the world and see everything that Abercrombie can do as a writer go for the first of the three stand alone books Best Served Cold. Aside from a very light spoiler for some stuff at the end of the trilogy that doesn’t actually matter there’s nothing in here that’s going to take away from reading the previous books if you go back, hell one of the main POV characters from that trilogy shows up in one scene but its written delicately around it so you wouldn’t actually know unless you’ve read the previous books, but if you have it’s a lovely little Easter egg for you.

This is Abercrombie doing his take on the revenge thriller, it's his Count of Monte Christo or Kill Bill. It starts off our heroine(?) Monza Murcatto being defenestrated after seeing her twin brother murdered in front of her and left for dead by the Duke Orso for whom she’d been formerly employed as one of his top generals. She survives and gathers a rag tag bunch of misfits to seek her revenge, including a few characters you might have come across in the previous trilogy such as Caul Shivers, who shows up in basically every book in this setting aside from the first one and goes through one of the wildest character arcs in genre fiction, with this being the one he’s in the most and has his most pivotal moments. It also has fan favourite Nicomo Cosca, another memorable and well written character who runs the gamut from anti-hero, to hero to primary villain-antagonist in another of the books, though in this one he’s on the side of our main characters and very much on the hero part of that arc.

It’s a great meditation on the nature of revenge as what starts off as a righteous quest for vengeance gets increasingly murky as the collateral damage stacks up and Monza herself begins to doubt the validity of what she’s doing but also hammers home that once you start off on a certain path it can be very hard to get off.

This is Joe on absolute top form, the competence in his character work, world building and technical writing is off the scale. In the later part of the book there’s one of the most cleverly written sex scenes you’ll ever read, not just for the smut but for how he handles character perspectives. The action and battle sequences are characteristically visceral. There’s a great heist sequence. It’s just a good meal well served and you’re in the hands of a master.

And apparently there's talk of a film of this one in the works so if you want to get hipster points by getting in early and reading the novel so you can brag about it now's probably a good time :)

 

So there you go. If you’re looking to branch your reading into fantasy and don’t want to dive head first into a big chonky multi part book series that only starts getting really good 4 books in or whatever or may or may not at the time this is going out ever come to a conclusion, looking at you Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM, this should hopefully have given you something to chew on and possibly inspired you to take a peek at something listed above. I may or may not come back to this topic for there are indeed a few books of which I’m fond that would be considered stand alone fantasy that have been bubbling under and might have been in here if I’d read them more recently. Or I might do something about completed series / trilogies for people that liked A Song Of Ice and Fire and want something similar to get into while enduring the long and possibly unending wait for that next book. Lets just see where the mood takes me. Anyways, I hope you’ve enjoyed this, peace out and if you’ve read any of these and want to comment or especially if you’ve actually picked any of these up thanks to me do leave a comment or share, it would mean the world to me.

10 Great Fantasy Stand Alone Novels (part 1)

This is a thing I often see coming up on forums and Facebook groups dedicated to the fantasy genre. When one thinks of fantasy you tend to think of trilogies like the iconic Lord Of The Rings, big expansive series like The Wheel of Time, A Song Of Ice and Fire, Malazan The Book of The Fallen or even CS Lewis’s Narnia books which run to seven books. For people brought up on the genre who love it there’s nothing better than plugging your mind into someone else’s for an extended period of time, watching the world building unfold and getting nerdy about the lore. For many people though these big commitments are a little much of an ask, newer readers who might just be feeling their way into the genre, people who might not have as much reading time and many other people might just legitimately want a good stand alone book that can show off what the genre can do. 

So the question does often come up, and I’ve answered it enough times that I’ve settled on a list of ten solid rec’s that at least one of them should appeal to anyone who just wants a “one and done”. Some of these might be part of larger series or share universes and characters with other novels by the same author but are perfectly fine to read in isolation or out of sequence. I’m also going to give a short explanation of each, what people are looking for from a novel is going to vary so this is in the spirit of a fair heads up and much as why I rate them.

Some of these books are in my opinion among the best writing of any genre. They’ve ideas that will fire the imagination, prose writing comparable to the best of any literary fiction and some contain a sophisticated commentary on fantasy and the world in general.

So, in no particular order these are the first five:

 The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson.

This book is one cited by the noted fantasy author Michael Moorcock as Better Than Tolkien. In the context of the 60s when that statement was made, performatively dunking on the undisputed king of the genre was a spectator sport indulged in by the young revolutionaries working in the field who wanted to kick against the thing that very much defined the genre. It was a provocative statement then and will have many up in arms to this day, think Jonny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” T.

But actually, the man has a point. Its interesting to compare with The Lord Of The Rings since they’re contemporaneous, the first editions of it and The Lord Of The Rings each dropping the same year, and they’re both original works of fantasy fiction that draw from the same well, the western European mythological canon and dark ages history. Whereas Tolkien takes inspiration from these works to create the complete world of Middle Earth with its own mythos, history, languages and even geology, what Anderson does is to read The Book of Invasions, Ulster Cycle, Mabinogion, Norse Mythology, the Sagas, Fairy Lore, The Tales of King Arthur etc. and treat them as a consistent and co existing Extended Universe and writes his own new story set at the end of the dark ages. As someone brought up on this stuff, to me it rings very authentic, it has the style, the feel and inhabits the morally ambiguous universe as the old pagan sources. Its also just a cracking read, much tighter than The Lord Of The Rings and many another which would try to imitate it.

It’s also of a certain historical significance in that it might be one of the earliest of the seminal genre works to be inspired by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, we’re talking a good decade before Earthsea and two before Star Wars. I’m not quite sure if those were direct conscious influences or just convergence from working with similar resources along the same lines but if you are familiar with The Heros Journey, the idea of archetypes and specifically The Shadow Self from Jung you’ll see that in it.

So yes, if you’re getting into fantasy and have read and enjoyed Tolkien and looking something else that might scratch that itch, maybe give it a go and see if you come to the same conclusion as Moorcock and myself. Conversely if you have read Tolkien and maybe weren’t so fussed and would prefer something similar that’s a bit darker and spicier this could be something you’ll enjoy.

 

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

 This is some peak mid 20^th century Irish literary fantasy by one of the great unsung heroes of Irish literature. Flann, real name Brian Nolan, was a Dublin man who ran in the same literary and drinking circles as Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Though overshadowed by them in posterity in terms of the quality and brilliance of his writing he was very much their equal, arguably Joyce’s true heir. The problem is that he didn’t have such an expansive literary output, or not for his fiction anyway, as he was a journalist and wrote a daily column under the name Myles Na Gopaleen which took up most of his creative energies and was in all fairness one of the most popular and widely read in its day. He did leave us with a couple of short but excellent books and The Third Policeman is the one I would consider the most accessible. It’s a novella length story of a strange young man who is what we might today term a sociopathic incel that after plotting and carrying out a robbery with an associate finds himself in circumstances stranger than himself as he wanders into a distorted surreal version of the Irish countryside. Its kind of funny but also kind of horrifying. I’m not sure how appealing that sounds but I think the best way I could sell it is that it is beyond trippy, a fairy story for adults that will do things to your head you would normally need chemical assistance for, which is interesting since as far as we know O’Brien never indulged in anything more psycho active than the sup, which he was very into by all accounts. It counts amongst its fans Alan Moore and Blindboy Boatclub, the latter of who’s mother prays to the shade of O’Brien’s brother on his behalf for his continued literary success. It’s a short enough and quick enough read that I don’t want to give up the goods re the plot beyond what I have but lets just say that one of the most memorable sequences involves a dialectic of fractal infinity in the form of a series of little boxes each a perfect copy of the other and each fitting into the other perfectly until we reach the material limitations of the tools by which reality is perceived and manipulated. I mean if that alone isn’t appealing, I don’t know what to tell you.

 

Wizard Of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm

This is an urban fantasy (and one of the seminal works that brought that subgenre into popularity) by the author who is much better known for writing epic high fantasy under her other pen name Robin Hobb. As Hobb she’s one of the big dogs of the modern fantasy genre along with George R R Martin, her Realm Of The Elderlings series in particular being one of the ones rec’d to people who liked ASOIAF and want something else to get stuck into, and its actually finished. This earlier work is as good as any of her better known stuff and has many of the qualities that make her epics great. She’s a great world builder and in this instance she captures her home city of Seattle of the early 80s.

If you’re familiar with the Terry Gilliam film The Fisher King you’ll be in familiar territory (like “very familiar” to the point where I’m surprised that no legal action was taken or even mooted) in that it’s an ambiguous fantasy whose phantasmagorical elements might just be the hallucinatory subjectivity of a psychotic unhoused person. The character writing is strong, the titular Wizard is a compelling and tragic figure who we feel and suffer along with as he uses his “cunning insight” (making him a true Wizard in the original sense of the word, a “Wise-ard” / wise man rather than someone in a pointy hat who can cast spells) to navigate the urban jungle much as you do with Hobb’s protagonists over the much longer stretches of her blockbuster series. There’s a strong anti-war subtext in that the wisdom the character has was hard won through being away to a traumatising war experience, a life hard lived ever since and deep connection to the psychogeography of the city.

 Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

 Kay started his career in fantasy at the top as an associate of and worker for the Tolkien estate who would become with his own work one of those along with Tad Williams who would quietly revolutionise the genre in the 80s by bringing a critical and modernist sensibility into high fantasy. This particular story inspired by IRL cultural genocide (Kay cites Translations by Brien Friel, a play about the culture wars over the Irish language) it has one of the great central premises in the genre. An evil wizard – conqueror casts a spell to erase the name of an entire people from the collective cultural memory in a fit of pique after a particularly bloody act of defiance by them sees his son die in battle. Our heroes are essentially nationalist revolutionaries on a quest to rise the people in rebellion and break the spell so that the name of their country; ‘Tigana’, can be heard once again. You cannot tell me that if Bibi had wizard powers he wouldn’t be pulling this type of shit, like the Zionist lobby are doing essentially this with their insistence that “Palestine” was made up by the USSR in the 1960s. It’s a good rollicking fantasy yarn but this premise gives it thematic heft often lacking elsewhere in the genre. It is complex. Our “heroes” will sometimes do things that are of dubious ethicality for the cause, make great sacrifices of themselves or just fuck other people over. One of our POV characters becomes tragically enamoured with the antagonist, as some subjugated people do with their oppressors. Also, as someone who has studied modern history and was introduced to Carlo Ginzburg’s work in my 101 class at uni the bit where it segues into The Night Battles for a little bit was just *chef’s kiss*.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Micheal Swannick

A human child called Jane is taken to the land of faerie. A changeling, she becomes a child slave labourer in a place that makes the titular Iron Dragons. She will escape and eventually pose as a student in the faerie high school, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the modern high school of the late 1980s, gets a bit into some bad habits, as you do at that age, sex, partying, shoplifting, you know, typical teenage stuff. She’ll even go beyond that to Faerie university to do STEM (Alchemy) all guided by the ineluctable and sinister force of the Iron Dragon. 

We’re into some very deep and for my money well executed 'fantasy as social-commentary' here along the lines of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The Dragon factory is a shitty ununionized sweatshop, not unlike the “Special Economic Zones” in China or labour conditions in general in the tiger economies of South East Asia that were coming into greater public knowledge at the time, the high school beauty queen gets to be the top girl in her year before being Wickerman’d at homecoming, The Iron Dragon becomes the ambient corruption and environmental degradation innate to capitalist development, he has the local pixies doing their own Guerra Sucia at one point just so he can stock up on his fossil fuel reserves.

So this is clever stuff and as with the other books I’ve recommended, the clever world building is only there to add to and accentuate what is a cracking story and a good read. Taking Jane past the usual fantasy-bildungsroman trappings into adulthood is a nice touch, the relationship between Jane and the Dragon Melanchthon is one of the most interesting and memorable in literature. Its one I would be judicious in who I would recommend it to since it appears as a YA / kids book at first but really isn’t. What it is is extremely compelling and sometimes challenging, I don't want to give away the ending or anything but lets just say that there's a sequence late on which is reminiscent of the end of 2001 in being pointedly abstract and "trippy" in both the literal transportative sense and the other.

This book is also typically my answer to "if you could see any novel made into TV or a film what would it be". I would personally love to see it done with a load of animatronic puppets representing the faeries, like literally getting Jim Henson's creature workshop and Cosgrove Hall in on the production and shooting it on the sort of analogue video tapes they did all the latter's Narnia and The Borrowers adaptions to give it that '80s kids TV retro feel with only Jane and maybe the various incarnations of Testigus and the Baldwynn played by actual people. At least that's the way it comes through in my head when I'm reading it and maybe yours too if you think that sounds at all cool or interesting.

………………………………………

So that is all for the time being. The next one of these will include my favourite living author’s masterwork along with more of the best fantasy writing of modern times.

2025 My Year In Stuff

 

2025 was actually a pretty good year just for getting through some good media. Working at the Ulster Museum as I had been for the most of it meant having to up my game in terms of good nonfiction and broadening my knowledge of stuff in and out of my wheelhouse. We’d some cracking TV and quite a good year for movies and gigs. So, in no order:

Gaming: Basically the same as last year, still playing Streets of Rage 4 a fair few times a week, Balatro, Pool and Slay The Spire daily. The two new games I got into, Deltarune and the new Shinobi from the guys that did SOR4 I enjoyed up to a point but hit skill walls where there were certain bits that were too hard for me to get past and hence didn’t finish which is a bummer but meh, what can you do? 

Podcasts: Again, aside from the ones I’m still listening to from last year, The Only Podcast About Movies which is co presented by Matt of Extra History. It’s him and another guy who works in industry so you do get a reasonable level of analysis as well as their opinions and they cover a good range of stuff, their crack is generally decent too.

Theatre: I actually did make it out to the theatre a fair bit. I always say that I’m going to but rarely do, this year though I did genuinely get to see a good few shows. I saw Shame Show again, a locally made queer comedy with some very clever production. I saw Imelda May’s one woman show The Mother Of All Behans, based on the autobiography of Kathleen, mother of Brendan, Dominic and Brian. Ottille – another one woman musical about the Northern Irish blues singer Ottille Patterson. The Tunnel, a troubles era prison drama which was part of he Feilé was brilliant as well as was In The Name Of The Son, based on the life of Gerry Conlon and almost entirely focused on his life after prison, his struggles with mental health and slide into drug abuse. This was written by old family friend, former blanket man and scourge of Sinn Fein Ricky O’Rawe. I got to see pretty much all of these with my Dad so it was fun having a wee boys day out with him.  And for my birthday my sister took me down to Dublin to see The Book of Mormon with a couple of our mates.

Youtube: Yeah, aside from the stuff I’ve been keeping up with since last year there’s not been much to write home about. For whatever reason the algorithm seems to want to kill the long form video essay, a lot of the better of which have up sticks and moved to Nebula. Lindsay Ellis though has dropped a few bangers which have made their way back to her channel. The Beatles one is essential watching imo, as is her one on Miss Rachel and the flack she’s been getting from the Israel lobby. The video essay space has been very light on Palestine, only Bad Empanada and the Chapo Trap House podcast seem to have been consistently good on the issue. Sad to see.

TV: There’s been a bunch of live action series I have yet to get around to but really should. I’m part of the way through IT: Welcome To Derry and its been great so far. Pluribus and Silo both look fantastic but aren’t on services I sub to so it is going to take me a minute to get them sorted. Andor season 2, as much as it felt a bit rushed it was still fantastic, arguably the best thing in the whole franchise since the first couple of films. Something that came out at the start of the year and most people, including myself until there now, have probably forgotten was the disney MCU continuation of the Netflix Daredevil series with Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio as Kingpin, in this iteration essentially as a Donald Trump figure. It was actually great and a worthy addition to the earlier series. Another thing I did see was The Chair Company. Between that and the movie Friendship Tim Robinson has been on a roll this year and long may he continue. It’s a toss up between that and series 2 of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal for best live action show of the year. And I have finally got around to watching all of the original Twin Peaks and I’m well into The Return. I can see why some people consider this the GOAT, I’m not sure I am one of them yet but I’ll reserve judgement until I finish the whole thing.

Anime / Western animated series: Have finally got around to Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood and tbh it was good but a bit too kiddyish for me. I have worked my way through a lot of obscure older anime from back in the day and damn, so much of it was absolute forgettable tripe. A couple that I did like were the old OVAs Ellcia a kind of high-seas fantasy and the urban horror fantasy Phantom Quest Corps. As far as newer stuff, we didn’t get anything new from the bit hitters of recent times, Hosoda, Shinkai etc. got a new Rose of Versailles film which was incredible, if you like shojo anyway, I caught the new Mononoke films (no relation to Princess Mononoke) which are as gorgeously animated as they are creepy and weird. Ponoc (or Continuity Studio Ghibli as I like to call them) give us The Imaginary, possibly their best project yet. Disney give us a whole slew of new Star Wars Visions, some direct continuations of the stories from season 1, all by some of the biggest anime studios currently going. Dandadan season 2 continues the standard set by the first ne, which is great to see since it fucking rocked. My only criticism is they didn’t keep the opening theme and the new one isn’t quite as good.  

The best thing though was 17-26, a compilation of stories by Tatsuki Fujimoto, creator of Chainsaw Man and Look Back. Honestly, this was incredible, unmissable stuff even if you’re not that into anime, every story is different and has some of the lushest animation and bravura story telling you’ll ever see. The other big stand out of the year in anime for me was Nukitashi: The Series. This was some of the most bizarre stuff I’ve ever seen in my entire life and really just reminds me of the good old days and everything I got into anime for in the first place. I’m not sure how exactly to describe it, it’s a sex comedy, borderline hentai but like a parody of the genre and not even that sexy, yet weirdly compelling. 

Western animation, we got The Mighty Nein, another show from Critical Role who were responsible for The Legend of Vox Machina, which we also got the last season of this year. Just solid fantasy hijinks. Creature Commandos, a suicide squad but with horror monsters set in the new DC Gunn-verse was a lot of fun, reminds me of the good old days of the 90s Vertigo era. Unknown Side-effects from the team that did Scavengers Reign was an absolute belter. The new Invincible season continues to be great too. 

My favourite series, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the second season of Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake. While it didn’t quite have the shock of the new of season 1 the animation quality, the cuts and turns of the plotting and the stream of consciousness visual storytelling were absolutely mind-blowing. A constant treat for old fans and new beginning to end, and good news is that we’re apparently getting more, a movie and 2 shows, a BMO centric one for babies and Side Quests, which is basically them going back to basics and doing stuff in the style of the early seasons, i.e. non arc plot single stories. We also got a short from Adult Swim called The Elephant made by a bunch of the OG adventure Time team, Penn Ward, Rebecca Sugar and Pat McHale which was almost three self contained minis where each handed the last panels off to the next with no context and let them riff on what they saw.

And yeah, I did see K-Pop Demon Hunters and it rules, not quite my bag but I can see why the kids all love it. Dogman might be the funniest thing I’ve seen all year. Predator Killer Of Killers was a lot of fun, one of the nest action films of the year animated or no.

For me though the best western animated feature was Memoir Of a Snail, the latest from ozzy stop motion animator Adam Elliott. A gothic, tragic, funny and sometimes heart-breaking story about two twins separated by the child services system and their subsequent lives. Its pretty dark in places but one you can definitely watch with older kids.

Movies: God damn, this has been a very good year for films. We’ve had a bumper crop of great horrors including Sinners, the best black Marxist vampire horror musical crime drama you’ll ever see, and not just because its likely the only film to blend those particular genres. Weapons, Together and 28 Years Later were all excellent. We got two great takes on the classics, passion projects by their respective directors with Robert Eggers Nosferatu and DelToro’s Frankenstein. I got to see 3 cracking new(ish) Irish horror film, All You Need is Death (came out 2023 but only got to see it on streaming this year) which was scored by one of the Lynch lads from Lankum, Fréwaka and An Taibshe two creepy atmospheric elevated folk horrors which are also fine additions to the cannon of Irish Language cinema. My favourite though was Bring Her Back, the second effort from the Philippou brothers. There were bits in that that had me squirming in my seat, and I’m hard as fucking nails and generally don’t get effected like that, so fair play to the lads.

Palestine features quite a lot in the cinema as one of the big things happening in the world at the moment. Even the new Superman seemed to be throwing digs (I personally think it was initially more about the Ukraine but as things unfolded during the production it leant into it). In fiction, To A Land Unknown was basically an update of Steinbecks Of Mice and Men but with Palestinian migrants in Greece. Palestine 36, a historic epic about the origins of the conflict was excellent, a few minor liberties with the historical accuracy aside. We had the documentary No Other Land which did a very good job of showing the general maniacal shittyness of the settlers and the IDF who defend and support them and the day to day bullshit Palestinians on the West Bank have to put up with. The Encampments, which was about the solidarity movement in the states and te sea change in public opinion that seems to be happening there based on the campus protests.

Other than that, The People’s Joker I really enjoyed but I feel like I need to rewatch, its basically the DC villains’ origin story as a trans narrative and its fun as hell. I’m Still Here, a Brazilian film, a true story about the family of a politician, a sitting senator who becomes one of The Disappeared by the fascist Junta in the 70s and their long quest for justice. The Return, an adaptation of the last sections of The Odyssey with Ralph Feins as Odysseus himself was classy good stuff. Pillion with Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård and Babygirl with Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson both did some excellent work bringing BDSM relationship dramas to the big screen with an element of realism conspicuously missing from tripe like 50 Shades of Grey. Cool OSTs on both of those two, particularly the latter. Bugonia is maybe my second least favourite Lanthimos film that I’ve seen but that’s still a pretty high bar and definitely a must see with a lot to say about contemporary society in the usual Lanthinmos bizarre style. Sorry, Baby will probably be remembered as the first of many masterpieces from its writer-director. As for: One Battle After Another, yeah believe the hype it IS that good.

Best new film, at least of the ones I’ve managed to catch so far was It Was Just An Accident. An Iranian films made by a dissident director who was banned from making films and had to shoot the whole thing in secret and smuggle it out of the country. And you can kind of see why, he does not pull any punches. A man who had been tortured by the regime for trades union activity thinks he has come across one of his torturers, by accident, chases him down and captures him with the intent of getting revenge. But, as the man swears innocence he begins to doubt himself and sets out on a journey to find others who were captured with him who might be able to positively identify him. A comedy of errors ensues that takes him all over Tehran with his drugged captive in a box in the back of his truck. It’s great vital film making, as much a black comedy as it is a thriller.

I also saw a fair few older films for the first time that I really enjoyed. The Blaxploitation classic Black Caesar is an absolute banger. Haneke’s Time Of The Wolf was bleak AF in the best possible way. The best film I saw all year might well be the French Resistance classic from the 1960s Army Of Shadows. Based on a novel by a resistance veteran it has a grittiness and a lack of romanticism about it that chimes with what I know about the real history of the time period.

Music: I’ve got to some cracking gigs this year, Managed to knock Laibach off the bucket list when I was over in London, and finally got to see clipping. in Paris (in The Moulin Rouge) touring their latest cyberpunk concept album, where I also saw Violent Magic Orchestra doing their new album in a tiny basement which was frankly the perfect setting. Nice bunch of lads too (and heck out their Boiler Room from Osaka, its unreal). I saw Max Cooper again in Dublin and at Bangface where he headlined the Sunday again and yeah, his music and his AV work are up there with the greats, your Aphex Twins and Autechres. Speaking of which Autechre played the Mandela hall and between them and the support who all played some absolutely sick wonky IDM and breakcore this was the best night of music in Belfast this decade, easy.

Other big gigs, Charlie XCX, fuck the haters I thought she was great. Kneecap and The Fontaines DC – great seeing Irish music repping hard on a world stage. The whole thing with Kneecap and Bob Vylan’s attempted cancelling and prosecution by the genocide propaganda complex was like the current generations big pop culture rebellion moment, Beatles “bigger than Jesus” or the Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy or the God Save the Queen banning, or the 80s metal Satanic Panic do not have shit on this in terms of the literal seriousness of the politics implicit in the whole goings on. 

One gig I did miss unfortunately was Billy Woods, as it was in Dublin and that was the night at the start of October where the weather was completely mental. Shame because along with clipping. Billy is probably the best in the game at the moment and Gollywog is some of the rawest horrorcore. Similarly, Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives new joint A City Drowned In God’s Black Tears is another masterpiece of raw alt-industrial hip-hop. FKA Twigs latest Eusexual, dark, clubby some tough edges to it and still kind of poppy.

It's not been a bad year for punk, I saw The Circle Jerks and The Descendants in the Limelight here back at the start of the year. I got listening to The Chats album which I only got hearing this year though it’s from last year. Lambrini Girls LP was a class bit of modern Riot Girl. 

Favourite LP of the year though was Kae Tempests latest where he’s essentially come out as trans-masc after identifying as non-binary for the last couple of years and that’s pretty much the theme of the album with Tempests usual fiery poetic delivery. If you can hunt down a bootleg of the Glasto set its really worth seeing.

Books: I read a fair bit of good genre fiction, Alan Moore’s The Great When being the most literary and the highlight. Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, basically a Catholic Gothic Suicide Squad set in an alternative middle ages, was fun. I read the whole Empire of The Vampire trilogy, and cheesy, derivative and all as it is it was also very enjoyable. I did also read a fair bit of serious non-fiction. I read The Wretched Of The Earth and Said’s Orientalism as well as the whole of Jonathan Bardon’s History of Ulster. I read Dead As Doornails, Anthony Cronin’s readable and insightful memoir of his time in mid 20th century bohemian Dublin, which in turn inspired me to read Pat Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger and Other Poems. 

Finn Dwyer of The Irish History Podcast’s pop-history book A Lethal Legacy was another absolute delight. It tells the story of modern Ireland through a series of True Crime Podcast-esque murder stories and is as recommendable to the layman as anyone in academia. Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals by Maurice J. Casey I picked up after hearing him on Dwyer’s podcast talking about the book and again, its in the sweet spot between pop-history and the serious stuff for academics. It takes in feminism, the Russian revolution, Trotskyism Vs Stalinism, queer history too. And it’s a good read to boot, the author puts a lot of himself and his journey as a researcher into the text, much more so than one usually gets. 

Similarly, Kincora: Britain's Shame - Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover Up by Chris Moore has a lot of Moore’s own story of his decades long involvement with the case and is, I personally think, essential reading for anyone with the slightest interest in the conflict here. Beyond conspiracy theory, this is conspiracy fact and it is harrowing.

Much more fun was the collected EC Ray Bradbury stories published and collected by Fantagraphics. This is pre code when comics production was basically the wild west and they would occasionally cut corners by ripping off stories from the more respectable sci-fi magazines assuming nobody would notice. Bradbury though actually did read EC horror comics and was a little surprised to come across his own work. Instead of getting mad and getting the lawyers involved he just wrote them and said he actually liked what they did with it and maybe in future they could cut a deal and he’d let them do his work with his official endorsement and name on the cover if they credited him and sent him a reasonable remuneration, which they did and the stories are an absolute joy, not surprising considering that they’d the likes of Wally Wood, Joe Orlando, Jack Davis and so on on art duties. 

So that was 2025, or at least the highlights. There was a bunch of stuff I didn’t quite gel with or like over much. Or just thought was fine. There’s still a bunch of stuff I’ve not got around to that might well have made this post if I’d got to it. 2026 is shaping up to be a good one too and no doubt if I do another one of these at the end of next year you’ll be hearing all about Arco, Hamnet, Hades 2 or The Voice of Hind Rajab from me. I really hope we keep up the good run of horror films and The Bone Temple lives up to the last one. I’m also hoping to get a lot more stuff written for this blog. So, here’s to another new year, hope 2026 brings us happier times because it is grim out there and that doesn’t seem to be letting up any time soon.

Reading order of The Discworld: My Take

 

We are back once again with a question that I see asked quite frequently on social media that I have answered maybe dozens of times, often enough that I think its about time to get my thoughts in order here so I can just direct them to this post rather than just type more or less the same thing every time. The question in this instance being one of where to start with the Discworld book series by the late Terry Pratchett.

It’s a simple question but the answer is a little more complicated than one might imagine. Before I get to that though I will say a little about it and my relationship with the series for the uninitiated.

 

The Discworld is a series of comedic fantasy novels written by Terry Pratchett from 1983 until his untimely death in 2015. If you were around nerd culture any time in the early 90s to the time of the authors passing you’ll know exactly what I’m on about, the books were everywhere. Easons and Waterstones used to have them on prominent display in their respective genre fiction sections and would do deals on them to entice shoppers in. They were reviewed in the genre fiction press, SFX did every single one since it started publishing as did all the other speculative fiction journals of note and they invariably reviewed well. He put the whole genre of comedic fantasy on the map in a way that it hadn’t been and spawned numerous, often poor, imitators. The only place you didn’t really see giving him the love was in mainstream discourse. This was well before the mainstreaming of nerd culture, you’d see little about it on TV except the time Tom Paulin on late review called him an amateur for not using chapters, a quote which made it to the book covers.

 

I was a fan myself. I first got into them when I was 14, I tapped my friend David’s collection to take on holiday with me to Donegal and read all of them and the couple that I’d scored from the library. I would go onto read all of the ones published up to that point over the following years and got those out subsequently as they were released. I also read as much of Pratchett’s other books as I could get a hold of, his earlier sci-fi works like Stratra and The Dark Side Of The Sun where he was working out a lot of the ideas that would become the Discworld, his YA fiction, the Discworld themed pop-science books that he did with two professional science educators and may be one of my most formative reads in terms of how I see the world. I also got a lot of the ancillary materials, the Maps, David Langford’s guides and quizbooks, the art books by Josh Kirby and Paul Kidby, who did the iconic covers for the books.

 

So that is all to say that I feel qualified to answer the question, where to start and what order to do the series in.

 

The first thing to get out of the way in answering this is whether or not to do it in publication order. That seems like the obvious thing to do, yeah? If you’re a fantasy reader in particular who isn’t daunted by a big series and is happy to commit to something like that, you’ve likely done that with another series already. The thing is that the Discworld is not like conventional fantasy series in which there’s a consistent set of characters or an overarching narrative, like Wheel Of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire. The single thing that remains consistent between books is the setting, a giant flat disc-shaped world that sails through the universe on the back of four elephants which are themselves on the back of giant turtle. The books are all written to stand alone, though there are some sets of characters and locations that recur that I will be referring to as sub-series. There can be dense and intricate plots in each story, but the plots are ultimately there to serve the humour which is the main purpose of the books. The whole thing is an elaborate playground that is a sort of mirror of our world but powered by magic that allows the author to interrogate different elements of the social imagination for the purpose of comedic satire.

 

In theory then, you can literally read the series in any order. Even in the sub-series, you’re only getting minor spoilers, like if you have read any of the watch books after Guards Guards! you’ll at least know that none of the original 4 guardsmen who show up in the subsequent books are going to get killed by a dragon nor that Vetenari’s imprisonment is going to last.

 

Aside from that you don’t have to for narrative purposes, the other argument against publication order is that the first two books are not that much like the rest of the series, arguably worse (though I personally wouldn’t got that far), and people who might potentially enjoy the books what Pratchett gets into full swing could be put off by them. I personally think that’s fair as while I like The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic (the former much more than the latter) they’re just objectively different to what the series becomes.

 

These follow the adventures of Rincewind, a Wizard who can’t do magic and Twoflower, the Disc’s first tourist. The first book ends on a literal cliff-hanger which is picked up immediately in the second, that’s the only time the series does anything like this. The Patrician and Death both show up and act out of what will become their character. There’s a lot of free associative high fantasy whimsy in the humour that won’t be a big feature of the books for long. They are mostly a riff on fantasy tropes, in The Colour of Magic the two main characters clip into our reality for a couple of pages, again the only time in the series anything like that happens (even the later books that feature Rincewind). The Colour Of Magic is also unique in that it feels like a fix-up, being made up of four short-story length sections (though as far as I know they were never published separately prior to the book itself). So not worse by any means in my subjective opinion, just different.

 

That said, there are two different groups of people that I would actually recommend doing publication order to:

1.      People who are already familiar with and enjoy the stuff Pratchett was riffing on and influenced by when he started writing the books, I’m thinking specifically Douglas Adams and Fritz Lieber, but also Micheal Moorcock, 70s/80s British humour in general, the early classics, i.e. Tolkien, Howard, Lovecraft etc.

2.      People who are going to commit to reading the whole thing, sight unseen. Maybe they’ve read some of Pratchetts non-discworld books or they just know themselves well enough to know that its going to be their thing. That and they’re happily cognisant of the issues the first couple in the series might present themselves with and will plough on regardless.

 

So, if not publication order, where then to start?

So, I have mentioned the sub series. Whilst some of the books stand completely alone and some are only connected thematically, most of the books are part of a sub-series which are set in the same location and/or have a recurring cast of characters. These may on occasion intersect with each other, its complicated. As I have said earlier, even these may be read in any order but I think it is optimal that you do actually do them in the order they came out as it is nice to see the characters and their situations develop and pay off over time. For that reason in my opinion the first book of one of these is one of the best places to start.

 

These are as follows:

·       Mort – this is the first book where the anthropomorphic personification of mortality, the grim reaper aka Death who shows up in nearly every book and SPEAKS ENTIRELY IN CAPITALS WITH NO QUOTATION MARKS LIKE THIS gets his own dedicated book. The titular character Mort is taken on as his apprentice, hilarity ensues. This is the start of the Death series.

·       Wyrd Sisters – while this is not the first book to feature the chief Witch Granny Weatherwax, it’s the first to be set in her home country of Lancre (which is kind of the Scottish Highlands analogue of the Disc but has Cornwall coding in there too, some adaptations give the residents West Country accents) and feature her coven. It’s a riff on Macbeth, but so much more than that.

·       Guards Guards! – This is the first book to centre the Watch, the police of Ankh-Morpork, the chief city of the Disc. It’s a lot of fun, some argue the exact point where the series goes from ‘Good’ to ‘Great’. It’s a fun mash up of police thriller / mystery, and high fantasy. One could argue that the cops being the good guys makes it copaganda and therefore ideologically suspect, I don’t disagree per sé but the take on policing and law and order in general is cynical and there’s enough nuance in there that it’s not that much of an issue, at least to me.

·       The Wee Free Men – This is the first featuring Tiffany Aching, a young girl who is set to become the witch or wise-woman of The Chalk, which feels a bit like the Discs analogue of the rural Home Counties area of England. As such it is witch-adjacent, Granny Weatherwax does show up as an advisor and mentor to the main character much as she does in her first book Equal Rites. That said these books are very much their own thing, Granny being there is basically an Easter Egg for the adults who have read the previous novels and have deigned to read this since it is actually the only series that is marketed as YA and intended for a younger audience. This and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, the first Discworld YA and only YA stand alone, to my mind make for the perfect onboarding point for tweens to older teens, particularly those who have already read and enjoy a bit of YA fantasy. And it isn’t like adults aren’t going to enjoy these, the Tiffany Aching sub-series are good examples of what YA is and what it can do at its best.

·       Going Postal – This is the first of the Moist Von Lipwig books. It’s a bit of a departure as it’s the first non YA Discworld book to be divided into chapters. Its arguably part of a longer thematic subseries chronicling the Disc, or at least the part in proximity to Ankh-Morpork, undergoing a process analogous to our industrial revolution. Most of this takes place in the stand alone books but it’s a bit of a running theme in the Watch books as well as policing in the city gets progressively modernised by Vimes as it goes on. In this one the postal service gets overhauled by a former gifted and ingenious con man who gets roped in against his will by Vetenari. Moist is low key one of the best characters in the Disc and this is representative of the late stages and most mature portion of the run, some would argue its objectively the best written of the books I’ve listed so far.

 

So those are the first books of each of the sub series. You could also again start with the first books as Rincewind’s various adventures around the Disc constitute a series in themselves. He ends up getting a lot of the high fantasy “we need to stop the end of the world” shenanigans. Of the stand alone books, there are a few that I would consider good jumping in points. These are:

·       Small Gods – this might be the best book in the series, or at least a close second to Nightwatch which while great does come deep into the watch subseries and definitely rewards familiarity with the wider lore and is a good example of one you probably ought to leave until you’re already immersed. It’s Pratchetts most definitive philosophical statement as it deals with organised religion and is animated by his deeply held secular humanist beliefs. On the Disc the way that religion works, with it being a magical space powered by the element narrativium that permeates the universe and ensures that reality takes the shape of stories, if people believe in gods that brings them into existence and they become sentient autonomous beings with godlike powers, who mostly live in the great tower Cor Celesti at the Disc’s centre where they idly play something like DnD with the lives of the mortals elsewhere as depicted through the first couple of books and feed off of the faithful belief of their followers. Not so in the desert country of Omnia which is a violent and expansive theocracy, it is monotheistic and seeks to supplant all other faiths with Omnianism. You’d think their god Om then would be doing well, but the religion has been so ossified and calcified into the bureaucratic structure of the organised church to the point where there’s only one person left who has a genuine faith and he can only manifest as a small turtle. Now if you think that sounds very fedora tippy, nu-Athiest-y then you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Pratchett was very outspoken in his advocacy for atheism back in the day and no doubt shared a portion of his fanbase with the 4 horsemen. Unlike them though he didn’t turn into a massive wanker the second 9/11 happened and cosy up to the American Christian right and their war of terror against the middle east. It’s a good time.

·       The Truth – This is one that could be considered in the Industrial Revolution series. These follow a loose format of: X industry / facet of modernity comes to the Disc, hilarity ensues. In this case its Journalism. This is something Pratchett was more than familiar with having been a journalist then press officer in his career prior to writing full time. It’s clever and quite fun, there’s an elaborate political thriller plot that is executed really nicely, its got one of the best cast of characters and while the main turns up later you don’t get one with the full crew like this again.

·       Monstrous Regiment – This is a take on the time honoured pop culture trope of the girl who cuts her hair to go join the army, as seen in popular broadside ballads over the last couple of centuries. It’s one I would recommend to anyone who is trans or gender non-conforming themselves as it is as clear a statement on all that as you could ask for since Pratchett himself passed before JK Rowling lost the plot and initiated a culture war and felt the need to weigh in personally on the issue. It certainly made for a firm rebuttal to those claiming on socials that he would have been a TERF. And it’s a good book on its own merits, feels almost like a Sharpe novel with a bit of a fantasy twist.

So, those are my recs as someone who has read the whole thing. Doing the sub series in order with each other at least is as far as I would go as far as general advice or sticking strictly to the publication order. If you want to do all the Witches or Death books, then all the Watch, then the Rincewind / UU Wizards books, that’s fine, or jump between them it doesn’t matter. I actually didn’t do any of that myself to be fair. When I started my journey over the Disc myself at 14 I read the first book having picked up a copy at a second hand stall at my first Q-Con. I got the most recent one (Masquerade) due to one of those dodgy book subscription things you used to get in every 2000AD back in the mid 90s. Some of the ones I borrowed from David were the second books in their respective sub-series, so I read Reaper Man and Witches Abroad before Mort or Wyrd Sisters. Until I actually got caught up and was getting them as they were coming out I was all over the place. It didn’t do my appreciation of the books any harm, and that’s why I’d say that fundamentally it’s not that important. Read what you want, in any order you want. Read the blurbs and if something catches your fancy get stuck in.

Cartoons Revolutionary Socialists should watch with their kids: The Return

When the mainline of a particular modern cartoon series was due to finish because of an early cancellation back in 2018, 7 years ago now (notwithstanding the four subsequent feature length episodes that delivered the real denouement to the series or the explicitly for adults sequel/successor that is currently in its second season) I made a bold claim on my socials. That was that the show in its entirety constituted one of the great works of narrative art of the modern age and ought to be studied in future years, centuries, millennia even the way we now study Shakespeare’s Theatre, The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, The Táin etc. It was a bit of an extreme take but I stand by it now as firmly as I did then, even more so considering the excellence of the subsequent material from the team attached to the IP. 

So, before we get into the “whys” of all of that, lets have a quick word about why I’m writing about this now.

Fans of the blog may recall that in the distant past we had an occasional series wherein I would do a quick breakdown of children’s animated series and films from or adjacent to my own youth that contained progressive, even revolutionary, leftist themes and ideas. Little did I know in 2012 not having children of my own that the world of children’s entertainment was going through a minor revolutionary upheaval of its own.

What I had intended to do was after the most recent of these (name link) was to do a couple more and then finish on a particular series that wasn’t remotely political but had an incredible surrealist chaotic tip to it that I very much enjoyed and vibed to when I was a child. Unfortunately the creator and show runner of the series was subsequently outed as a creep of the highest order and I can no longer in good conscience support or platform any of their work. I wouldn’t even say the name of the person or the work that they are synonymous with. 

It was a blow and something that took a while getting over. Knowing that was on the horizon didn’t make me feel much like coming back to the series, even though it was one that I liked doing and a small part of the reason why this thing is so sparse. 

That said, we have up until a few years ago been living through what will probably come to be seen as a golden age in children and young adults animated media, especially long form episodic series for the small screen. From about the start of the 2010s to a few years ago when the Cartoon Network that was arguably the driving force for this shuttered, there was a marked spike in the quality and variety of these shows. The whole story of what this was and what happened to essentially kill it are a whole story and too long a one for me to want to go into right now, a post for another time probably. Suffice to say that I have got enough things to talk about to potentially keep me going for some time.

To begin with I’d like to start with what is in my opinion the best of these series, and also the foundational one of the era. It has proven to be both a masterpiece in itself and also a training ground for many other creators who would go on to do their own works which I will also be covering in future instalments.

So what time is it? 

Adventure Time!

(So at this point in these articles I usually split things into three sections, What’s It About, Why Its Good and What the kids will hopefully take from it. I have found that with Adventure time giving a reasonably explanation for what its about inevitably leads into explaining the others so I’ll just get stuck in)

Initially at least Adventure Time is about the adventures of Finn the Human and his stretchy dog Jake. They live in a tree house in the grasslands of the land of Ooo. The nearest civilisation is the Candy Kingdom where the candy people live ruled by the Princess Bubblegum with whom Finn has a romantic interest. There’s a Vampire Queen called Marceline who the MCs become friends with, along with other characters like Tree Trunks the elderly cute little elephant and the seemingly superficial valleygirl-accented Lumpy Space Princess. Their main antagonist is the Ice King, an Ice Wizard who likes to steal princesses who Finn and Jake inevitably rescue. Most of the stories in the first season are very simple stand alone fables, very straight forwards and just looking to entertain. The show is for young children but pitched in a way that any adults watching will get a good laugh out of the humour. 

That’s how it all starts, at some point though things start getting more complex. During the production of season one the tale grows in the making, an episode suggests that the world is not just a whacky fantasy that happens to have one human in it, but that it’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland on earth some centuries past a catastrophic “Mushroom War”. Between seasons 1 and 2 it’s decided that the silliness in the first season is actually building a world with a consistent cannon. Locations are returned to, throwaway gags become or are retconned into setup for stuff that happens seasons later. There is a subtle shift in the writing in that the characters start getting fleshed out and dimensions to otherwise pretty simple archetypes get added. The Ice King gets a backstory and becomes one of the richest and most interesting characters in the show. 

This MF'r

Around season 3 you start getting episodes that aren’t focused on Finn and Jake. Thank You is the first one of these and is told almost completely visually. We start getting episodes that are explorations of different ideas and concepts that the writers find interesting. As the series progresses the complexity in all senses levels up each year. It basically grows up with its audience. You get episodes in the late run that go from one week being an exploration of big brands and consumer capitalism to Crowleian Hermeneutics the next. Finn grows onscreen physically from the start, getting drawn a little bit physically larger as the early seasons progress. The voice actor was a literal child himself at the start, you can literally hear his voice breaking. The character also develops emotionally as we go on too. Some of the plots of the early episodes play his naivety and youthful enthusiasm and immaturity as a positive, in season three towards the end we get My Way which is a corrective to this and he learns that his particular approach isn’t always the best and that’s okay. This stays as part of Finn for the duration. Finn’s ongoing quest for romantic partnership is an ongoing feature of the show as well as his quest for identity as the apparently last human in a world thriving with other forms of life become drivers of the overarching season-long stories that we get later on. Marceline’s centuries long backstory which ties in to a lot of the backstory of the world itself is filled out in a 7-parter that is partially based on some of the major arcana of the Tarot and is some of the finest storytelling in the animated format ever. The real main antagonist of the series gets unleashed and our heroes end up travelling across space and time and into other dimensions to fight it. Jake becomes a Dad and the trials and travails of fatherhood become a feature of his story line. BMO, the cute little robot character that lives with Finn and Jake has a psychotic break. There’s a handful of episodes that are legit short horror and genuinely unsettling. 

We get episodes that are shorts compilations where you have to guess the theme that connects each of them. There’s the Fionna and Cake episodes where the characters are gender swapped. There’s even one of the shorts episodes set in the gender swapped universe where there’s a gag involving layers upon layers of layers of abstraction that is as mind blowing as it is hilarious.

The ruling classes, as per Adventure Time

The general sensibility behind Adventure Time is not quite overtly socialist but it is definitely anti-capitalist. Jake, when explaining how society works to Finn opines in a typically abstracted way what is a not unreasonable rendering primitive accumulation and the rise of the ruling class and the law in a way that is readily understandable to the target audience:

"The laws ain’t made to help earthy cats like us… Here on our planet, back in the old days—back in the real old days—it was just every man for hisself, scrooblin' and scrat-scrobblin' for the good stuff, the greenest valleys, and scrat-scrobblin'. And the strongest, meanest men got the best stuff. They got the green valleys and were like, "The rest of you, y'all scrats get sand. And that’s when they made the laws you see."

Jake The Dog, Season 6 Episode 12 ‘Ocarina’

The whole thing is definitely very much animated by a left liberal-hippy ethos. It is feminist, it’s very much pitched against the toxic masculinity you get in standard hero narratives. It’s very queer friendly, there’s a canonically homosexual relationship which builds from the midpoint of the series onwards. There's a lot of environmentalist messaging in certain parts too.

If you’re starting to watch it as a young-ish kid around the time of season 1 or 2 you were essentially growing up with the show. This is why I would personally recommend for any adults I know with young children that if you are going to follow my advice here and watch it with your kids that you stagger the seasons. I feel like if you’re starting off with it with children who are age appropriate for the first couple of seasons the later seasons are going to be a bit too weird and abstract, unless they’re precociously smart and this is the thing that’s going to unlock their media literacy for the rest of their lives, which it well could. If you’re starting with kids who are the right age for the later seasons they might bounce off the earlier more kiddie stuff in the first couple. This is why I would also personally advise you to get it on physical. The one legal streaming service that its on in the UK at least butchers or outright bans some of the episodes that have some of the darker or more implicitly adult humour. This shouldn’t be an issue for the home releases, though do check since some of the UK release randomly miss important episodes. 

There are 10 seasons of varying length and 4 40+ minute short films that fill out the run. These last were originally broadcast out of order, though they stand alone pretty well and it doesn’t quite matter what order they’re done in as long as you finish on Together Again as that was clearly intended as the capstone and canonical end of the series as it ties up Finn and Jake’s story and the themes of the whole show. 

We also got a spin off series called Fionna and Cake about the gender swapped universe that is explicitly for adults. It’s great, again it levels up in real time with the original audience of Adventure Time. It starts off in something approaching the real world with a 20-somethig Fionna living in a crappy apartment in an unnamed city with a seemingly perfectly normal cat going from one bullshit job to another. By the time we get to Ooo we see things we didn’t get to see in the show, like the characters bleeding after a fight and using money. The second episode is a self-conscious criticism and deconstruction of one episode from the old series about dealing with trauma. It is clever and playful as the show was at its best and is thankfully currently ongoing. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone over 15 though.

That’s about as much as I think I can or want to say without going into too much granular detail. If I feel like it I might come back to the well and do some deep dive on particular episodes, like the aforementioned one about brands that is essentially No Logo condensed into a ten minute mostly silent childrens cartoon, or the Scrat Scroblin’. I really hope I haven’t over egged the more complex or adult elements of the show to the point where people have the impression that it goes too far or is ever not child friendly. For all of that it never stops being bright and funny. Even the horror episodes tend to end on a joke. It helps that each episode only runs for ten minutes. I think anyone whatever age will get a lot out of it.