Sent 12/31/2025
Happy New Year, readers!
General Updates
I’ll be quite honest, writing progress has yet again been a struggle. More overtime, and sickness . . . a lot of being sick for some reason. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, planning, video games, reading Winnie the Pooh and Llama Llama Red Pajama books with my little girl . . . stuff like that. Thus, I moved the release date of Luna to a tentative April 27th, 2026.
Royal Road
Gaea is almost finished uploading daily on Royal Road, and will be all up within the first week of January. You can find it here. Somehow, despite little follower growth of late, I’m suddenly getting a lot more page reads, so I think that means people are finally committing to the read now that it’s almost finished. If you’ve been following along, be sure to drop a review or rating once it’s finished, and if you read it elsewhere, do me a favor and follow that link above to follow the series on Royal Road and/or leave a review.
Tales from the Earthen Sky is up to almost 60 followers on Royal Road and 2 ratings, so that’s pretty steep improvement considering I haven’t made it onto the Trending or Rising Stars lists yet. I’ve been scaling back my release schedule in hopes of releasing longer, better chapters and resuming the weekly schedule in January 2026.
Book Reviews
Below is the list of books that I read or finished this month. I’ve gotten a pattern down of reading eBooks or web fiction on break time, audiobooks in the car or when doing non-brain-intensive activities like Monster Hunter Rise, and of course reading more physical books.
★★★★★
So I’ve been reading some more Mother of Learning . . . That is to say I chewed through all ~800k words in one month. This will be the review for Arcs II–IV:
Arc II starts off with a breather after the climax of Arc I, expanding the world at the cost of feeling just a tad side-questy (while Zorian is nabbing some new abilities, running errands for new characters), but this only lasted a couple chapters before real progress was being made again and things start tying together, leading up to a climax even more explosive than the first. You have to be patient while the author occasionally teases something that feels imminent but doesn’t explore that vein of the story until a good bit later, but it’s satisfying and makes sense when he does.
Arc III keeps the action and mystery going, upping the ante on multiple occasions and expanding the world massively. Lots of large-scale conflicts, battles, and incredibly creative uses of higher-level magics in addition to new revelations about the time loop, the world and the characters.
Arc IV — I don’t want to spoil anything by hinting at the direction of the series, so I will just say that he absolutely held the reins throughout the last act. The finale was everything I was hoping for, and more.
★★★☆☆
Empire of Silence, by Christopher Ruocchio . . . this one sort of disappointed me. I’d heard such great things about the series that I’d built up a certain glossy image of it, and the reality didn’t live up . . . yet. People like to bash it for its unoriginality, and I’m going to do the same—but for very different reasons. Yeah, it’s ‘just like Dune‘, but that didn’t bother me at all. A little bit like a more cynical Star Wars, sure. Nothing like Red Rising, so I don’t know who was making that comparison. (I could see how the books going forward could be a little similar? But that’s about it.) Very similar in feel to The Name of the Wind, so I agree on that count . . . and actually more. Here’s where my problems arise.
First, Hadrian Marlowe. He is a very passive character. Weak. Like with Kvothe from The Kingkiller Chronicle, it seems the theme of this story is for the heroic legend to dispel all legendary status by telling just what a lame hero he really was all along. Where Darrow of Lykos (of Red Rising) and Vis Catenicus Telimus (of The Will of the Many) are strong, magnetic, incredibly active characters who influence the world around them, Hadrian is stuck in Prologueville until the very end of the book. He does, like, one thing, and proceeds to profusely apologize to an annoying woman (my least favorite character by miles) for the rest of the book about it. He lets too many characters walk all over him, seemingly for the purpose of virtue-signaling. But it doesn’t fit with the deeply ingrained pride of his heritage that sneaks out so often.
However, my real problem is as follows: Ruocchio’s influence from decades worth of science fiction shows most in the content of this novel. There are one or two scenes that hint at the sexual perverseness of certain characters, yet every time it’s explained away as just kind of nothing. In some cases, you could say it’s his upbringing, but at other times, I can only chalk it up to virtue-signaling—or more accurately, something thrown in just because every Sci-Fi writer does. (I had this same exact problem with To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini.) With the highest caste, the Pallatines, in particular, it doesn’t even add up, because theirs is essentially a post-sexual society, where children are brought up in labs using DNA. Our main character objects to the blood games in the Colosso, and yet not to his lesbian mother who has her own personal harem? She’s never even talked to him, so why would he view this as fine? Dueling a corrupt, hateful, abusive priest for someone’s honor is bad, yet pleasure slaves at palace are A-OK? The morality just doesn’t seem consistent. This assumption that human morality will grow beyond its current bounds is something of a theme throughout a lot of Science Fiction, and is one of the reasons I don’t often read it.
That said, Book 2 seems far better so far, and I’m hopeful that Hadrian will grow a spine and cement his worldview more. After all that ranting, you’d think I’d rate this book far worse, but the overall worldbuilding was still fantastic and the narrative, while at times slow, was solid. I have high hopes for the series. Ruocchio did a lot of things right here, and the scope of it all is quite impressive. In particular, the Cielsin and the language-juggling that the main character has a knack for are all handled exceptionally.
★★★★☆
Sunder Souls, by Abdellah Jamad (writing under the Royal Road username SoulSunder). This is part of my new undertaking to read some new Royal Road stories every month. I had my eyes on this one for a while, as the author reworked some things and started posting new chapters again — currently well into Book 2. It’s an adult suspense-horror survival story that takes place in the subways of New York, where an ensemble cast of characters are locked in suddenly, inexplicably, and . . . possibly supernaturally. It starts out slow, and the prose is far from polished. Without spoiling anything, I will say that Book 1 is sort of a lengthy (100k+ words) prologue for what is shaping up to be an urban fantasy progression story of characters at their very lowest, rejected and cutoff from the world, finally making a comeback by working together. Book 1 is rather hopeless adventure, depressing and frustrating at times, but with exquisite character backstories and arcs. There’s a nice twist at the end of Book 1 that was not entirely unexpected but which was enough for me to continue, offering a glimmer of hope for the stranded characters. While I’d say usually say 4 stars is a bit generous, this is the author’s first foray into fiction, and on Royal Road an unpolished manuscript is to be expected. I think it has a lot of potential.
★★★★☆
Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. A classic of Christian literature. We’ve been going through this all year in Sunday School, but I’m just now finishing it for myself as we wrap up. Definitely one of those books best read as a group, since a lot of chapters bring up interesting points that fuel discussion, but aren’t necessarily going to 100% land with any one denomination. I would also totally recommend this book to any non-Christian with an interest in theology, cosmology and philosophy, as Lewis was a brilliant scholar and touches on these topics with the finesse of one very learned, but also one who was once very much an atheist himself. I don’t think I’d call it a perfect book, but a very good one.
That’s all for now. Have a great New Year, and go read many books!
— Jacob Gamber