Craig, Ryan, and Megan reunite remotely for the next installment of their Lord of the Rings series of podcasts. Up today, Book 4, or the latter half of The Two Towers. In these ten chapters, we follow Frodo, Sam, and Gollum through the Emyn Muil, the Dead Marshes, Ithilien, and Shelob’s Lair. The panelists will discuss the split nature of the narrative, Sam’s place in the reader’s experience, and why Gollum’s final betrayal is possibly Tolkien’s best writing in all of The Lord of the Rings.

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The original Blue Team is back! Todd, Kenn, and Megan worked around their social distancing requirements and came together over the interwebs to discuss Small Favor, book 10 in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. If there’s a pool out there on when Todd would cry (we’re way past if), then get out your stopwatches.

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What quarantine? Oh, THAT quarantine. Todd, Stephanie, and Kenn wanted–no, needed to talk about the third installment in The Expanse, but had to rely on some remote software to do it. And it will take more than crappy sound quality and missing 10-minute chunk of audio to stop our intrepid trio. (In other words: forgive us, we tried.)

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The Ladies of the Legendarium are back! This time they take on a listener suggestion: Uprooted, by Naomi Novik. Stephanie, Megan, and Kate all read the book for the first time in preparation for this episode, so they’ve got some fresh takes for you. They also address some listener questions and comments to round things out.

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On this return to the “weekender” episodes, Craig is joined by Travis from The Fantasy Inn for a two-parter. In this episode, we reminisce about our own entry points into fantasy, both as young readers and again as adults. What is it about certain books that sucks us into a genre and won’t let us go? And does that thing change as we age? Can lightning still strike as an adult, or does our entry point need to happen earlier? Let us know what you think by commenting on Ricochet.

And stick around for part 2, which will be published on 3/24 on the Fantasy Inn podcast. In that episode we extend the discussion into what we think are the best books, and the best ways, to introduce someone to the fantasy genre. Go subscribe to hear more.

Craig, Ryan, and Stephanie (no Kyle today) talk about book 3 of The Lord of the Rings, being the first half of The Two Towers.They take on the entrelacement writing technique Tolkien employs, Aragorn’s character arc (yep, he has one!), and the nature of the palantiri. Craig is of course back with his recap poem, but Megan decides to one up him by singing on this episode. Trigger warning.

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Todd, Stephanie, and Kenn are back with another installment of their series of episodes discussing James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse. As usual, Todd threatens to cry a lot and Kenn likes the punchin’ stuff, but Stephanie digs deep and gives us a brand new topic: licorice. Yeah, it’s one of those episodes. Enjoy!

Craig, Ryan, Megan, and Kyle discuss the second book in The Lord of the Rings–or to put it another way, the second half of The Fellowship of the Ring. They get into lots of listener questions, like whether the Rivendell chapters are too long, whether balrogs should have wings, whether the fellowship sufficiently mourns Gandalf, and much, much more. Enjoy!

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Todd, Kenn, and Stephanie from the Blue Team discusses the first half of Caliban’s War, book 2 of The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. As per usual, Todd has some tears to shed, Stephanie gets in touch with the emotional state of the characters, and Kenn is (of course) attracted to the militant women in the story. Enjoy!

While Blue Team is reading the books, Craig will be hosting a weekly, patron-only, joint watch-through of the SyFy series. To get more details, check out this Reddit post. To join in on the weekly livestreams, join any Patreon tier.

The Sad Puppies nearly broke the Hugo Awards. In fact, you could argue that they did for a time. The Sad Puppies, and the response to it, were … fraught with a lot of baggage for the sci-fi/fantasy community. It seemed no one could resist taking a side. (In fact, we couldn’t even find a good rundown to link to–every article and post we saw was biased, and usually pretty angry. You’ll have to Google it yourself.)

Craig and Kenn recently hosted Larry Correia for an Author’s Shelf episode (which was great), and they couldn’t miss the opportunity to talk to the founder of the Sad Puppies about the subject. So they invited Larry to tell his story–the how and why of the most divisive movement in recent SFF history.

Giant ants and pterodons come to Earth via a rift in space-time, kill lots of people, and consume anything electric, leaving the remnants of humanity to rebuild in a post-apocalyptic steampunk hellscape. If that line doesn’t sell you on pulp sci-fi, then there may be no hope for you at all. Kenn and Craig welcome best-selling author Larry Correia, who tells us why he pulled this new collaborative novel off his shelf for us to discuss.

Visit Larry at https://monsterhunternation.com/

The time has come! Six years ago Craig and Ryan kicked off the Legendarium podcast with a read-through of the Lord of the Rings. Now they’re back, and they’ve got Kyle and Megan in tow as well. In this episode they discuss a bit about the hobbits, the pacing, the poetry and the reasons for Gandalf’s 17-year absence. If you’re hoping to get your fix of Professor Craig, stick around, because that mostly happens toward the end. A note: If you’re looking for an in-depth discussion of the minutiae of this book, look elsewhere! But you can enjoy a discussion amongst friends loosely based around the first book of The Lord of the Rings.

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It’s all listener comments, all the time! For our final Lightbringer installment, Craig, Ryan, and Stephanie tackle all the listener comments and questions that they missed during the first Burning White episode. Curving cannonballs, deific resuscitations, and gas-powered murder teeth are all on the table as we close out our discussions of Brent Week’s 5-volume fantasy epic. What a ride.

Kyle recently returned from a Disneyland trip on which he got to experience the newest Star Wars attraction: Rise of the Resistance. He, Ryan, and newcomer Mandi combine forces (haha) to try to convince Craig that Disney has gotten at least one Star Wars thing indisputably right: the theme park stuff.

Ask and ye shall receive! After years of requests, the Blue Team (this time comprised of Todd, Kenn, and Stephanie) is taking on James S.A. Corey’s sci-fi epic series, The Expanse. The joint effort of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (writing under the joint pen name of Corey), Leviathan Wakes was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2012, and the series was nominated for Best Series in 2017. So, will the Blue Team join in the love-fest? Listen and find out!

Craig and Ryan welcome special guest–and Brent Weeks’s editorial and administrative assistant–Melanie Bond to discuss The Burning White, the final book in the Lightbringer series. To have even a shot at greatness, a book had better take some risks, and this one certainly did that. So, what were the risks Brent took? How did they pan out? Can an author really [redacted for spoiler reasons] and get away with it??

Giveaway rules: To enter to win a signed copy of The Burning White, simply tweet at us (@LegendariumPod) with your one-sentence, five-star review of the book. To qualify, entrant must be a U.S. resident. Entries will be accepted until 11:59 pm EST on Friday, January 24th, 2020. The winner will be selected entirely at our discretion and notified on Twitter by direct message no later than January 31st, 2020. (You must be following us on Twitter to receive a direct message.)

We were saddened to learn today of the passing today of Christopher Tolkien, someone who has done more for the fantasy genre than most people realize. Craig talks a bit about the younger Tolkien’s legacy and his contribution to fantasy. The bulk of the episode is reserved for reviewing Netflix’s The Witcher, starring Henry Cavill. There’s a lot to love and a lot to … love somewhat less, and we’ll get to a few of those things on today’s episode. Craig and Kyle are joined on this episode by Matt Hatch from The Dusty Wheel, a Wheel of Time-centric, live call-in show on YouTube. Go check it out.

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Craig, Ryan, and Stephanie knock out their entire Blood Mirror discussion in a single episode instead of two. Is Brent pulling too many rugs out from under our feet? Has he improved since Night Angel in his use of sex and violence? Speaking of which, let’s talk about that Author’s Note…

Here’s one of the massive solar arrays Ryan mentioned.

I really hope Craig puts info here…. (Narrator: But Craig did NOT put any info here. He decided to let Ryan sleep in the bed which he’d made. His decision was validated when he looked ahead and realized Ryan had called Sanderson’s latest book “nonsense,” which would surely become a delightful regret.) Todd, Kenn and Ryan blather on about Starsight or some such nonsense. They were clearly tired and made questionable decisions. Support us on Patreon.

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Blue Team is back for a quick dip back into Dresden before taking a more extended break from it for a while. But what an interesting time the Blue Team has had with it! From a “yeah I guess we’ll read this because the listeners seem to want us to” series to a “oh my word this is really really good” series, it’s been a pretty wild ride through Dresden so far. Thanks for hanging in there with us. And yes, we will finish the whole series!

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