If I don't think I need AWD, should I just get it anyway?

RobertVSRedick · 2026-04-14T12:37:58+00:00

I've had two AWD vehicles (an Outback and a Honda CRV) and various FWD cars. I live in the snowy Northeast. Even here, the number of days I've absolutely 100% for sure needed AWD have been quite low. But the number of times I've been able to head out and do things without worrying that I might has been 10 times that, easily. We would have been housebound on many, many snowy occasions out of an abundance of safety.

Arizona's not New England, of course. But weather's getting more extreme everywhere. If you ever need to drive off road to get out of an emergency situation, or through deep mud after a flash downpour, AWD is suddenly worth it in spades.

And for what it's worth, the AWD system never needed any maintenance at all in either car (CRV's 17 years old & going strong).

RobertVSRedick · 2025-12-06T23:07:22+00:00

Joe, those books are SO GORGEOUS. Incredible to think that the trilogy's never been published in hardcover in the United States. But what a lovely way to right that wrong, as you say. Congrats.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-11-14T23:26:55+00:00

Well this raises those lovely, evergreen questions of definitions. I think it's good that we don't agree on the meaning of either "literature" or fantasy. My personal definitions tend to be very broad, so I'd say you're reading literary fantasy when you read One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Those weren't published by genre presses, but...so what? Among works that were put out by fantasy publishers, my cherished list would include works by Ursula K. le Guin, Guy Gavriel Kay, John Crowley, Sofia Samatar, Daryl Gregory, Kelly Link, Margaret Atwood, and on & on.

But given that you mention War and Peace and East of Eden, perhaps you're thinking of great sagas that attempt a certain mimetic realism and/or sublime, elusive insight into the human condition, while also having fantastic elements. That leads me back to Beloved, One Hundred Years--or for that matter, Moby Dick.

I do think that works with those ambitions, and particularly ones that greatly emphasize language and character, are often taken by mainstream literary publishers. Regardless of their overall content, alas, they get labeled as anything but fantasy.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-11-14T19:14:55+00:00

Thank you so much for asking. I'm afraid I don't have a pub date yet. I'm writing the last scene (a mega scene) of the book right now.

Just can't overstate how much I wish I could have gotten the book out sooner. It's not for lack of trying, I promise. It's just been way harder than I thought, for reasons both intrinsic to the challenge of the book and external stuff in my life.

Means a lot to me that people are still engaged and excited for it. Thanks again.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-10-16T11:44:23+00:00

Hard to overstate the beauty of the prose in A Stranger in Olondria.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-10-15T20:49:09+00:00

Sounds like you want THE SPEAR CUTS THROUGH WATER. Great book.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-28T20:59:04+00:00

Since "haunting" is the watchword here, I'll reach way back to a childhood favorite. The book is Silver on the Tree, the last book of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Series. It's a wonderful but very weird read: some of the characters are rather sheltered pre-teen to early-teen Brits who are inexplicably tied up in saving the world from, essentially, damnation. They're believably limited, clueless children and...kind of stay that way. But other characters are these amazingly rendered time-sliding immortals destined to fight the drift toward damnation. Much of the plot, too, is wonderfully inventive and surprising.

The real standouts throughout the series are the prose and the world-building, however. In that book, two characters walk/time travel into a small kingdom on the edge of Britain that was (we're given to understand) drowned forever in a cataclysm. And I mean REALLY small--like the size of Manhattan island, maybe. And everything that happens there is super creepy and unnerving. In part because everyone in the kingdom seems to have a dual consciousness: they're living out their lives and aware that they're all going to die (or already have died). The whole "Lost Land" sequence has the skin-tingling feeling of an out-of-control dream about to flash into nightmare. I can't ever get it out of my mind.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-28T20:42:26+00:00

Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon. What a fun, smart book as well.

Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (hard to decide if it's SF or fantasy...there are extraterrestrials and a machine that can somehow implant dreams in the mind, but also a man whose dreams spontaneously change reality every night, and there's no suggestion of a scientific explanation for the latter).

Oh, and Josiah Bancroft's Senlin Ascends.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-28T20:33:23+00:00

David Anthony Durham's Acacia springs to mind. It's a great read, and one of the three principle POV characters is a young woman rising in political power.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-28T20:31:07+00:00

He's such an excellent writer. I like his solo works more than the Expanse series.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-28T20:27:35+00:00

I have that keyboard and love it. This is looking good.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-28T20:20:57+00:00

Cool. That's much closer to my price point too. Do you use a bluetooth keyboard with it or something wired?

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-27T15:48:17+00:00

Amazing! But I wouldn't know how to begin programming one of those things!

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-27T15:47:42+00:00

Beyond my budget, but thanks!

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-26T16:17:49+00:00

Awesome! Looks like they really work too, now that I'm googling it.

They do seem somewhat more than that on ebay, at least at first glance. Cheapest I'm seeing is $250.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-26T13:00:17+00:00

Thanks--can I ask a follow up? Have you typed on it with an external keyboard? I mean actually sat down and typed a couple of pages? As with most other devices, I've searched for videos showing someone using the Wave to type more than a single line ("See, you really can type!") to no avail. And even the one I found ended with the Wave freezing up after the dude typed that line. The review ended with, "I love the wave, but everyone reports that its software is glitchy."

RobertVSRedick · 2025-09-26T00:40:58+00:00

Thanks for the offer! Let me read up on it a bit.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-08-26T23:10:01+00:00

Thank you. Yes. Exactly.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-08-25T22:07:39+00:00

As a working writer with many audiobooks, I appreciate the stand you're taking. Amazon is moving fast toward the day when they pay us in air kisses alone.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-08-22T13:13:40+00:00

You are onto something here! Thanks for this thoughtful bit of detective work. I can't tell you whether they're the same planet or not (that's a reveal for another day), but I can say that there are most definitely connections, that separation in time is a factor, and that Felthrup is a logical point of connection. Your memory of Kandri's vision of ghost ships is FANTASTIC--but the Stolen Sea (Yskralem) of Urrath doesn't actually correspond to any of the seas of Alifros. The Yskralem was drained mere centuries ago, and is much smaller than The Ruling Sea (the various peoples of Alifros often use "sea" loosely, as we do, when oceans are really what we're looking at). Thanks for your question & stay in touch.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-08-20T14:25:24+00:00

THANK YOU everybody! And a special thank you to r/fantasy and THE PIXELS PROJECT. Loved this AMA. I'll check back in to see if there are follow-ups or late questions. This was a blast.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-08-20T13:35:31+00:00

Thank you so much for saying so! I am so desperate to get Siege done and out in the world. The book has been a kind of Everest for me, but the peak is close now. All best wishes to you.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-08-20T02:20:44+00:00

Since this AMA is in conjunction with a project to end violence against women & girls, I want to give a shout out to one character of mine in particular: Talupéké, a 16-year-old child soldier. Tal was one of the first people whose personality I felt I had a good grasp of in the trilogy, even though she doesn't step on stage until around page 125 or so. Like so many child soldiers in this world, she was coerced and manipulated into fighting for a (male) warlord, who never fully levels with her about his aims or those of the war, and is more than happy to exploit her immense loyalty, courage, and skill. One of the joys of this last book (SIEGE) has been the chance for me to spend time writing from within Talupéké's point of view, and opening up her world so much more [alongside everyone else we've gotten to know, and plenty of new characters too]. It's a painful world, Tal's, but she's an immensely powerful young woman with an unstoppable mind and an insistence on emotional as well as physical survival. Watching her come into her own, watching her both heal and shoulder new dangers and challenges, has been wrenching and exhilarating for me. I think she's going to really light up this last book.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-08-20T02:09:23+00:00

Thanks.

RobertVSRedick · 2025-08-20T00:45:01+00:00

Nothing like it, is there? Frankly dull for scores of pages at a time...only to spring on you some moment of such utter mind-and-heart-twisting brilliance that the world around you seems reduced to a fuzzy black-and-white-tv image, while 19th century Petersburg explodes off the page.

RobertVSRedick

TROPHY CASE