Fourth Wing
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them. With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant. She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise. Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret. Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
10mentions
9people
2023–2026years
10% recommend80% neutral10% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Not sure about underrated, but if you mean lesser-known, here is some of the most memorable, possibly lesser-known science fiction I've read over the past few years. These are the ones that stick in my brain and continue to generate thought, even though I read them months (or even years) ago:
"Chocky" by John Wyndham
"This is How You Lose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (a new all-time fave for me)
"The Book of Strange new Things: A Novel" by Michel Faber
"The City and the City" by China Miéville
"The Fifth Science" by Exurb1a
"The Initial Fold" series by Nick Adams
"Peacemaker's Code" by Deepak Malhotra (still not sure why this is not more well-known)
"Eifelheim" by Michael Flynn (a most unusual premise and a gob of seemingly inane stuff to get through at about the 2/3 point, but IMHO worth it)
"Providence" by Max Barry (heart pounding)
"Hench" by Natalie Zina Walschots
"Orange World" by Karen Russell (short stories but many qualify as sci-fi, very memorable to me)
And here are some definitely well-known examples that also stick in my head:
"Infernum" by Jayson Adams
"The Fourth Wing" and "Iron Flame" by Rebecca Yarros (more fantasy than sci-fi, but very well done if you can handle two or three extended and explicit sex scenes)
"Rabbits" by Terry Miles (book includes some hidden hints and puzzles that lead you to things outside the book
"We are Legion (We are Bob)" series by Dennis Taylor
- Traditional tv lives and dies by Nielsen ratings which are a proxy for views. Hollywood lives and dies by box office take, with token nods to awards. Music has charts. Books have bestseller lists.
Anyone in any of these media industries will happily tell you that what gets made next is heavily dependent on what is being consumed now. If you want to sell books, you’re going to do a lot better writing sports romances for 30 somethings or romance fantasy aimed at slightly above young adult. There’s a lot of that coming out and it’s based on the success of Heated Rivalry, ACOTAR and Fourth Wing.
- I think this article is conflating the craft of writing, which is essentially literary ambition and aspiring toward literary fiction, with genre fiction which is focused on plot and story above language that is employed. Writers who aspire towards a nobel or elite critical acclaim certainly must read because their aspiration is to develop a novel and masterful command of their native language. But writers who aspire towards story, storytelling itself is an oral tradition. The author here conflates these two, citing Woolf and Nabokov as examples of voracious readers while addressing a general population of writers. It is not obvious that the genre fiction writer is losing out by reading less compared to watching tv or movies. They would still be learning about pacing, dialogue, plot mechanics, and the ability to consume more stories albeit via a different medium may be net positive EV for them. As a fun counterfactual, if Fourth Wing by Yarros was instead written as literary fiction, would it be more or less popular? My guess is, less. Which is again to emphasize that masterful craft of language vs. plotting/storytelling are distinct skills that do not face the same payoff or learning dynamics.
- I built a wiki where you can set the current reading location (book + chapter) and articles get automatically truncated to only show information revealed up to that point. The problem with existing wikis was (for me, at least) that they would spoil complete character arcs already in the first few sentences of an article, basically making it impossible to look up any information before finishing an entire series. For something like the 14-book Wheel of Time series with literally thousands of characters, this is really painful. Especially if you're listening to the audiobooks, spread across months, it's really hard to keep track of all the names and places. There have been only a few attempts of spoiler-safe wikis before, such as Spliki (recently discontinued) and Coppermind (which is really great, but Sanderson-only).
Thulr is still a work in progress. I've only got a single series on there so far, Fourth Wing/Empyrean, which is much less complex than e.g. Wheel of Time. I think the current pipeline won't automatically scale up to those more extreme cases, so I'm trying to only slowly increase the complexity of series that I'm adding. It also currently only supports one clear timeline, so I'm not entirely sure yet how to handle the case where you've got non-obvious reading-orders or auxiliary books (such as having one wiki for all of the Tolkien/Middle-earth books).
My current implementation partially uses LLMs. I built a multi-step pipeline that collects chapter-level information on different entities and then aggregates that into final article candidates. This still needs a ton of manual back-and-forth for quality-control and editing. I want articles to incrementally reveal more information (as opposed to: rewrite the full article on each new time horizon), which makes the amount of text manageable, but can lead to awkward prose at times. E.g., name reveals or character identity collapses (think: Voldemort & Tom Riddle in Chamber of Secrets) can't be spoilered in an article at an early time horizon, but those paragraphs need to stay in the article even at a late time horizon. I'm still trying to find better approaches for this.
Any feedback or ideas on the UX (I'm very new to this) and data processing would be great.
- Extremely weird cover selection. Books like Stag Dance, Project: Hail Mary, The Emperor of Gladness, etc. None of them have that. Some of the books listed there are several years old (The Death of Vivek Oji was published in 2020). A Map Is Only One Story isn't even fiction?? I think its very cherrypicked of a complaint. Not to mention the author doesn't talk at all about the rise of romantasy and finding bets like Alchemised and Fourth Wing (neither of which have these covers complained about).
- I think the point 2 will rub many people the wrong way (me included) though. That would make reading Fourth Wing or Twilight a more connecting experience than most classics. (Nothing inherently wrong with that, but... you know...)
