Brian Trent

05/12/2026

My view whenever I’m writing at the computer. His right paw has a habit of hitting the F11 key, which is either his way requesting attention, or demanding a fighter jet.

05/06/2026

The Lowdown is a delightfully weird romp, a deeply engaging neo-noir that oscillates between screwy and grim with equal fluency. Ethan Hawke has really come into his own as an actor; he plays a downtrodden “truthstorian” drawn into the darker side of Tulsa history, and who comes across as an unhinged combo of Philip Marlowe and The Big Lebowski (or as one character calls him, a “hillbilly Indiana Jones”). The dialogue is whip-smart, the performances roundly excellent, and the topsy-turvy narrative is worthy of Raymond Chandler, constantly keeping you guessing. Hats off to writer-director Sterlin Harjo. There aren’t many shows I’ll immediately rewatch on completion, but this is one of them. Highly recommended.

03/30/2026

Project Hail Mary is a smart, sweet sci-fi film, with Ryan Gosling delivering the very best performance of his career. With striking visuals and a sublime musical score, it offers a hard sci-fi story with exactly the right measures of humanity, humor, and pathos. I have a few nitpicks, but they’re minor against the cosmic scope of the picture. Recommended.

03/23/2026

How many people out there remember The Maxx? Its creator, Sam Kieth, died last week.

I had this show on VHS, and would pop it into the VCR for a twisted, edgy and cunningly imagined exploration of the human psyche. The Maxx was unlike anything else. A product of ‘90s cynicism in all the ways that mattered, it was a challenging piece of art. It dared you to engage with some shocking material, balancing whimsy with nightmare fuel; a kind of permutation of The Fisher King and Don Quixote and Jungian psychology. Long after I’d rewound the tape, I’d still find myself ruminating on its macabre visions. There’s no other decade that could have produced this. In contrast to the cheery optimism of ‘80s action-adventure and superheroics, The Maxx was like standing on the precipice of broken promises and broken idealism. It required a degree of courage to get through.

It reminds me, actually, of a quote from Franz Kafka: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us… a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

RIP, Sam Kieth.

03/20/2026

I don’t need a new Buffy, Babylon 5, Firefly, or any other reboot of previous IPs. I get no enjoyment out of the cynical and bloodless recycling that studios seem obsessed with.

Just the same, I don’t need someone to rewrite Sophocles or Sappho, or remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. These properties exist, and I can reread or rewatch them as I like. Remakes and reboots are ghoulish business. They usually cheapen the legacy of the original: digging up the body, slapping a new coat of paint on it, and parading it about like variations of Weekend at Bernie’s. There are exceptions, but they’re rare indeed.

There are plenty of new ideas and new IPs that can be launched. How about a 10-year moratorium on sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots?

02/17/2026

A sad farewell to Robert Duvall, who died yesterday. Many obituaries will mention his standout performances in The Godfather and To Kill a Mockingbird, but the first place I ever saw him was in my favorite (and I’d argue the best) episode of The Outer Limits. Titled “The Inheritors”, it’s a rare two-parter, and follows Duvall’s character on an international investigation of a potential alien menace. First-rate television, and a compelling, sincere performance from Mister Duvall. Farewell, sir.

01/05/2026

For 2026, here’s an idea that we all should be cool with:

It’s time to practice better social media hygiene.

Don’t share articles you haven’t read. Check and cross-check your sources. Don’t share AI-generated ANYTHING: we have enough problems with misinformation and disinformation across the spectrum. Don’t peddle conspiracy theories about elections or Sandy Hook or aliens building the pyramids. Please.

And most of all, let’s spend a little less time addicted to our phones. I’m seeing it everywhere: people who can’t sit through a movie or dinner without the glaze-eyed compulsion to check their phones, pawing at a glowing screen like the undead at a mall window. It’s not healthy, it’s not okay. If someone was taking a shot of whiskey every five minutes, we’d say that person has a problem. Phone addiction is no different, and in many ways it’s worse.

Happy New Year.

12/30/2025

In 2025, I spent time in Egypt and Washington State. I toured the pyramids and Sphinx, visited some of civilization’s oldest sites along the Nile, and explored the (literal) Seattle underground.

My novel Perdition’s Storm was published by Baen Books and achieved bestselling status! Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook, it’s still going strong.

I rode in a fully self-driving car, something I’ve been anticipating in my sci-fi for 30 years.

A nine-year-old baked me a cake, and it was delicious.

I participated in monthly table-reads of Shakespeare’s plays from Henry V to Much Ado About Nothing, with a group of highly talented actors who happen to be my closest friends. “I count myself in nothing else so happy as in a soul remembering my good friends."

I enjoyed not being addicted to my phone. There’s a life beyond constantly tapping at a glowing screen every five minutes.

My story “The Beasts at the End of the World” appeared in the Shapers of Worlds anthology Volume 5; “The Saga of Little Fig” was sold to CatsCast; “Director X and the Thrilling Wonders of Outer Space” was sold to Robots Past & Future; “The Print Job” was published on Baen.com; I performed a reading of “Enchantment Lost” on the Story Hour podcast; the audio rights to “Checkmate” (steampunk!) and “Steel Dragons of a Luminous Sky” (dieselpunk!) were sold to Clockwork, Curses and Coal and Grim, Grit and Gasoline, respectively.

For films and TV, I watched Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga, Nosferatu, Sinners, Cunk on Life, Number 24, Saturday Night, Dark Winds, Music by John Williams, Titan: the OceanGate Submersible Disaster, The Accountant 2, F1 the Movie, Jaws at 50, American Manhunt Osama bin Laden, Robert Redford: The Life & Legacy of an American Icon, the spectacular Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution, and unfortunately, the excretable 28 Years Later. My favorite show of the year was The Diplomat, which has the best writing I’ve seen on TV since the early seasons of The West Wing.

For video games, I played Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Mafia The Old Country, Jedi Fallen Order, Jedi Survivor, Robocop Rogue City, and the excellent The Outer Worlds 2 (gotta love a game with a catchy jingle about the Fibonacci Sequence). The Indy and Star Wars games were orders of magnitude better than any other Indy or Star Wars product we’ve seen in years.

For books, I read/reread The Private Sea, The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell, Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, Red Sparrow, The Damnation Game, Murder on the Orient Express, and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.

I deeply mourned the loss of David Lynch, video game artist Viktor Antonov, Gene Hackman, George Foreman, Val Kilmer, Peter David, Frederick Forsyth, Brian Wilson, Michael Madsen, Ozzy Osbourne, Loni Anderson, Terence Stamp, Graham Greene, Brigitte Bardot, my friend Katherine Tomlinson, Jane Goodall, Diane Keaton, June Lockhart, Drew Struzan (who illustrated every awesome ‘80s movie poster), Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, and the incomparable Robert Redford.

Happy New Year!

11/17/2025

So this happened: PERDITION’S STORM hit #20 on the New Release bestseller list!

Here’s my interview on the Baen Free Radio Hour, talking about how to write sequels, the beauty of Italy, and why Ancient Roman concrete is actually superior to the modern equivalent.

Griffin Barber interviews Brian Trent on Perdition’s Storm, his first Baen novel. Set in John Ringo's Black Tide Rising universe, this novel takes us to Ital...

11/11/2025

“I called your name, and understood I was alone.”

Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein is a gorgeously gothic feast, with sumptuous colors, dreamlike images, and a set design straight out of a dark fairytale. Balancing weighty philosophical queries with outright horror, del Toro’s gifts as a director are on full display. He’s obviously having the time of his life, and often the movie feels like a 19th century oil painting come to life.

I’m always skeptical of adaptations; in my opinion, we have yet to see a truly faithful adaptation of Dracula (no, don’t point to Coppola’s effort). Del Toro’s film makes several deviations from Mary Shelley’s novel (like not including Henry Clerval for some reason, reinventing Viktor’s familial relations, and interpreting the Creature in a more sympathetic light than in the book). This isn’t as faithful as the 1994 adaptatuon with Branagh. Nonetheless, it’s clearly born from love of the book. (I think there’s comparisons to be made with 1979’s Frank Langella version of Dracula, which truncated Stoker’s novel but hit the right gothic horror notes and was a visually entrancing film).

The cinematography and costuming are just stunning—the film drips with imagery befitting Romanticism at its finest, including small touches like the lacy back of a dress mirroring a spinal column, and the inclusion of quotes from others in Mary Shelley’s circle like Percy and Byron. And the cast delivers roundly excellent performances, especially Oscar Isaac as Viktor Frankenstein, and Jacob Elordi as the Creature.

Recommended.