Brian Trent

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.

11/04/2025

Today is launch day! PERDITION’S STORM is officially out! If you’d like to support a human author, please consider grabbing a copy. 🙂

This is a tale not of apocalypse, but of recovering from one—in Italy, from Venice to Palermo—and the lengths we go to save the ones we love. (Purchase links in the first comment.)

10/23/2025

Author copies have arrived!!

10/01/2025

Today, my story “The Print Job” is up for free reading at Baen.com! In a near-future of advanced 3D-printing, a murder has been committed, and it falls to an ex-con to figure it out.

“The dead men had printed semi-automatics for their assault on the shop and, from the look of spent casings, must have fired off a thousand cheaply printed bullets. But their target had printed a monster of some kind, and there wasn’t much left of the gunmen by the time Miguel Falcón arrived on the scene…”

https://www.baen.com/print_job

The Print Job by Brian Trent - Baen Books

08/12/2025

As anyone who remembers Kolchak from The Night Strangler knows, modern Seattle is built atop an earlier incarnation, which can be visited. Secret rooms, vast open spaces, old doorways… it’s all down there.

After this descent into the underworld, I then ascended the 605-foot tall Space Needle for drinks and a view, and later visited the Chihuly Gardens and Glass, which looks like a dreamscape inspired by Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, and W***y Wonka.

08/11/2025

Here in Seattle, a city which retains the same futuristic vibes as when the Space Needle and monorail were unveiled for the 1962 World Fair. Not coincidentally, that year also saw the debut of The Jetsons, whose Skypad Apartments of Orbit City were inspired by Seattle.

I was here 20 years ago, and while lots has changed, Seattle’s fusion of breezy repose and entrepreneurial energy hasn’t faltered. The sheer number of major companies that started here is head-spinning. The Seattle music scene was the soundtrack to my formative years. And Pike Place is as vibrant and delectable as ever, the epitome of what a waterfront marketplace should be.

07/14/2025

Jaws is one of the films that changed my life. No surprise—it changed cinema itself, became the world’s first blockbuster, and launched the career of Steven Spielberg.

JAWS AT 50 is a captivating look at how the classic was made: a documentary on a truly perfect cinematic creation. Terrifying, stirring, adventurous, humorous… and a film that almost didn’t happen (it legitimately bothers me that in an alternate universe Jaws as we know it doesn’t exist). Jaws is as powerful today as it was a half-century ago: structured like a two-act play, and a masterful combination of primal fears and human endurance, Psycho and Moby Dick, a monstrous force of nature and the villains of human greed. The beginning alone is so horrific that I still get knots in my stomach when I go swimming.

JAWS AT 50 is highly recommended.

07/09/2025

Overwhelmingly, sequels and prequels are terrible. From the J.J. Abrams Star Trek films to The Hobbit, Prometheus to anything past Terminator 2, they fail spectacularly. But why? And what are the exceptions? How can sequels and prequels be done right?

This is a subject near and dear to my heart (and career) and the subject of the latest episode of Space Station Squid.

A podcast of science fiction and fantasy discussion, from the classics to the hidden gems, hosted by award-winning sci-fi author Brian Trent.

06/16/2025

This is what happens when my group of friends decides to get together for drinks and a movie, and someone says at the last minute, “How about we pretend it’s the 1920s?”