Review of Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

There are undoubtedly some, if not many, who would say the Cold War was the golden age of spying. Mission Impossible to James Bond, it even birthed a niche of entertainment. But reality is something different; agent field work is the opposite of sexy. Collecting data and building networks of contacts sounds more corporate than thrilling. Injecting a syringe full of clever, black humor into Britain's espionage efforts in Cold War Cuba is Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana (1958).

Our Man in Havana tells of a British vacuum salesman named James Wormold living in the titular city in the 1950s. (Bear in mind this period is just prior to Castro's communist rule.) A bit of a pushover, Wormold's sales are limited, to put it nicely. His wife is estranged and his relationship with his entitled teen daughter Milly isn't any better; she plays him like a fiddle getting what she wants. Wormold's moping, plodding life takes a major turn, however, when British intelligence identifies him as potential agent. Needing money to pay for Milly's excesses, Wormold acccepts, and his life as an unlikely spy is born.

Best Reads of 2025

Speculiction has alrady posted about the speculative fiction published in 2025, which can be found here. But we are a blog which casts its nets far and wide seeking quality fantastika. ~70% of the books we read each year is older than a year. In this post we will highlight the best of that entire spectrum encountered in 2025, regardless of year published.

In no particular order, the following books stand a chance of being remembered, and possible even re-read, years from now:

Fairyland by Paul McAuley – A criminally overlooked work of cyberpunk, Fairyland may also be Paul McAuley's best novel. Descriptions, plotting, and setup are all strong in telling of the next generation of humanity we ourselves may spawn. While there are elements of body horror due to the subject matter, McAuley maintains focus on the larger meaning, almost one of neanderthals looking at the emergence of homo sapiens type of scenario. Where most books approach this from a mental/intelligence perspective, McAuley maintains a wholly biological/zoological perspective, which makes things interesting.

Grendel by John Gardner – I cast a wary eye to retellings; they can be cash grabs or cheap political criticism as much as legitimate commentary on the source material. Grendel is wholly the latter. It holds a mirror to Beowulf and in the process excellently captures the human condition. Told through the eyes of the monster rather than the hero, readers get a psychological snapshot of the avarice and pain the monster possesses, in the process gettign a different view to heroism and humanity.

Speculiction's Awards - Best Fiction Published in 2025

And the years go by.

2025 has ended. Time to look back at the books published and consumed this year, here in the bustling offices of Speculiction. But first some comments on the meta.

In parallel with broader social phenomenon, the female influence on speculative fiction is huge, if not the majority. Female authors are performing extremely well on the market. Female authors are performing extremely well in awards and recognition. And women in general have a strong foothold on the largest media platforms associated with the genre: content creators, YouTube, awards committees, Locus, etc. Compared to speculative fiction of the 20th century, the gender pendulum has swung to the other side. We're living in a time women hold clear power in the field.

In keeping, neoliberal (neomarxist?) politics continue to heavily influence speculative fiction. While I think we've seen the peak, and are moving past the peak, there is no shortage of token homosexuals, ethnicity tagging, or females wielding indomitable power in spec fic. There is no shortage of weight being thrown behind books which agree with the neoliberal agenda, from the authors themselves to the content of their work. And yes, the number of girls holding swords on book covers has not abated. Finding recommended books which do not go out of their way to highlight the left's virtues is difficult.

Review of The Adjacent by Christopher Priest

Christopher Priest is one of the greatest writers of science fiction of both the 20th and 21st centuries. He's not a one-trick pony: he doesn't rinse and repeat as so many genre authors do. He doesn't write cheap fiction; there is human substance to his ouevre. And his ideas are original—or at least off the center of the bell curve. 2013's The Adjacent just very well be the culmination of everything Priest wrote—in a good way.

The Adjacent is a patchwork quilt. (It's probably more an Escher tesseract, but that metaphor proved difficult to sustain.)  The first patch is a near-future in which journalist Tarent covers a Europe degraded by climate change and social upheaval. As the book opens (patch appears?), Tarent is mourning the death of his wife who was killed under mysterious circumstances. Only a burned black triangle remains on the ground where she had been standing, something Tarent reflects on during his return journey to the Islamic Republic of Great Britain. In the second patch, an illusionist named Tommy Trent joins Britain's World War I effort. As an airman, he attempts to use the tricks of his trade to disguise warplanes. The third patch takes elements of the first two and changes the colors. The fourth patch takes the first three and changes the pattern. The fifth patch...

Article: The Last of Us: Preaching to the Choir

I am a fan of the video games The Last of Us (Parts I and II). I don't have any tattoos, but I would consider them among the tip-top best narrative-driven video games humanity has produced to date. In Part I, Naughty Dog created a realistically dire setting and two relatable characters, then put them through an existential wringer via a tried-and-true trolley car conundrum. Part II expanded on this setup in relevant, edgy fashion, forcing players to question their conception of violence, hatred, and vengeance. Add to that brilliant soundtracks and voice acting, and the games are a major success—not only in my eyes, but the market's as well.

Naturally, I was interested in the HBO series when it came out two years ago, and watched. Season 1 captured Part 1 well. The producers (mostly) focused on the key scenes, and skipped those which, while fun in-game, were not critical to the umbrella story. They had a good CGI budget to render the world in great approximation to the game. And episode to episode progression held suspense. Season 2 came out this year, and it's clear the wheels are starting to come off, creating a different kind of trolley conundrum.

Non-fiction Review: The Banished Immortal by Ha Jin

One of the tightest held secrets here at Speculiction is our deep, deep love of Chinese poetry. There it is, it's out in the open now. But it's a love that has not been rekindled in some time. Years were once consumed devouring every compendium, anthology, collection, and biography of Chinese poets and poetry—not as easy as one might think given 99% of the material is written in Chinese. Every new book we discovered was cherished (and sits on hallowed shelves to this day). But it's been a while. Perhaps looking to rekindle some of that passion, we stumbled across Ha Jin's 2019 biography of one of the Chinese great The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai. Is the flame burning strong again?

The Banished Immortal follows the tried and true template of many a biography: chronological order, birth to death. Given Li was born in the 8th century, a time of patchy recorded history, Ha Jin acknowledges he is working with an incomplete picture. He also acknowledges a debt to the biographers who came before him in filling that window of time. What he does not acknowledge, however, is what new information is being brought to the table—what have the years of Li Bai research brought to life since the other Li Bai texts were published?

Cardboard Corner: Review of Star Wars: The Card Game

If there is any IP that has been exploited by table top games, it is Star Wars. (Lord of the Rings is having a go at the top spot currently...) Dozens of different playable experiences have appeared, and in many cases, disappeared. Star Wars Monopoly to Star Wars: Legion, Star Wars Deckbuilding Game to X-Wing Miniatures Game, and on and on. Old to new, there are dozens of games available for people looking to immerse themselves in Jedi, lightsaber duels, the dark side, blasters, and spaceship battles. One of the most divisive Star Wars experiences ever released is Star Wars: The Card Game (2012).

Star Wars: The Card Game is a TCG / CCG type experience but within FFG's LCG model (fixed releases as opposed to random). The top-down view is classic: players construct decks and bring them to the table to duel with an opponent, generating resources to play cards to achieve the win conditions. The bottom-up view, however, highlights many exceptional features that distinguish the game from every other TCG and CCG. Let's start with the asymmetry—the dark and light side.

Review of The Rose Field by Philip Pullman

Since 2020 I have been checking Locus' list of forthcoming books, looking for the third and final volume in Philip Pullman's Book of Dust trilogy. The Secret Commonwealth, second book in the series, was an excellent return to the world of His Dark Materials and ended on a cliffhanger. Six years it's been hanging, and hanging, and in 2025 Pullman finally rewarded patience with The Rose Field. Let's see if anything is left of those fingernails.

The Rose Field delivers on the cliffhanger by picking up seamlessly where The Secret Commonwealth leaves off. The Magisterium, lead by Marcel Delemare, is looking to use explosives to close all the holes to other realities. Malcom Polstead searches for Lyra, almost blindly, and encounters a society of gryphons along the way. Pan is on a quest to find what he call's Lyra's 'imagination', and he doesn't intend on returning until he has it. Lyra is alone in a city haunted by daemons, searching for Pan, and trying to find her way in an increasingly estranged world—money, real estate development, science, etc. But all the characters' trajectories come to point at one particular, lonely building in the middle of the desert of Karamakan where, through means nobody seems to understand, rose oil makes Dust visible.

Review of Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel

Lincoln Michel is a writer that slid smoothly onto Speculiction's radar. We took a chance on his 2021 The Body Scout which, if anything, produced a unique cyberpunk baseball tale through the lens of human limits pushed ever further. It was enough to warrant further notice, such that when 2025's Metallic Realms was released, we picked it up. A humanist paean to nerd culture, it showed Michel had improved his craft while yet again capturing a unique take—something difficult to do in today's market. It was enough to warrant looking into Michel's back catalog... which consists of one book: the 2015 collection Upright Beasts.

Where most collections consist of ten to twenty selections of a given author's short fiction, Upright Beasts is something else. It's twenty-five selections of “flash fiction”. To explain the quotation marks. Flash fiction stories are typically less than a a page, a length which almost every story in Upright Beasts surpasses. But by very little. Most stories are two to three pages. Neither a good or bad thing, would-be readers should nevertheless be aware the collection is closer to smorgasbord than five-piece meal. (It goes without saying Michel was in no way trying to create meta-commentary on the the phenomenon of flash fiction itself.)

The TCG Curriculum: Innovation on a Spectrum

It seems I've become a curmudgeon when it comes to expandable card games (TCGs, CCG, LCGs, whatever). I've played these games long enough to be critical of the new games emerging on the market. Recent games like Lorcana, Star Wars Unlimited, One Piece, Riftbound, etc. leave me decidedly meh. They are expandable card games, and expandable card games scratch the lizard itch in my brain. But they don't scratch the itch in the same way many older games do. Which got me thinking, why?

The market, experience, economy, IP, —these all seem to factor in. But the more I think about it, the more I realize innovation is the real reason. Most such games released today are risk-averse, i.e. they position themselves around the center of the bell curve of originality. They are afraid of trying something truly groundbreaking for reasons, reasons most likely based on fear of market failure but likely others. Which got me thinking further: what would a hierarchy of expandable games based on innovation look like? A college curriculum seemed the natural structure.

And so, without further ado. Here is the University of Friday Nights course offering in the iterative card-gaming department.