Non-Fiction: Review of The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of by Thomas Disch

I guess I am a science fiction nerd. Beyond the fiction, I have also invested in the non-fiction, such as How Great Science Fiction Works by Gary K. Wolfe, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction by Brian Aldiss,The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as numerous articles and essays, including Peter Nichols and John Clute's excellent online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The meta of science fiction as a literary and cultural movement is just as interesting as the stories themselves. Bring on Thomas Disch's 1998 The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World.

Of all the non-fiction sf I have read, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of is perhaps the most erudite (despite the title ending on a preposition, natch). Disch brings to the table his experience as a writer of many forms of fiction and poetry (not just sf), his work as a published critic, columnist, and essayist, not to mention broad reading experience outside the genre. Like Aldiss and Atwood, Disch is better positioned than the average genre writer to form an opinion about the context and evolution of science fiction in the world at large.

Cardboard Corner: Review of "The Scarlet Keys" expansions for Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Note: “The Scarlet Keys” Investigator and Campaign expansions are combined in this review. Each must be purchased separately but were designed and released simultaneously, and thus will be reviewed together. As with all Arkham Horror reviews on this blog, there will be no spoilers save the bare necessity of setting up story.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game is something like the Beatles. Churning out hit after hit, it seems the game can do no wrong. After eight albums/campaigns, including the core box, designers have yet to try new wave jazz, i.e. produce a campaign that intentionally hits off notes in the name of the art. But don't all ideas have a ceiling? Don't all artists eventually need to try new wave jazz in order to feel fresh and invigorated? Let's look at the ninth and latest campaign, “The Scarlet Keys” (2022).

Strange objects are disappearing around Arkham. There is no obvious link and nobody else besides yourself seems to be noticing, that is, until a mysterious letter arrives at your door one day. The sender requests a meeting in London to “share information”. Taking a risk, you agree to meet them, and in turn end up tracking a mysterious Red-Gloved Man who has been seen flitting in and out of the shadows where objects disappear. Aided by a coterie of hooded agents, however, the Man proves elusive. Where is he? Who is he? And finding a suspect, pulling their hood off, and discovering they are just one of the coterie doesn't help. After an encounter with another shadowy group, however, hope reveals itself. Well informed, the shadowy group provide a dossier of info, instructing you and your fellow investigators to scour the globe, find the Red-Gloved Man, and discover just what paradimensional purpose the strange objects are being collected for.

Today and Tomorrow: A Second Look at A Song of Ice and Fire

Every winter, something epic itches inside of me and I scratch it by re-reading a fantasy series. This year it was George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. It is the crack candy of the book world. Once you start huffing that stuff you can't stop. Martin nails the overlap of intelligent pulp and entertaining literature in a way so few writers can. He will not win the Nobel prize, but there remains something inexorably bittersweet, something relatably gray about his fantasy world of humans doing what humans have done for thousands and thousands of years. And beyond the human condition, there is the stuff of drama, of revenge, of power, of love, of justice (and injustice), of loyalty—the stuff that turns pages and pulls the mind from the real world into imagination. With the re-read fresh in my mind, I thought I'd put down a few of my thoughts on the following points:

• The Story

• The Future Story: Story

• The Future Story: Author

The Story

A Song of Ice and Fire was good the first read, but improved upon re-read. Knowing what is coming, the reader can see Martin subtly positioning people, places, decisions, and actions well in advance, such that when the time comes for the shoes to drop (swords to fall?) the striking moments feel organic and natural, not cheap spots of drama as so many lesser writers contrive. The Red Wedding, for example, takes on a darker hue reading how the characters in-the-know spoke and behaved well beforehand. Or Tyrion killing his father, the reader can see how he was driven to inhuman depths by the man. The perpetrator of Joffey's poisoning is now clear as day. And there are numerous other such examples. The stories and sub-stories were always gears within gears, but upon re-reading became Swiss watchwork. (At least the first three novels; the latter two are more individual trajectories shooting from a central point.)  Martin nevertheless remains a master storyteller.

Review of On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch

Based on how strong recency bias has become the past +/- 10 years in speculative fiction, I assume Thomas Disch has only a toe or two in society's collective awareness. Encyclopedias et al have room for everything, but I guess most modern readers' shelves do not have a Disch. Which is a shame. He is quietly one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. Aware at the macro and micro levels, his fiction features living, breathing humans in existences spiced and peppered by sf devices. But that in itself is not enough to earn him a place in the science fiction pantheon. But what is, are the choices of subject matter and application of said devices—both perennial in nature. No book in Disch's ouevre may speak to this relevance better than On Wings of Song (1979).

Part speculative and part autobiographical, On Wings of Song may be Disch's magnum opus. While indeed speculative given the manner in which it envisions alternate borders within the US, as well as “flight” and penal technology, it's the manner in which it reflects the social, cultural, and political issues the US is still dealing with today that make it perennial. Published more than four decades ago, it often reads like a novel of 2023.

Cardboard Corner: Review of "Edge of the Earth" expansion for Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Note: Designed together but released separately, this review will cover both the “Edge of the Earth” Campaign and Investigator expansions.

Fantasy Flight Games are like a golden child: they can do no wrong with Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Every expansion released to date hits the sweet spot of fresh, fun, and evolutionary within the game's first principles. They have proven there is heady space to iterate on the original concept without destroying what makes the game singular and enjoyable. Do FFG still have the golden touch with the latest expansion “Edge of the Earth” (2021).

Bringing to the table what some consider Lovecraft's best work, “Edge of the Earth” plays off The Mountains of Madness. Appropriately set in Antarctica, players take on the roll of an investigator who is joining an expedition to investigate the unexplained discoveries in the icy, mountainous land. The ship journey goes smoothly for the investigators, but once arriving on land, things take a a quick turn for the worst. The group's airplane crashing, they are forced to find emergency shelter. Trouble, that is only the beginning of their worries as a creepy miasma starts to spread across the land toward them, threatening to swallow them unless they can discover its origins.

Review of Tomorrow's Parties: Life in the Anthropocene ed. by Jonathan Strahan

With weather patterns visibly evolving in my lifetime, global warming seems a real thing. There are clearly biodiversity issues occurring due to humanity, i.e. the expedited extinction of species, but as for the concept of global warming as a whole, science has yet to write the definitive chapter. Is it natural, or are we, the most advanced monkeys on Earth, to blame? There is a significant chunk of people who say 'yes' to the latter, and have dubbed the era the anthropocene. Regardless one's opinions or views, Tomorrow's Parties: Life in the Anthropocene (2022), edited by Jonathan Strahan, features a suite of short stories looking at the concept from a variety of interesting perspectives.

The anthology, however, does not kick off on a bang. “Drone Pirates of Silicon Valley” by Meg Elison is a YA story that postulates: what if Robin Hood stole from everybody, not just the rich. It features a group of teens who start start capturing Amazon-esque delivery drones and redistributing their contents—at least those they don’t want. A “corporations are evil” story, it blurs the line between legal and illegal in ideological rather than realistic fashion with weakly characterized people. A might makes right sketch, the story would have been better off at longer length to flesh out the characters and implications of their piracy. Another story that could have been novella but in this case has enough meat on the bone to be a short, “Down and Out in Exile Park” by Tade Thompson takes the tons and tons of plastic in the ocean to its logical conclusion and posits a floating island named Exile. Exile so big as to become inhabited, Thompson locates a socio-anarchic society of Nigerian political deviants on the “land”, then sets them spinning with a most delightfully bizarre idea regarding their “religion”. Thompson has received increasing accolades in the past five years, and the story shows him growing in strength.

Review of Tangents by Greg Bear

Science fiction in the late 70s and through the 80s was a semi-confused time. Post-New Wave, writers and readers were trying to find a new direction—a difficult thing considering the major nodes in the genre sphere had already been mapped. And while writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling established cyberpunk (perhaps more a motif than sub-genre), most other authors fell back on what had been successful prior to New Wave. Writers like David Brin, Gregory Benford, Kim Stanley Robinson, James Patrick Kelly, and Lois McMaster Bujold came to the forefront writing tried and true tales but with up to date knowledge and modern sentiment. Their concepts extrapolated on scientific revelations, prose was more straight-forward than experimental, and characters received the same attention as the -isms. Greg Bear was also a central figure, and as a result his 1989 collection Tangents provides a mini-cross section of the 80s.

The novelette that spawned the novel, “Blood Music” kicks off Tangents. It tells of nanotechnology gone wild, and while an interesting idea, execution leaves something to be desired given how easily it descends into hand-waving mediocrity. To be fair, the novelization is poorer. Something of a ghost story bildungsroman, in “Sleepside Story” a young man from a poor, broken family finds himself being asked to pay the debts of his mother's Dayside debts at an ethereal bordello on Sleepside. Better scene setting would have drawn more mood from this story, and more mood is what it needed, as it stands as a failry straight-forward ghost story.

Cardboard Corner: Review of Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends

There have been various times in my life when the stars held interest. Getting out a map, I would gaze into the heavens, trying to find this constellation or that. Formlessness converted to form, where the stars at first seem scattered, a deeper look can convert them into shapes—lions, crabs, wagons, crosses, and dippers. 2013’s Tash Kalar: Arena of Legends takes this idea and converts it into a board game.

In Tash Kalar, 2-4 players (best at 2) take on the role of dueling wizards. Representing one of the four factions available, players play cards with “constellations” (patterns) on them. These constellations come in the shape of fantastical beasts, warriors, nymphs, bears, and all other manner of battle-hardened creatures. Players summon creatures shown on their cards by placing tokens on the game board matching the pattern. Their goal is to disrupt their opponent's patterns and/or put tokens to score objective points, depending which game mode players choose (more in a moment). A back and forth abstract battle, players look to deploy ever more powerful creatures (i.e. more complex patterns), from common to heroic to legendary, to become the winner.

Review of Talking Man by Terry Bisson

For people who regularly read, undoubtedly you have that writer who, upon completion of one of their books or stories, you say to yourself: Why am I not reading more by them?!?! I also have a few such authors, of which Terry Bisson is one. Attempting to remedy regret, I jumped into Talking Man (1986).

Backcover copy for Talking Man is likely not to induce interest. A book that needs to be experienced, boiling it down to its component parts is like boiling a human down to a skeleton; you can tell something about it, but it's flesh and blood that give it character. So, I could say Talking Man is: a surrealist teenage '60s road trip chasing down a supernatural engine mechanic from the Kentucky foothills who has had a numinous glass owl stolen from him. But that might just register as odd, no? It is, however, the skeleton.

Cardboard Corner: Review of Star Wars: Destiny

I am one of thousands of people who are sucked into expendable card games, many of which are produced by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). The customization, the imaginative worlds, and the pedigree (art, QA, first principles, etc.) have my grey matter in a tight, warm grip. And so, despite the fact I have four competitive expandable games already sitting on my shelf, I was curious when seeing that FFG had released another. What's the wrinkle, and can FFG continue the success?

Destiny is a two-player collectible card game set in the Star Wars universe that works according to the same general principles as other tabletop card games like Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, etc. Players construct decks of cards to battle each other head-to-head. In Destiny, players start with hero/villain characters already on the table, ready to go—Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Obi Wan Kenobi, and a million more. They then draw hands of cards, which can include Support cards that bolster characters (vehicles, droids, etc.), Event cards that provide one time benefits, and Upgrade cards that can be attached to specific heroes/villains to provide bonuses. Reduce your opponent's hit points to zero, and you win. This is all pretty standard stuff.