Review of Angel Down by Daniel Kraus

Every once and a while, out of the blue, brushing your teeth for example, lightning strikes. Every once and a while you're going to work, same path you always take, and an elephant falls from the sky. And every once and a while, traveling the well-trodden highways and byways of contemporary fiction, a truly exceptional book plops in front of your eyeballs. This review is lightning; Daniel Kraus' Angel Down (2025) is the blue.

Angel Down is the story of Bagger, a gravedigger deployed to an American company of soldiers at the front-lines of Bois de Caures in World War I, France. The front-lines provide Bagger no shortage of work, and a cynical view of his fellow soldiers to boot. No use getting close to people when you'll bury them the next day. Bagger hopes to survive the war in order to return to his Iowa farm. But a chance encounter with an angel one battle changes his fate.

But that is just the story of Angel Down. Just.

Article: Phase Three: Z-Factor TCGs

Maybe it's just me, but cultural movements seem to be divided into three phases. You have Phase 1, the Indiscernable Phase (official name, natch). Disparate pieces appear in the ether of culture but are not yet discernable as a "thing". Take cyberpunk, for example. In the mid-20th century, books appeared with techno-dystopias, datanet heists, body-embedded technology, evil corporations, information wars, etc. scattered among them. But it wasn't until the late 70s and early 80s that writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan et al. pulled these ideas together into a phenomenon we call cyberpunk. Yes, you're reading correctly: cyberpunk as an identifiable concept does not emerge until Phase 2, the Coalescing Phase. One other important point about Phase 2 is that it sits on the edge of popularity but is not yet popular. Neuromancer was a niche hit upon release, not a mass market hit. The hucksters need time to catch on, which leads us to Phase 3: the Commodification Phase. The "thing" is now an ordinary thing, a known entity that companies can market, produce, and sell en masse. They can put the 'cyberpunk' label on the cover and most people will know what it is. Rinse, repeat, until ubiquity is achieved.

Of course, the transitions between the three phases are nebulous. What precisely is the line between Coalescing and Commodification? Hard to know. But the phases undoubtedly exist. Cyberpunk, jazz, romantasy, or any other cultural phenomenon have gone through them. Which brings us to TCGs.

Review of Ice by Jacek Dukaj

One of the things linking my wife and I is our love of speculative fiction. It's the majority of what we both read. But there are many conversations we're unable to have. There is a huge swathe of Polish fiction she has read that I cannot. Stanislaw Lem and Andrzej Sapkowski are about the only two authors available to the English speaking world of the dozens if not hundreds who write fantastika. For years my wife lauded and lamented Jacek Dukaj's Lód. You should read it, but it's untranslatable. In 2025 I finally did. Ursula Phillips brought us Dukaj's Ice (originally published 2007).

Ice is set in an alternate,early 20th-century in which World War I never took place and Russia rules the territory we currently know as Poland. A deep freeze has settled on these lands. Everything is covered in ice and snow, including gleiss which shifts and moves by some form of arcane sentience. Gleiss appears in cities and towns, and anything which touches it is frozen to crystal. Scientists work to harness its power. In society, there are a diverse array of political affiliations—nationalists, tsarists, anarchists, autarchs, slavophiles, westernisers, conservative religionists, materialists, and many others. This short paragraph does not do the setting of the novel justice, but suffice to say it is a richly populated world bridging known history and culture with an alternate history that is imaginative and engaging.

Review of Sacrifice of Fools by Ian McDonald

1996 was an unassuming year from our tumultuous perch in 2026. The majority in the West agreed on unwritten social rules and gender identity. Politics were dramatic but reasonable by comparison. Trans people existed and few made a big deal about it. And immigration, while ongoing, was not as hot a topic as it is today. Into this calm before the storm, Ian McDonald published a tasty piece of alien noir, Sacrifice of Fools.

The setting of Sacrifice of Fools parallels situations happening in the western world today, for example the influx of Somalians to rural American towns, Syrians into Europe, etc. In McDonald's novel, the Somalians and Syrians are the Shian, an alien race who has flown light years across the galaxy to trade tech and find a new home. (Not sure what tech the Somalians and Syrians are trading, but you get it.) And rural America and urban Europe are 1990s Northern Ireland, a place still rife with Protestant-Catholic tensions as well as conflicting views to how the Shian should be handled. And in this clash of cultures there develops a small subset of Northern Irish who want to appear and act like the Shian, up to and including body modification surgery. Uncanny the parallels...

Review of Molten Flux by Jonathan Weiss

It happens. Interviews with the author indicate a person who is reasonably articulate or potentially more. No major red flags lurk in one- or two-star reviews. The description sounds interesting, even on the third independent check. And yet a book can still disappoint.

Wait. Let me start again.

It's a Mad Max scene where massive metal cities rove the deserts, scavenging scrap and warding off gangs of bandits who pressgang people to join the ranks of the molten dead. A young man is thrown into a fire in the opening pages, and after must use his wits and strength to navigate uncertain situations. Pace is controlled: the world is not revealed in gusts of author impatience; Weiss takes his time peeling back the layers of this world, gaining reader interest in the process. And tactile description exists. More later, but effort is put into bringing the reader into the world. All in all, Molten Flux would seem a delight.

Review of The Universe Box by Michael Swanwick

I get people who don't pick up what Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter is putting down. It's a fantastical carousel of moods and settings—the central post of main character remains fixed, but the horses are lenses, rotating the narrative through a wild selection of moods and tones. The approach lends a kaleidoscope glow to what is actually a dark, gritty story of one woman's battle with herself. Swanwick's The Universe Box (2026, Tachyon*) is much the same despite being a collection. The only difference is each carousel horse moves to its own gait.

The through-lines of The Universe Box are therefore few and far between. Moreover, Swanwick's imagination falls off-center of the bell curve of fantasy; he continually zags when the average writer zigs. Plots are wholly unpredictable and prose is dynamically effective. Overall, the collection is a varied set of stories that are definitively not mainstream—readable, engaging, yes, but anything except derivative or monotone.

Cardboard Corner: Review of Ashes Ascendancy

If capitalism weren't what it is, I would attribute the re-emergence and re-emergence of Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn to poetic manifestation... Regardless, the game as undergone effective revision throughout its history. It was popular, is popular, and though a niche game, is going strong. Ashes Ascendancy (2025) adds fuel to that fire.

Ascendancy is an Ashes product that sits in the Ashes Reborn (v1.5) model. It is both supplementary to and complementary of the Ashes Reborn core set, and all the hero expansions, deluxe or otherwise, that go with it. The box is intended for both Ashes veterans and players who just want to try the game. I'll start with the latter.

For new players, Ashes Ascendancy is a two-player starter set that contains all of the cards, tokens, and dice to play a complete, proper, unabridged game of Ashes. There are two heroes, two dice types, and all the cards two players need to build full decks. The Ascendancy box also contains the board, tokens, dice, and cards needed to play the solo/cooperative version of Ashes for two players. Whether it's PvP or PvE, Ascendacy covers the full play experience in a small/medium box.

New Year, Few Prospects: The Science Fiction Blues

On many occasions over the past five-six years I've had the feeling: Speculiction is winding down. This blog, which clearly does not exist for the Benjamins, is purely a hobby. On the About page, I describe it as a means of exercising a language I rarely have the opportunity to use to its fullest. That is 100% true. But I also must have a topic to exercise with, and for the past sixteen years, that topic was speculative fiction, then video games, then board games, then... Nothing. Nothing new. A person only has so much time, and so many hobbies.

Another thing that is finite (although it doesn't feel that way the past decade) is speculative fiction titles.

Over the past sixteen years, I have explored a vast-vast amount of what we might call senior speculative fiction—books and writers published before 2000. I've read 1,155 books published prior to the millennium, the overwhelming majority being science fiction and fantasy. It's a lot. What's more, every year the feeling gets stronger the amount is approaching comprehensive. Which is where the seed for this blog post takes root.

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.