Review of Moon Dogs by Michael Swanwick

Whether you know it or not, Michael Swanwick has been producing some of the best off-center fantasy fiction since 1980; he plays in the sandbox but uses his toes. What some people also may not know is that Swanwick has also been one of the best voices in non-fiction over that time. He has produced 100+ published essays, and likely just as much content if not more on his blog, in interviews, etc. Swanwick's 2000 collection Moon Dogs features the best of his short fiction between 1991 and 2000 as well as the most relevant of his non-fiction during the same time frame.

Moon Dogs kicks off with the title story. It tells of a young man who goes to a near-drowning clinic in the hopes of purging his thoughts of mortality. After, he rests in the woods and meets a strange woman with a pack of mechanical dogs. Her backstory relevant, the man's sense of mortality takes a dramatic swing in the aftermath of their meeting. This story is the lone, previously unpublished piece in the collection and is an oddly successful combination of gothic and science fiction. It delivers on mood, and, if anything else, is a well written bit of cheap revenge.

A True Phoenixborn: Breaking Down the Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn Product Line

In a way, this is a spurious post. Like baby spiders emerging from the egg sac, it's inevitable Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn will find its own way in the world, the words below unnecessary. But the game has evolved a couple of times the past ten years, and therefore for people interested, here is a quick and dirty breakdown of Ashes products. Skip to the summary if you just want to know where to start.

Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn

The first Ashes product release was the 2015 master set Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. It was popular and spawned expansions: nineteen standard hero packs, three deluxe hero packs (new dice types), tournament play, deckbuilding websites, forum chatter, and all the jazz one associates with a popular collectible card game. Anti-Magic: the Gathering in several ways, the master set offered players a complete, out-of-the-box TCG-esque play experience without the need to chase cards, worry about rarity, etc. The game's design is better for it. All the cover art for the products released during this cycle has a white background.

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.