Review of Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel

A nerd is a person that everybody instinctively knows when they see one but are hard pressed to define. And even when put into words, the definition doesn't feel right. Knowledgeable about science, ok, maybe, yes, often—but not always, definitely not always. Socially awkward, yes, likely, but it's 2025. Many celebrities openly geek out but don't seem to have trouble speaking into a microphone. A nerd exists in a dark basement, smashing Star Wars figures together with lightsaber noises. Hmm, yes. Could be, could be. But all nerds? Pinging readers' instincts like a submarine radar but never providing a dictionary entry on nerdom is Lincoln Michel's culturally insightful Metallic Realms (2025). The subtle humor is the icing on the cake, or should I say: the goo on a blarpstrim's purple snout schnuck, schnuk.

Metallic Realms is the inadvertent biography of one Michael Lincoln. Obviously there is a a connection to the author, but it feels nothing deeper than tongue-in-cheek, or at best, a tiny contributor to the novel's meta layer. It's an inadvertent biography because Michael is ostensibly writing a piece of academia: the be-all end-all history of the Star Rot Chronicles, a series of pulp fiction stories. The stories are written by friends of Michael's, a group of writers calling themselves The Orb 4. Michael desperately admires The Orb 4. He loves their fiction, and more so wants to be accepted by them. But he just can't seem to get over his own personal hump to connect. While singing the praises of The Orb 4, Michael describes the background social dynamics—the inspirations, the conflicts, the real life happenings—of the group which lead to their stories. But the fact he can't help inserting the perceived injustices of his own life into the narrative is where the novel truly comes come alive.

Review of The Girl in the Glass by Jeffrey Ford

It's fair to say a large portion of horror fiction's miles have been had from seances, necromancy, channeling, speaking with the dead, Aleister Crowley, divination—anything to do with the occult and occultish happenings. There is, naturally, a certain fascination with what lies beyond the light at the end of the tunnel, so much so a certain type of grifter thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For these grifters, seances for communiques with the dead were the name, but the game was appearances and deception. The lengths these con artists went to 'selling their wares' is the stuff of legend. Digging into this rich sub-culture in a 1930s New York gangster scene is Jeffrey Ford's The Girl in the Glass (2005).

The Girl in the Glass is the story of Diego. Once a Mexican street kid, he was taken under the wing of a traveling performer named Schell and taught to be “Ondoo”, a mystical Hindu assistant helping Schell with seances. The pair, along with their jack-of-all-trades assistant Antony, travel the Long Island area, helping the rich commune with the departed. And quite successfully. The trio have grown rich, and in doing so have attracted the attention of an aristocrat named Barnes whose young daughter recently went missing. Invited to a session to help locate the girl, the three's carefully crafted world starts to unravel in the aftermath.

Gush-Gush-Gush: Balancing the Internet Review Formula

The following is the opening paragraph of C.J. Sam's novel Temple of the Bird Men.  It's a book on some readers' 2025 radars and is spoken of in glowing terms by certain reviewers (Gush-Gush-Gush!).  But a counter-weight is needed.

The capital gates loomed high above Daran, the farmer from Southern Shangee Province. Their riveted metal plates shimmered under the late afternoon sun, casting shadows over the road, paved in stone. Guards in polished armour stood at attention, their hands resting on the hilts of swords that gleamed as brightly as their distrustful eyes. Daran shifted uneasily, adjusting the satchel slung over his shoulder. Within it lay the letter from Sanrat, Lord of the Southern Shangee Feudal Domain, a man revered in his lands as much for his cunning as for his authority. The weight of his mission pressed on him heavier than the miles of rough terrain he had trudged on his tired horse to reach the capital.

The opening sentence is awkward; the clause should open a separate sentence or be communicated in another fashion at a later point.   But ok, let's keep going. Shimmering in the sun, ok. Paved in stone—wait, what? What are those stones doing at the end of that sentence? They have no place. It's spurious info which contributes zero to the mood, and in fact disrupts the flow of prose. But onward, forward. Daran... Sanrat... his. Wait. Whose is “his mission”? Daran or Sanrat's? I assume Daran's, but I was taken into Sanrat's lane by the details about him <wink>. And why do we need to know such details about this Lord character? Sam has shown he's willing to include spurious info, so is this another instance or just foreshadowing? Ok, ok, keep going. The weight of his mission pressed on him heavier than the miles of rough terrain he had trudged on his tired horse to reach the capital. Overdone sentence.  Remove “rough” and “tired”. Typical genre overuse of adjectives.  The terrain is inherently rough due to the Medieval-esque setting and the horse is inherently tired due to the word “trudge”. Better yet, show the difficulty in some other fashion—aches, sweat, gauntness, etc.

Review of Gatherer of Clouds by Sean Russell

Before getting to the review of Gatherer of Clouds, it's worth briefly—briefly—summarizing Initiate Brother. Initiate Brother introduced the land of Wah and its paranoid Emperor who sought to play dangerous games in keeping the power of the Wah's largest house, House Shonto, in check. A handful of key actors on this stage were introduced and positioned on one side or the other, but the final chapters introduced still a third major player: barbarian tribes from the North, threatening to invade. Is the Emperor behind the barbarians in a ploy to eliminate House Shonto, and if yes, has he bitten off more than he can chew? Will Lord Shonto be attacked by barbarians from the North and the Emperor from the South? Will the land of Wah survive? Gatherer of Clouds (1992) answers these questions.

For readers curious if Gatherer of Clouds delivers on Initiate Brother, absolutely. It starts exactly where Initiate Brother left off, then only picks up momentum. No peaks and valleys. No hot and cold. Gatherer of Clouds just keeps moving steadily upwards and onwards til the stakes are fully in conflict. The barbarian threat fulfills itself, as does the struggle between the Emperor and Shonto. And there are several main character deaths. In short, any reader worried that Gatherer of Clouds does not deliver need not worry. Some writers spend two books getting the same quality substance from their stories.

Review of Transreal Cyberpunk by Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker are two of science fiction's most imaginative minds.* Sterling broke fresh ground in the 80s and 90s with cyberpunk, ground still being farmed to this day, while the only element common to Rucker's oeuvre carries the sparkly label 'gonzo sf'. The two writers collaborated enough over the past decades that in 2016 a collection of their dual efforts was released, Transreal Cyberpunk**.

Kicking the collection's doors off is “Storming the Cosmos”. Two Russians in the 1940s chase down a reported UFO landing through a web of KGB, mosquitoes, and tribal voodoo deep in Siberia. A wild ride, you never knowing what's coming next or where the story is going, only that you want to hang on to find out. Pure Soviet gonzo. Tug-Tug Mesoglea is an entrepreneur with an idea: "Artificial Jellyfish: Your Route to Postindustrial Global Competitiveness!", and in the story “Big Jelly” his idea comes to spectacular life with the help of a drug snorting, broad-minded Texan venture capitalist named Revel Pullen. Tug and Revel alter egos to Rucker and Sterling, the story is not only a cyberpunk romp about a product in development that goes wild, but a formula-setter for the most of the remaining stories in the collection.

Review of Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

There is a wonderfully expressive idiom in Polish: to paint the grass green. I don't know the etymology, but instinct tells me this is left over from communist times, times when the appearance of things was more important than the reality of things. Comrade big boss visiting? Ok, we can do this. Get things presentable. Get your stories straight with everyone. Falsify the reports to look good. Make sure the motivational slogans are appealing... Interrogating the space between this paint brush and the grass is Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia (2009).

Yellow Blue Tibia is a tale of Stalin's Soviet UFO program. In the years following WWII, the dictator commissioned a group of Russian science fiction writers, one being Konstantin Skovrecky, to write a story. Naturally these writers wanted to write a story that properly represented communism and the communist struggle against capitalism and the bourgeois West. Aliens would represent anti-Soviet interests, and as the USA had dropped atomic bombs on Japan, why not make them radiation aliens? But just as soon as Stalin commissioned the story, he commanded the group lock the ideas away and never speak to anyone of their story again. Yellow Blue Tibia is Skovrecky's memoir of the decades following this command.

Cardboard Corner: Review of Vale of Eternity

Seasons is one our family's go-to board games. It fits nicely somewhere between trading card game and Euro, and plays in about an hour. Mostly solitaire engine building, you still have a chance to interfere with opponents' game plans through dice selection and card play. But it's in combining card effects where Seasons hits its sweet spot. Taking the Seasons model and stripping it down into a more streamlined experience is Vale of Eternity (2024).

Vale of Eternity is a 2-4 player card drafting and engine building game. Players start a round by drafting two cards each from a selection wheel, then have the choice of selling the cards for money, paying for and playing them, or keeping them in hand to play a later round. The cards are in five factions, each with its own sale value and type of card effects. Card effects can do anything from generate resources to earn victory points, and are meant to combo off one another. The player who builds the card-combo engine getting to 60 points first triggers end-of-round scoring. After final tally, the person with the most VPs, wins.

Review of The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett

For people who have been to Australia, they will know it's almost like another planet. The people, culture, society, etc. are all recognizably human, of course, typically European in descent or Aboriginal. But everything else is otherworldly. The flora looks and smells different. The landscape is largely flat, unforgiving, with occasional strange bumps of rocks. And the fauna covers a spectrum of unique to just plain weird. It's clear things evolved differently compared to other continents on Earth. Looking to take humorous and insightful advantage of this fact is Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent (1998).

The Last Continent follows two wizardly plotlines. Plot A features Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, the Lecturer in Recent Runes, and the Dean as they attempt to help the Librarian return to orangutan form. Every time the ape sneezes he turns into an orange hairy something—book, chair, tree, etc. and wants to return to form The group arrives at the bedroom of the one wizard who may be able to help them, only to discover a dimension to another world, one millions of years older than the Disc. Plot B features our unlikely tourist hero Rincewind as he finds himself bouncing around the Ecksecksecksecks-ian (Australian) outback, sometimes literally, trying to get back to Ankh-Morpork. DEATH is ready and waiting in the wings, but Rincewind somehow manages to avoid the snakes and spiders and bandits. He does, however, find himself a sheep thief awaiting the gallows.