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.

Review of Our Townish by David Marusek

For the past five years I have been casting an occasional eye to the happenings in rural Alaska. It's there that David Marusek has been plugging away on a self-published series, Upon this Rock. Quirky, clever, and relevant, the series drops aliens into the middle of a rationalist versus religion scenario, sprinkles it with jimmies of the apocalypse, and sets it all loose in the Denali. It's been fun, and in 2024 Marusek published the fourth and concluding volume, Our Townish.

Our Townish picks up precisely where Consider Pipnonia left off. In fact, they should be considered one volume published in two pieces. The rogue planet Pipnonia comes crashing into Earth in the opening pages, bringing about a literal apocalypse. But it's not all death and destruction. Dead bodies mysteriously come back to life in the Alaskan bush, and slowly a new society begins to form. But is it really all that new? One by one, the skeletons in humanity's closet begin to emerge among the new residents of Alaska, threatening to take us under once and for all.