Cardboard Corner: Citizen Sleeper: Spindlejack [print-n-play]

Citizen Sleeper: Spindlejack is a quick pen-n-paper game that burns through a couple satisfying hours solo-style. Fun escalates as the player figures out better and better ways to scoot their airbike from A to B—literally. (And C, too.)

In Citizen Sleeper, players take on the role of a cyberpunk delivery boy (a spindlejack) trying to earn a buck and get some street cred by delivering packages to various points of a space hub. To make deliveries on time, spindlejacks must navigate busy intersections of haulers without getting crushed or overheating. Thankfully they've got a couple tricks up their sleeve—drifts, grinds, and skitches—in getting goods where they need to be. Do that on time and get some cryo cash to feed yourself and upgrade your airbike. Fail and lose reputation.

Review of Echoes of Eternity Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Mortis by John French, sixth book in the Siege of Terra, laid low the defenses of the Emperor's Palace. Horus' legions are now on the brink—demon-crazed, ready to run rampant. One gate stands in their way, and with Angron and Magnus pushing with all their might, it seems just a matter of time til it falls. With Rogal Dorn organizing the Palace's defenses from a central location, there are only two primarchs to hold back the tide: Sanguinius and Vulkan. Echoes of Eternity (2022), seventh book in the Siege of Terra, tests their might.

Echoes of Eternity is the most powerful book in the Siege of Terra yet. The two most recent books, Mortis and Saturnine, have seen the fighting build and climactic events bigger than anything yet—at least in terms of character deaths. But these small compared to Echoes of Eternity. It takes the upward slope of the Siege of Terra story and converts it into a parabola. Things escalate.

Review of Past Master by R.A. Lafferty

Christian apologetics and science fiction make for interesting bedfellows. One a be-all end-all explanation of how things came to be, the other a fantastical potential for things to come, they would seem to be at odds. And yet there have been books which make it work, notably Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and James Blish's A Case of Conscience. Can R.A. Lafferty's Past Master (1968), a book which likewise features extra-terrestrial Christian shenanigans, join the list?

An exercise in utopianism, Past Master is set on Golden Astrolobe, an Earth colony famed for its high quality of life. But the story begins in the middle of a firefight planet-side. Robots attack a trio of men who have been tasked with finding the next leader for the colony. The three agree that special measures are required to solve the situation, and so they head into history and pluck Sir Thomas More out of time and space to bring him to Astrolobe. The trio hope his wisdom writing Utopia will be able to resolve their conflict. Can it?

Review of Warhawk by Chris Wraight

And the Siege continues. Warhawk by Chris Wraight (2021) takes the conflict to the next level. In Mortis, traitor forces pushed hard on the walls of the Emperor's Palace and breached the Lion's Spaceport. Honoring an oath, Jaghatai Khan rallies the White Scars for a counter-strike; the port's role is critical to Loyalist plans for stopping Horus. But Horus has other plans.

Warhawk follows a handful of sub-plots. Primary is Khan honoring his promise—or at least trying. The second is a secret Loyalist plan to refurbish a destroyed space platform and use it as a battle station. In a third, Mortarion and the Death Guard close the open threads of The Buried Dagger—coming to terms with their bodily changes due to Chaos. Further plot points still, Imperial Fist Sigismund gets a new sword that seems to have power of its own, in turn becoming a focal point for Traitor forces. And lastly, we have Olli shenanigans; the Perpetuals' mission draws closer to ending, and in doing so he finds deeper questions than originally thought.

Review of Mortis by John French

Titandeath, 53rd book in the Horus Heresy, was the BIG titan one. It's the one which properly put the massive war engines on the field of battle and turned them loose. Mortis (2021), fifth book in the Siege of Terra, turns what's left—horned or unhorned—toward the Emperor's Palace.

Mortis takes Horus' siege on Terra to the next level in bombastic fashion. World Eaters, Death Guard, Word Bearers, and Chaos continue their assault on the walls, and now, titans are unleashed from deep storage in the Emperor's palace to battle the Chaos titans Horus drops from space. The fields start to run slick, not only with blood, but also oil, prometheum, and all other manner of chemicals leaking from the damaged and destroyed siege engines. The war antes up.

Review of Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson

I am in the middle of my first re-read of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Memory of the first read of Midnight Tides (2004) is: the most organic story in the series to date. Erikson loves jumping between settings and characters as often as he can, but Midnight Tides felt more contained, more streamlined. Let's do a memory check.

The first four books in the Malazan series bounced between the continents of Genabackis and Seven Cities. Midnight Tides takes readers to an entirely new region: North Lether. The area is beyond Malazan imperial control. A different set of groups vie for power, meaning the reader gets a (welcome) break from the endless scenes of soldiers' gallows humor. The Tiste Edur and the Letherii take center stage. A savage history between the two, the Letherii antagonize through commerce (legal and illegal) while the Tiste Edur tend to more traditional values by forcing fealty and hierarchy, trying to keep the Letherii to heel. When the Letherii raid a Tiste Edur hunting ground, the king of the Edur decides to take advantage of the opportunity and bring to bear a power none on Lether have seen in millennia.

Review of The Fury of Magnus by Graham McNeill

After three straight novels of space marines attacking space marines, wave after wave, Graham McNeill's novella The Sons of the Selenar offered an excellent respite. Catching up with things beyond Terra, it looked at what was happening with the Shattered Legions on the outskirts, and told a compelling story in the process. McNeill's second novella in the Siege of Terra series, The Fury of Magnus (2020), likewise takes a look at a character who has largely been sitting by the side. Things, however, eventually get even closer to Terra—even more so than Horus has been able to achieve—to date, at least.

Magnus is aloof, perhaps the most cerebral primarch among the Traitors. As such, his involvement in the Siege of Terra has been ambiguous to date. He allowed the Shattered Legions carrying the legacy of the Selenar to escape without a fight, yet he appears to be loyal to Horus and the goal of tearing down the Emperor. Inherent to the novella's title, The Fury of Magnus cracks open the primarch to see what is boiling inside.

Review of Alas, Bablyon by Pat Frank

If there were ever a place to explore the potentialities of the Cold War, it was through fiction. Mushroom clouds in the imagination are a much better place to perform experiments of how things might turn out if somebody finally 'pushed the button'. And indeed there was a good chunk of fiction through the 50s and 60s exploring what nuclear world war might look like. One of the better specimens, at least of the six or seven that I've read, is Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959).

Alas, Babylon is the story of several people, but none so dominant as Randy Bragg. Korean War veteran now attorney, he lives in Fort Repose, a rural area of inland Florida. Randy's brother Mark calls one day, telling him to start preparing for the big one in secret. Tensions with Russia are about to boil over. The H-bombs fly and Randy's world as he knows it is turned upside down. Miami, Orlando—the majority of the US blown to smithereens, Randy and his small town acquaintances must all take a new tack on life, one increasingly stiff by the day.

Review of Saturnine by Dan Abnett

The assault on the Emperor's Palace is in full swing. Horus throws his forces, wave after wave, at the kilometer high walls, looking for a breakthrough. The forces of Chaos have been unleashed, and now attack the walls along with the traitor legions. In Dan Abnett's Saturnine (2020) something has to give. But where?

Assault after assault, bomb after bomb, death after death. Horus' attack on Terra is starting to have an effect. Endless supplies of munitions becoming finite, Rogal Dorne's storage facilities are starting to run dry. And with The Lion and Guillaume still nowhere to be found, the manpower the Emperor can throw at the traitor legions is starting to come up short. Dorne cannot keep up with Horus' volume of men and materiel. Hard decisions now sit in directly front of Rogal Dorne, no avoiding them. Horus is attacking at four critical junctures, but only three can be defended. Does Dorne have one last trick up his sleeve for his nemesis Peturabo at Saturnine Gate, or is the writing on the wall?

Review of House of Chains by Steven Erikson

It's an understatement to say Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series is an acquired taste. It's a MASSIVE fictional world that seems to be constantly in flux. Every chapter, every book requires the reader to update their knowledge. Each book is also different in its own right; Erikson evolves his style volume to volume. It all makes for shaky footing that a minority of readers have the patience for. For me it's here, the fourth book in the series House of Chains (2002), that things solidified.

For those paying attention—which can be difficult given the plethora of plotlines and endless-endless strings of characters running through the series—Sha'ik's rebellion in Deadhouse Gates was unresolved. The desert folk found a new Sha'ik in Helisin, but the Whirlwind didn't actually whirl. At the beginning of House of Chains, Adjunct Tavore arrives on the Seven Cities continent with a rebuilt Malazan army to finally put an end to the Whirlwind, and maybe patch ends with her sister, Helisin. Memories of Ice revealed that the Crippled God was looking to take down the system, and in House of Chains he recruits more servants to achieve this goal. Everyone's goals—the Whirlwind's, the Crippled God's, and the Malazan Empire's—come to a crashing, massive head that leaves the series wide open.