Did We Watch the Same Series? Defending Game of Thrones Season 8

It goes without saying, but I'll say it: spoilers ahead...

If one goes online, the opinion they inevitably find of Game of Thrones Season 8 is sorely negative. Specific reasons are rarely given, but it's definitely “bad”, “awful”, “a series' killer”, etc. Which leaves me wondering, did we watch the same series? Season 8 definitely has its issues, which I will get into, but as a whole it delivers.

To get the obvious out of the way, yes, Season 8 was too short. It should have added two episodes rather than subtracting two. Ten seems about right to present the showdown with the Night King and still have time to resolve who sits the iron throne. Too much was crammed into too little space, and it was over too quickly. The powerful scenes which needed room to breathe, scenes the previous seven seasons had been building toward, didn't get the freedom they deserved. People with that criticism, I agree. (And people with the criticism that Bran's nod to “democracy” was cheesy, yes, I've got your back. Cheesy.)

But length (and democracy) do not destroy Season 8. Scenes which progress the story exist in organic concatenation, i.e. everything follows linearly from what came before, no wild tangents, no novel producer ideas, no last minute changes to “shake things up”, no new character to revive a fading series as Hollywood is sometimes wont to do. No, it's clearly, identifiably the same story, same actors/actresses, same sets, same writers, same dialogue, etc., and it all flows naturally—quickly, but naturally.

Review of Madness Is Better than Defeat by Ned Beauman

The opening scenes of the film Babylon are glorious madness. Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll at the height of the silent film era, it's the definition of a decadent, world-is-your-oyster, liberal frenzy. The sense of freedom is redolent. Taking those scenes and extrapolating upon them through variegated lenses is Ned Beauman's criminally underread Madness Is Better than Defeat (2018).

I generally provide a plot overview in my reviews, and I will attempt to do so here, as well. Just be aware the following is superficial, at best.

Madness Is Better than Defeat starts off as a quasi-competition between two groups of Westerners who come to learn of an undiscovered Mayan pyramid in the Honduran jungle circa the late 1930s. One group seeks to dismantle the pyramid and rebuild it in a museum, while the other seeks to make a Hollywood blockbuster using the pyramid as a set piece. A bee's hive viewed through facets of time, Beauman proceeds to tell the tales of the varying interests to the pyramid, their entourages, and the people whose orbits move in and out of the pyramid's fate. Madness, indeed.

Review of Initiate Brother by Sean Russell

The past fifteen years, poked and prodded by social movements, have seen myriad books emerge with Oriental and Oriental-esque settings and motifs. Before that time, however, such books were inconspicuous. Readers interested in non-Medieval European settings had to dig deep on genre bookshelves to find material. Occasionally they were rewarded. Dig far enough and it was possible—and still possible today—to find Sean Russell's high fantasy gem Initiate Brother (1991).

Initiate Brother is set in a world called Wah which strongly echoes feudal Japan/China*. Wah is ruled by an Emperor who has consolidated power through a loyal group of advisers, generals, and houses paying fiefs, but is paranoid of the more powerful houses in his empire, the largest of which is House Shonto. Lord Shonto, despite his power, is loyal to the Emperor, and guides and rules his house through patience, long-term strategies, and intelligent alliances, including the monks of the botahari religion. At the outset of Initiate Brother he takes one of their brightest young minds, a monk named Shuyun, as his new spiritual advisor. Little does he know the implications of this decision on the future of Wah.

Review of Red Snow by Ian Macleod

I've always thought of Ian Macleod as a writer who can transcend genre, or at least get beneath its skin, to find its human heart. The Light Ages is steampunk with real adolescent concerns. The Summer Isles is alternate history specifically positioned to get to the bottom of one man's personal issues. The superb novella “New Light on the Drake Equation” is 'hard sf' to a lot of readers, but it is more about an alcoholic astronomer stuck in a rut of life. So where does Macleod's 2017 novel Red Snow, a novel ostensibly about vampires in the late 19th century, apply its human spade?

Red Snow tells the story of three different people. For the purposes of spoilers, however, we'll start and end with Karl Haupmann, who begins the novel. Doctoral student swept into the American Civil War, he helps the North's effort, surviving only to be bitten by a crazed man in the aftermath of battle. Two other soldiers likewise bitten, Haupmann observes radical changes in their and his bodies. Wounds heal quickly, an aversion to sunshine develops, as does a thirst for blood—classic vampire symptoms. Clinging to his humanity, Haupmann searches for and finds a bandaid solution to his situation: morphine. The drug dulls his urges and gets him through waning moons. But returning to his friends and family after the war he discovers his appearance and behavior are too cold, too strange. Rejected, Haupmann is left to scour the Earth, looking for the source of his condition, heroin syringe in hand.

Cardboard Corner: Review of Flesh & Blood

Note: this review is intended for people interested in trying Flesh & Blood casually. For information on competitive play, the game's secondary market, play formats, etc., please seek out the other, innumerable internet channels available.

The Big Three in trading card games have been the Big Three for more than a decade. Dozens and dozens of games, as well as game models (LCG, UCG, etc.), have appeared. But Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh still stand tall. And they remain the most popular by a margin. But in 2025 there is a contender. It has slogged for years to even have a peek at the summit, and shows the best potential yet of making it a Big Four. I dove in to see what Flesh & Blood (2019) is all about.

Rooted in common ground, Flesh & Blood is not radically different than any other popular TCG. If there is a TCG bell curve, it falls halfway between its fattest and thinnest points. Players spend resources to play cards to attack their opponent and drive their life total to zero. You've heard that before. The central combat engine of Flesh & Blood is, however, its own. It's where the game distinguishes itself, making for a singular TCG experience.

Review of Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith

One of the joys of Jack Vance is the manner in which he surfs the edge of the absurd. Constantly on the verge of being swamped by a wave, he perpetually shoots the pipe, always emerging into the colorful yet familiar waters of pulp science fiction. Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), with its wild possibilities and worlds and characters, feels similar. But instead of shooting the pipe, Smith busts out a triple flip into the froth of the absurd beyond.

Norstrilia is the wild and wacky, far-future story of Rod McCan and his quest to be a hiering and spieking inheritor of his family's legacy. A naive teen Aussie, Rod's family have become immensely rich raising exponentially large, sick sheep. Yes, vast, mouth-breathing ewes. They have a hundred or so of the animals, harvesting them for stroon, A Dune-esque immortality drug sold to the wider universe at top dollar. Yes, you read that correctly: hiering and spieking, which in Norstrilia are the telepathic ways everyone communicates. Except Rod, who is so desperate to gain those skills he has been reborn multiple times. But each time he lacks the skills. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and at the beginning of the novel he asks his AI computer friend for ideas. He gets one: buying Earth. And that is just the beginning.

Gone vacationin'...

Speculiction is going on vacation for a couple of weeks.  Upon return, we'll be putting some of the big series we've been reading for a while behind us (Horus Heresy, Malazan, etc.) and digging into the fantastika 2025 has made available, as well as closing out the oeuvres of several authors.  See if any of you amateur geoguessrs can identify where we're going based on the photo...

Review of When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory

Brain-in-a-vat is a common enough concept in science fiction. Do we exist in reality, or are our brains in vats attached to sensory stimuli simulating existence? The Matrix made a killing playing off this thought experiment. It features a main character who, after building a life, comes to learn his brain is in a vat—a battery for the machine gods. When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory (2025) posits something slightly different, a modern world scenario where everyone already knows they are living in a simulation. They know their brain is in a vat, no surprise, no red or blue pill. Gregory then takes a sharp social/psychological stick and begins poking this world (as if it needed it).

The frame of When We Were Real is a motley group of ~15 tourists taking a cross-country bus tour of 'impossibles'—flaws in their simulated reality. Stereotypes slowly coming to life, the group consists of four octogenarians, a pregnant influencer, a flat earther (he's not really a flat earther, but you get the vibe) and his teenage simp son, a brain cancer patient and his cartoonist best friend, an ageing, wheelchair-bound mother and her adult daughter, newly wed Austrians, a Chinese young lady, a researcher on the run, two nuns, a rabbi, their last minute-replacement tour guide, and the bus driver. Akin to video game glitches, the impossibles include invisible geysers, holes to the other side of the world, a 90-degree bend in reality, an atemporal tunnel, and so on.

Review of Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God by Steven Erikson

As they were conceived as a single volume, I will review Dust of Dreams (2009) and The Crippled God (2011) as a single volume, despite they were published as two separate books. No spoilers.

Fairly or unfairly, epic fantasy series are often judged by their closing volume. Throughout a series, things have been building, ramping up, and are ready to explode by the end—to provide readers the catharsis via fireworks they have been lead to believe will occur. The Malazan series has been a little different, however. Each of the eight books leading to the closing volume has been insular, closed off. Overarching threads of story and certain characters, bind the series together, but the concerns of a given volume remain inherent to to themes and characters to that volume. Which is what makes Erikson's decision to do what he did in Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God so... interesting? To explain.

All of the Malazan Book of the Fallen books to date have been massive. Each features ~1000 pages. Each features dozens and dozens and dozens, if not more than a hundred characters. Each features multiple, multiple storylines and settings. The reader has had to max their mental RAM keeping all of these pieces straight—who is who, where they are, and what they're trying to do. Add to this magic, warrens, gods, and characters who can shapeshift and it's a smorgasbord extremely few readers have any chance of digesting their first one or two times through the series. You almost have to take notes.

Review of The End & the Death: Volume III by Dan Abnett

This is it. The arrowhead striking home. The mushroom cloud rising. The supernova erupting from the Horus Heresy series. Sixty-four books into one of the most epic tales ever told, and we've reached the end. The third end. The absolute end. The End and the Death: Volume III by Dan Abnett (2024).

In reality, the expectations for the final-final-final volume of the Horus Heresy are even higher than that. The book must not only deliver the explosive showdown between Horus and the Emperor, it must also propel the reader into the 40^th millennium. It needs to resolve the demi-gods' conflict and set the stage for the thousands of stories that have been told, are being told, and will be told. It must answer the questions why the Emperor sits on the throne, burning through souls like cigarettes, rather than kicking ass around the galaxy. It needs to provide the impetus for the Astra Militarum, Sisters of Silence, Plague Marines, et al, et al. And it needs to ____(fill in your Warhammer jam here)____. The natural question is: does Volume III deliver on these expectations?