Cardboard Corner: Review of Etherstone

The Dark Crystal is a 1982 film for families and children. Jim Henson, creator of Sesame Street, brought his muppet-style to a dark fantasy world, spent a good chunk of money on puppetry and set pieces, and told a harrowing tale that will have even the most hardened adult squirming with emotion. One of the reasons for this is the film's baddies, the skeksis, anthropomorphized vultures who cackle and gloat while competing among themselves to suck the souls from the film's elfen heroes. The 2025 board game Etherstone gives me skeksis vibes. <cue cackling glee>

Both strategic and tactical, Etherstone is an engine building game for 2-4 players that is not multi-player solitaire. There is a small but important degree of interaction that forces players to pay attention to game-state as a whole. How it plays is, after a one-time card draft, players take turns drafting dice, collecting etherstones, playing cards to their engine, triggering card effects, and attacking NPCs, all in an effort to build the best points engine. The player with the most points when there are no more points in the pool, wins.

Review of Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

The horrors of WWI, while brought home to Britain in body bags, nevertheless occurred on continental ground. The country remained almost entirely intact, the artillery blasts and machine gun fire happening in France, Belgium, and other places. It was WWII that brought war home. In an effort to subdue the Brits, Hitler launched unending waves of attacks—rockets, bombs, and fighter jets. Those who survived were inevitably faced with soul searching possible only when mortality is at stake. In dynamic, colorful, dramatic, and comedic fashion, Francis Spufford's Nonesuch (2026) digs into the life of one such mortal.

Nonesuch is the story of Iris Hawkins, her romantic adventures as Britain emerges from the Great Depression, and the arrival of Hitler's bombers over London rooftops. She's a free-spirited young woman who enjoys a night out (or seven) with handsome young men, typing her way through a menial clerk's job at a stockbroker's by day. But her routine takes a turn when she has an encounter with the uncanny after a one-night stand. And then everyone's lives in London take a turn when the luftwaffe start dropping bombs.

Culture Commentary: What You Wanted: The Mandalorian & Grogu

Let's do it. Let's fight the power. Let's break the modern media mold. Let's give a reasonable, balanced opinion. The Mandalorian & Grogu is a good Star Wars movie with caveats.

Depending which corners of the web you haunt, your algorithms will attempt to feed you media based on other media you've consumed prior (with a strong dose of sponsorship). If you're not careful, I mean really careful, this can quickly swing to one extreme or another. Love-love-love! Hate-hate-hate! Love-hate-love-hate.... And on and on spins the media monster we've built. Mandalorian is crap! It's great! Disney is doomed! Star Wars is back! The truth often lies in the middle, and the film is no exception.

Review of The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

Cli-fi has slowly and unsteadily become a sub-genre of science fiction. Works have appeared here and there—Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, Matt Bell's Appleseed, Lily Brooks-Dalton's The Light Pirate, and Ned Beauman's Venomous Lumpsucker among them, all with varying visions of nature's power in relation to human life. Whether they know it or not, most of these visions owe a debt of gratitude to the granddaddy of all the environmental novels, The Sheep Look Up (1972) by John Brunner.

If something could go wrong for humanity in The Sheep Look Up, it has. A Greta Thunberg wet dream, pollution chokes cities, forcing people to wear masks in public. Epidemics of food poisoning, accidental and intentional, occur with the randomness of clouds. Potable water doesn't exist anymore save through treatment. Viruses and infections sweep through society like granny's Saturday morning broom. Oily sludge covers coastal and inland waters. Agricultural practices have denuded prairies, forming dustlands. It's bad.

Review of The Ends of the Earth by Lucius Shepard

What a world the West has woven. Technology, with its mantra of making life easier, has in fact made our lives more busy and inundated us with information, so much so that our lives are ever more consumed by the present. It hurts my heart clicking on links to 'Best SF of All Time”, or “Top 100 Fantasy Ever” and seeing that 75% of the books were published after 2000. The efforts of so many brilliant writers are invisibly crumbling in the public eye. Not quite vanished but on the verge is Lucius Shepard. Once one of the absolute titans of fantastika in (semi) short form, few if any of the younguns have even heard his name. The Ends of the Earth (1991) may just well be the best collection he produced, and if not, at least has several horses in the race. Beyond himself, the collection likewise contains some of the tip-top best short stories to come out of the late 20th century.

The collection kicks off with the title story “The Ends of the Earth”. A down-on-his-luck NY writer tries to get away from it all in Guatemala. He meets an alluring young French woman in a lonely tourist town, but has his advances blocked by a weed dealer who is trying to translate a native board game he found into English. The writer's advances eventually go too far, and the small town is turned on its fantastical head. Out of all the stories to choose to title the collection after, I'm lost why this is the one. It's a loosely developed, forced concept with random “fantasy” coming alive in a form that is intended to be horrific but doesn't go beyond cheap 80s slasher. If the idea was to ease readers in, one toe at a time, then fair enough. Because...

Review of No Man's Land by Richard Morgan

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings famously tells the story of the end of one era and the beginning of another. The giant evil is defeated and the elves go to the Gray Havens, taking magic with them and leaving humans and halflings in a spring of mortal peace and prosperity. In jarring contrast to that pastoral idyll, Richard Morgan's new novel, No Man's Land (2026), shifts forward in time to the beginning of the next era: What if the horrors of WWI were the reintroduction of fae evil into Britain? No hobbits smoking pipes here...

No Man's Land is the story of Duncan Silver. Hired gun, woodsman, tracker, hunter—the WWI war veteran is highly experienced in the wilds of the Forest, dealing with the evil Fae who dwell there. In post-war Britain, the Forest is spreading its roots into farms and cities, giving Duncan a lot of work. The opening pages find him at a farmstead where a woman believes her daughter has been stolen by the fairy folk, the Huldu, leaving a lookalike in her stead. After performing a simple alchemical test, Duncan determines that indeed, the girl the woman thinks is her daughter is just a Fae. He agrees to go into the Forest and retrieve the woman's real daughter, and by doing so unwittingly begins a new chapter in his life that will rival WWI for horror and chaos.

Cardboard Corner: Ashes Reborn – Breakdown of all "Red Rains" expansions

This is a breakdown of all seven Ashes Reborn “Red Rains” expansions. It will focus primarily on the Chimera and their aspects, with secondary notes on the phoenixborn and player cards which come in each box. While every Chimera is unique, I didn't want to repeat myself seven times regarding the player cards, so I'll do it once now.

Every “Red Rains” expansion contains four phoenixborn. None are new. As of 2025 (prior to Ashes Ascendancy) all have been previously seen, either in the master set or in individual packs. But each does have new specialty cards, and the remaining nine cards (three copies each) included in the pack are likewise new, never before seen in Ashes. Other than the fact the cards are based around one of the dice types, there is no synergy. They are intended to expand the broader player card pool rather than work together as a precon deck. To be clear, they can be played as a legal deck by adding Phoenixborn specialty cards, just not a good one. If you enjoy a particular dice-type or phoenixborn (included in the notes below), check out the relative pack as there will be new options for play.

Organized in release order, the following is a breakdown of the seven “Red Rains” packs:

Review of The Book of Fallen Leaves by A.S. Tamaki

It is an unfortunate reality of fiction in 2026 that the reader must do research prior to purchase. There is such an extreme diversity being published that it's more important than ever to know what you're (likely) getting into. Gone are the days of blind jumps leading to a reasonable amount of fun. I am reading a minimum of three reviews and checking if sample pages are available for anything by an author I have not encountered before—which is probably 60-70% of the titles scrolling on my screen. I did my research on The Book of Fallen Leaves by A.S. Tamaki (2026), and it still wasn't enough.

A piece of epic Oriental fantasy, The Book of Fallen Leaves is set twenty years after the Gensei rebellion. The rebelling clan was crushed, it's leader was executed, and its survivors were scattered to the winds. But pride, fate, and honor still burn. The Gensei work in the shadows to re-establish order, their holdings, and their army. Their continued goal: destruction of the emperor, his Ten'in clan and those loyal to him. At the start of the novel, the Gensei's plight again seems headed to defeat, but a handful of cackling gods and demons start to meddle, ensuring no result is certain.

Review of Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons

For whatever the reason, despite not having any sort of personal relationship, we readers feel a touch of sadness when a writer we enjoy, passes. Dan Simmons took his pie to the sky in early 2026 and in tribute, I decided to dust off a novel of his I've had on the shelf for more than a decade, Darwin's Blade (2000).

Simmons has written—sorry, I must adjust my grammar going forward. Simmons wrote in a wide variety of genres, including space opera, fantasy, historical fiction, science fiction, horror, and neo noir. Darwin's Blade is yet another: straight-forward action/thriller.

Front and center is Darwin Minor, a Vietnam vet who, after the war, has made a name for himself as the best accident reconstructionist in southern California. Running a private business, he uses knowledge of physics and the latest computing tools to help the police and victims identify what really happened at accident scenes. It's business as usual until somebody tries to kill Darwin as he drives home from an accident scene. Next thing he knows, a statewide investigation is underway for fraudsters staging accidents for insurance claims. That proves to be just the tip of the criminal iceberg.

Review of The Promise of Space and Other Stories by James Patrick Kelly

Science fiction, like so many cultural mediums, has exploded in content the past couple of decades. Gone are the days when a fan can read, or at least be aware of, the key writers in the genre. James Patrick Kelly was once one such writer. Most sf readers knew of his stories and style, and many were reading him. With the swamp—ahem, milieu—of genre fiction rolling in the mud today, JPK has been pushed to the reedy fringes, unfortunately. Unfortunate because, he only continues to improve and mature. Living proof is the 2018 collection The Promise of Space and Other Stories.

The collection starts off with the title story and features a relationship as only the near future can hold. A science fiction writer talks with the AI memories of her dead astronaut boyfriend who died on a Mars mission. The story is entirely dialogue, and Kelly paints their relationship with a gray brush, making for rereadable content. The next story, “The Chimp of the Popes” is an homage to Robert Silverberg. Humans have transcended to the Cognisphere, leaving bots and uplifted chimps to rule Earth. A handful of humans remain in stasis, however, and at the beginning of the story one is unthawed who claims to be the pope. The chimps put him with the other unthawed popes. But this new pope has a little extra kick, eventually forcing the chimps to discover the reality of the cognisphere.