A taste for the speculative

There is too much to read, watch, and play, and most of it is fine. Mud & Silicon is a filter against fine. It covers speculative fiction worth your time: science fiction, fantasy, and the strange country where the two bleed together.

Articles here are taste notes, not plot summaries. Each tries to say something true about a book, film, or game: why it lands, what it is doing formally, whether it earns its ambitions. The rating is shorthand. The writing is the point.

The lens is deliberately particular: world-building that understands how power actually works, prose that remembers it is prose, and premises with the nerve to think past their first good idea.

The name is the thesis. Mud and silicon: the two materials speculative fiction is built from, myth and machine, the body and the circuit. Everything here lives somewhere on that line.