Festival of joy

It's like going from colour to black & white. My wife and I are back under the chill grey skies of Britain after a weekend in glorious Cannes, where we were fêted like royalty (Louis XIV, that is, not Louis XVI) by my French publishers Alkonost and the good people of Scriptarium. In the South of France, ham slices and bread bought from a Spar corner shop are as delicious as anything you'd get in a top London restaurant. What a shock to the system, then, to return to a country where cheese is sold in tubes after we'd been contentedly munching freshly baked croissants on the Croisette. But we brought back something priceless to cast a golden gleam over Britain's drab streets: memories of a warm and heartfelt welcome from all the French gamebook community, and those memories I will cherish forever.

The occasion was the Festival International des Jeux, where I was signing books alongside Jonathan Green, Emmanuel Quaireau, Gauthier Wendling, Frédéric Meurin (who took the photo below), and other talented folk. We enjoyed perhaps the best meal I'll have all year (for both the food and the company) at Le Caveau 30. I won one award (for the French edition of Down Among the Dead Men) and handed out several others, was interviewed, chatted to fans and fellow creatives alike, and generally had the most amazing time.

The Alkonost stand sold out of copies of Notos, the second book in the Forge Divine series (Vulcanverse to English gamers). I think that may have been a divine reward for my honesty when a mother with a 9-year-old daughter came over to look at the Forge Divine books. "She loves Greek mythology," said the mother; "should I get her this?" Remembering what it's like to be a 9-year-old otaku, and what purists the young are, I had to put my hand on my heart and say she would prefer Cyclades, Emmanuel Quaireau's gamebook, because that is set in mythological Greece whereas the Vulcanverse books are slightly Graeco-Roman flavoured fantasy, but mostly their own thing. The little girl went home happily clutching Cyclades, and the Fates took note and later ensured we sold the last copy of Notos fifteen minutes before it was time to pack up.

I just wish my French were better, as there's obviously a lot of really original work going on in the gamebook field nowadays. A couple of examples:

The Mini-Yaz silver medal went to Froides Lattitudes by Henry Pichat, set in the Arctic Ocean at the end of the 19th century. The blurb explains: "You are the leader of a polar expedition setting out in search of the Northwest Passage, but the boat you command is quickly caught in the ice. After two winters on a drifting ice floe, you have no choice but to abandon the ship and try to bring your crew back to inhabited lands. A thousand kilometers separate you from civilization. Will you be able to reach it? And at what cost?"

The Mini-Yaz gold medal was won by Adrien Saurat with his book Traité sur l'expérience divinatoire à propos du vampyre surnommé Le Valèque. The book is supposed to have been written in the 18th century and is formulated as a gamebook, except that the purpose is not (for the fictional author) playful but divinatory. He proposes possible paths that we will follow with our intuition and with the help of certain dice rolls (influenced by a superior force if we pray briefly at each new passage). This process is supposed to help us find the true thread of events relating to a troubled episode that a village experienced a long time ago, and whose testimonies, decades later, vary greatly.

Both sound superb and worthy winners, and hopefully somebody will get around to translating them into English soon. I'll be first in line to read them.