You wait for a gamebook and then four come along at once

I think we pitched the Virtual Reality books as "like novels only you get to make choices". Mark Smith certainly wrote his that way. The Coils of Hate in particular has some beautifully evocative descriptions and sharply tuned dialogue, though even after struggling from dawn till midnight for weeks on end I don't think I managed to fix its dysfunctional flowchart.

My own VR books were not so much novels as role-playing adventures. Heart of Ice in particular was based on a Tekumel campaign that I ran many times, except that for the book I moved it to a near-apocalyptic future where the world may end with a bang or a whimper, and which of those fates it will suffer is largely up to you. I always saw it as a Sergio Leone movie with operatic sweep and pragmatically amoral heroes. In the new edition, I've corrected one logical flaw and in the process added yet another possible ending with the obligatory nod to Blade Runner.

Down Among the Dead Men is an adventure with pirates, magic and the undead. Pirates of the Caribbean in those days was still just a ride at Disneyland, and I don't know if I'd even heard of On Stranger Tides. If this one were a movie it'd be directed by Tim Burton. The setting is about a century before the powdered wigs era popularized by Hollywood. Think Drake and Raleigh and Doctor Dee.

I researched Necklace of Skulls while on honeymoon in Mexico and Guatemala following the Maya trail. Spirtually it owes a debt to Professor M A R Barker - as do all my books, really - but there's nothing there that came directly from our Tekumel role-playing games. There are two main routes through: one the underworld of Pre-Columbian myth, where I aimed for the logic of dreams, and that's contrasted with the "reality" option of the everyday world of the hero's clan and the historical backdrop of the collapse of Teotihuacan. Director of the movie? Jan Švankmajer or Terry Gilliam, maybe.

For the new edition, I've retitled Twist of Fate as Once Upon a Time in Arabia and I've given it a completely new prologue. The core of the adventure is unchanged, though: a whirlwind of encounters with a 1001 Nights flavour involving ghouls, djinn, flying carpets, magic rings, lost palaces, strange lands, devious villains and brave comrades. Well, you've seen the movie and played the boardgame I'm sure.

All four of my VR books return to print this week as Fabled Lands Publishing's new Critical IF series. These are completely re-edited versions, in many cases with new sections, and with brand spanking new covers by Jon Hodgson. All but Once Upon a Time in Arabia have the original illustrations, and they are formatted to fit on the shelf along with the new edition Fabled Lands and Golden Dragon books.

And if you're into the digital era of reading, all four books are also out on Kindle. Even better, they're included in Amazon's new Matchbook bundling program, meaning that if you buy the print book, you get the Kindle version for no more than 99c extra.

And, and, and - this weekend only, you can pick up a FREE Kindle edition of Down Among The Dead Men. This is what heaven is like for e-gamebook fans. But just till midnight on Sunday, mind you.

These are some of my very best gamebooks, so I'll hope you'll check them out - or, if you already read them, maybe you'd like to go put a review on Amazon? If so, may your barysal gun never want for charges.



Sorry about all these covers. I know it looks like a supermarket shelf, but I wanted to be sure everybody had easy access to at least the US and UK links. (Hey, I could have added Italian, German, Canadian...)

What happened to heroes?

Image by Compulsive Collector.

Krypton blows up. If you didn't already know that, you won't care anyway. And this isn't going to be a review of Man of Steel, because Mark Waid has already nailed that - everything that I would say, only phrased better and with more than adequate spoiler warnings.

Still here? Okay, so I share Mark's reaction to the final showdown between Supes and Zod. I wouldn't actually jump up and shout my opinion to a crowded cinema, as I figure they paid £15 to watch the movie, not listen to me. But hey, it's the USA. They do things differently there. (Here in the UK we do our shouting on the inside.)

That final snap (listen, I did say spoilers ahead) is just the last in a whole chain of narrative dominos that start toppling with relentless inevitability from the point that Zod and his rebels turn up in their big spiky ship. Here's how I picture the writers' meeting:

"Zod's got like a dozen guys with him. How's Superman going to beat all of them? Kryptonite?"

"Nah, we're keeping kryptonite for the sequel with Luthor."

"Okay, so how about this? Jor-Ex-Machina figures out a way to suck 'em all back into the Phantom Zone."

"We're calling it a black hole, but OK so far."

"But we still need a big showdown with Zod. So he's gone off to get something, and he isn't on the ship when it gets black holed. All his soldiers have gone. His dream in ruins. He's alone, nothing to lose. Big punch-up."

"How's that going to end? Even if Superman beats him - and this is Farm Boy vs G.I. Joe, remember - what prison can hold him?"

"He's gotta die..?"

"Uh-huh. Gotta die."

[Both think furiously.]

"Got it. In the fight, Superman gets the upper hand. Arm round Zod's neck. But Zod, he's berserk now. 'I'm going to kill all these bitty humans!' So he's lasering his heat ray towards a few little people. 'Don't you do it!' says Kal. 'I will!' snarls Zod. So, tearfully, Superman snaps his neck."

Now, why am I (and Mark Waid) so profoundly pissed off by this outcome? First of all, it's Superman. He's not just a superhero, he's the superhero. Here's what the film-makers want us to think: boy, what an impossible situation. He has to take one life to save a half dozen others. At least they're innocents and Zod is a murdering arsehole, so the moral arithmetic works out fine.

No it doesn't. Captain Kirk was several times faced with that kind of a choice: sacrifice one to save many. And Spock may raise an eyebrow, but Kirk would say no, that's unacceptable - taking one life or taking many, I reject those choices. And he would find another way. Why? Because that's what heroes do.

For all that, it's not the disastrously misjudged morality of this Superman that bothers me most. It's that the writers just went with the laziest solution because coming up with a genuinely heroic conclusion would have called for much more ingenuity. Well, I shouldn't be casting stones at other writers, and Lord knows we've all been face to face with a deadline only to find the Muse hasn't got our back. Maybe they'd got tired by that point in the proceedings - two and a half hours of CGI devastation in 3D can do that. But if you're going to tell a story about a hero - about what it really means to be a hero - either know your play or pass the ball.

In Blade Runner, who saw it coming when Roy Batty lifts Deckard up onto the roof? That's a moment of heroic redemption, surprising but inevitable as all endings should be. Or, for a less familiar tale, watch André De Toth's 1959 western Day of the Outlaw. Robert Ryan is one of those guys out of time - a relic of a hero, now a danger to the settled community he made possible. Then a bunch of outlaws show up and hold the townsfolk hostage, and it's up to him to save the day. Today that part would be played by Bruce Willis with a quirky grin and two meaty fists, and he'd be quickly dispatching those baddies with a series of lethal Home Alone type manoeuvres, but in De Toth's movie it's not so easy. Ryan has no gun, he's one man with a mere mortal's strength. So, in the absence of any easier choices, he has to dig deep and be a hero. The ending of the story? I won't spoil it, but it's surprising and inevitable.

That's a lot harder work for the writer. Maybe some writers welcome the glut of comic book movies because they think it's all about biffing bad guys through skyscrapers. But I'm a comics fan from way back, avidly hanging on the escapades of Spider-Man and the X-Men while my schoolfriends were reading The Beano, and even as a little kid I always knew that being a superhero isn't about the cool powers. It isn't about ethical sums. It's a quality from within that shows the rest of us how to live. Without that, even the Man of Steel is just a muscle-bound jerk in a silly suit.

Infinite possibilities

And this week's Bookseller makes it official: now the outside world (well, the publishing world, anyway) knows that our Infinite IF series is launching in just eight weeks or less under the aegis of the Osprey Adventures imprint. The whole OA line is geared at that overlap between myth, legend, gaming, fantasy and history - and if that doesn't put a full charge in your barysal gun, I don't know what will.

I'm putting final touches to my four books this week, and Jamie is just finishing up on Avenger. While these new ebook editions are substantially unchanged from their earlier paperback incarnations, we are adding extra material. Heart of Ice has a new alternate ending (thanks to Romain Baudry for pointing out the need for that) which gave me the always-welcome opportunity to write another hommage to Blade Runner, and the other VR books also have a bunch of new sections. Once Upon a Time in Arabia even has an all-new prologue to reflect the change in tone and title.

The biggest bonus comes in the Way of the Tiger books, however. Because the ebooks don't feature dice-rolling (which regular readers will know is one of my pet hates in digital media) Jamie is writing all the moves and outcomes for the fights. So instead of a 3 and a 5, you get:

You crouch as if to wrestle with Gorobei who tenses, ready to throw his extra weight against yours, but then you jab unexpectedly towards his midriff - and hit home. Gorobei gasps, winded, but he's tough. He won't give up that easily.

These books are all about the narrative, you see. So despite Jamie's howls of protest, we're keeping him chained to the desk until he's written the flavour text for every single fight.

I could show you some of the colour art, but let's not spoil all the surprises. Let's just say that if Jeremy Clarkson doesn't end up wanting his own Manta car, I'll be very surprised.

Frankenstein - bringing a classic out of the attic

I’ve just written my first gamebook in sixteen years, the interactive version of Frankenstein that will be published for iPad and iPhone by Profile Books in April. Maybe it would be more accurate to say it’s my first “gamebook-like” work for sixteen years. Why so coy? Because, if we use a word like game too freely, it becomes meaningless, and then what can we say about games? By one definition:

“A game is a problem to be solved.”

But not always the other way round, obviously, otherwise a sudoku or crossword puzzle is a game. Now, Raph Koster might be happy with that, as he says:

“Games are puzzles.”

But, you know, love is a puzzle. A story is a problem to be solved (if you listen to Hollywood screenwriting gurus, anyway). What use are those definitions? Sid Meier says:

“A game is a series of interesting choices.”

Which I like, but it essentially requires that you understand what gameplay is before you experience that smile of recognition at his definition. The barer truth, of course, is that a game is anything that’s marketed as a game. But then that raises problematic expectations. If I were to review Dear Esther and rate it as having little or no actual gameplay, wouldn’t I be missing the whole point?

And then there’s replayability. A true game is almost endlessly replayable, precisely because those choices are interesting – that is, there’s never one right decision. But, much as I enjoyed Dungeon Siege or Assassin’s Creed, I’m never going to replay them. On the other hand, I will happily re-read a great novel or watch again one of my favourite movies, and they’re not games at all.

You can probably see why I chose to be a creator, not a critic.

Getting back to the monster in this particular lab, Frankenstein is certainly structured like a gamebook. It’s 155,000 words long (by comparison, a typical Fighting Fantasy gamebook is 60,000 words; Choose Your Own Adventure rather shorter) and at a rough count it’s got about 1200 sections. A monster by anybody’s standards.

I have been asked if it has multiple endings. In fact there are several, as subtly different as the question of whether Clarence lives or dies at the end of True Romance, or whether Deckard gets to drive around in Shining woodland with Rachael, his replicant love. The ending question, though, to my mind misses the point just as much as do considerations of gameplay or replay(re-read?)ability. Every choice is an interaction with the main characters. It affects your relationship with them. Where a novel ends is a tiny part of the whole experience. People enjoyed the meaningful multiple endings of Heart of Ice, but those work because of the route you take to get there. It’s the same with Frankenstein.

Do you get to play the monster? Not really, but yes, is the best answer I can give to that. Do you get to play Victor Frankenstein? No, but you will get to know him. Imagine your best friend is going through a crisis. (Hopefully unrelated to having created a potentially homicidal new lifeform – but this blog has a lot of readers, so you never know.) Your friend asks you for advice. He may or may not trust you enough to confess certain things to you. Would you call that a puzzle, or problem-solving? Or even a game? Yet it is undeniably interaction.

That type of interaction, in the Frankenstein book, will engage you emotionally, intellectually, politically, aesthetically and maybe spiritually. When you have finished, everything you’ve read will be laid out there behind you – a complete novel, the precise text of which will be unique to each reader. I could say the experience will be unique to each reader too, but that is after all true of any novel. Yes, ebooks and book apps are a whole new era, a revolution, a tipping point, yada yada. But at the same time: plus ça change…