The year in view

From time to time we get queries about various projects of Fabled Lands Publishing, so it struck me that a good way to kick off 2016 would be with an overview of all those projects and if/when they're going to see the light of day. Happy New Year, by the way.

The big triumph of 2015 was the Kickstarter for Fabled Lands book 7: The Serpent King's Domain. Currently this is being written by Paul Gresty and illustrated by Russ Nicholson. When it's ready (spring or early summer, if I have to guess) Megara Entertainment will release a hardcover edition, and Fabled Lands Publishing will follow up with the paperback.

A lot of people ask me about Blood Sword 5: The Walls of Spyte. I'm on record as saying that tonally and plot-wise it doesn't fit with the rest of the series, but that isn't the reason for the delay in re-releasing it. I found while flowcharting the book that there are a lot of sections with pretty garbled logic, so all that needs to be fixed. Not least of the errata is in section 62, where a placeholder "XX" was left in the text (it should read "100") but there are other sections that only make sense when re-flowcharted. Even so, if it were only that then the book would be out in a few weeks but there's also an Augean stable of typesetting and picture-scanning to be handled. It's not a spare time job and Fabled Lands Publishing doesn't have the resources to pay for the work right now. So put that one in the category of "to be released - no date set" and if you can find a pirated PDF, grab it with my blessing. In fact, what do you know - here's one.

Then there's Falcon. The first book, Renegade Lord, didn't sell like hot cakes, or even lukewarm cakes, so the rest of the series is definitely on the back burner. Don't expect those in 2016.

Some people have noticed that when we republished the Golden Dragon series, The Eye of the Dragon was missing. One possible plan for that is to rejig it as a Fabled Lands Quest, as we did with Keep of the Lich Lord. But it's a big pile of work doing that - not just editing, flowcharting, artwork, proofing, but converting the whole thing to the FL game system. Also on the back burner, therefore.

Dragon Warriors reverts to me and Oliver Johnson in November, at which point I'd like to get it available on Amazon. If I can get the rights to the new books, I can upload the PDFs to Createspace right away - hell, I could do it in the next half hour and still have time to make a cup of tea - and the books would be on sale on Amazon a week later. As it is, we don't know who will end up owning all the new material such as Frazer Payne's "Darkness Before Dawn" scenario, so you might just see a re-release of the original six paperbacks.

Those are all the plans for now - such as they are - but we also have a new Dirk Lloyd book coming out, along with more DL adventures in The Phoenix comic, and an entirely new book series by Jamie with the working title A Shadow on the Heart. Plenty to look forward to, then - and if plans change (as they always do) you'll read it here first.

The road more traveled by

Following on from the previous post, I don't want to give the impression that all of my collaborations with Jamie consist of me writing something and then him taking over and cutting out half of it. They do say murder your darlings and, as Hitchcock and Highsmith pointed out (above), it helps to get a friend to do it for you.

Here's a case where it went a little differently. We were talking to the Fabled Lands agent, Piers Blofeld, about digital gamebooks. I mentioned time travel and how for it to really grip as a story it has to be personal. We talked about the old Falcon gamebooks that Jamie wrote with Mark Smith in the 1980s, and how those were very much in the 2000AD adventure style, but how maybe they could be rebooted with a little more relatability for a wider audience.

So I wrote this as a possible new way in to the story of a protagonist who gets to "fix" mistakes in time:

You always had a sixth sense. And people laughed at you for trusting it. But you knew better. The time your friends at high school piled into Billy’s older brother’s car to drive out for a picnic, and Billy had only had one beer but you felt something like a physical dread. Couldn’t get in the car. You watched them drive off and six hours later you watched the crane haul the car out of the west river.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” the cop asked.

“I had to study.”

Because you’d already learned not to talk about your glimpses of the future, even then. When people thought you could see what was coming up, they blamed you if it went bad. Best to say nothing. Keep the sixth sense – or whatever it was – to yourself.

But you learned to trust that sense. Right up till the last day of your life.

Okay, so then there's an elision to a scene in which you are in a plane crash...

A bang. It just sounded like a tyre blowout until the gravity switched off.

You wake up in the wreckage. Not too badly hurt, as far as you can tell, but you’re completely trapped in a cage of twisted seats and crushed fuselage. A liquid drips on you, causing an icy stab of panic until you realize it’s not aviation fuel but some kind of air con coolant. Even so, you can dully hear screams through the wreckage, and the smell of burning.

An overhead locker pops open and a bald man in a neat dark suit and grey trilby hat drops into the crumpled seat beside you. “You’re thinking you should’ve trusted your instincts,” he says.

“What? Who are you?” You strain to look past him into the locker. Is there a way out?

“I’m just guessing,” he goes on. “I can’t read minds or anything. Though I know what you’ll do now.”

You strain as far as the vice-like grip of your crushed seat rest will allow. The locker is empty, no escape route through to the outside. “Where did you come from? What happened? Was it a bomb on the plane?”

“A bomb?” He’s amused. “Like a terrorist incident? That’s ego talking, my friend. No, no terrorists. The universe has plenty of ways to kill you all on its own.”

He drones on and you listen with half your mind. He's telling you that many pasts and futures exist. Likens it to driving along a motorway. Spacetime can drift like a driver who’s nodding off, and that’s okay as long as the driver gets jolted awake when the tyres hit the hard shoulder. But if not he can go right off the road. And then there’s no getting back.

“Romulus can kill Remus, or vice versa, and you’re still on the blacktop. But if the wolf eats them both – that’s what we call a train wreck for time.”

“I thought we were talking about cars?”

“Ha! You see, right there, that’s what I’m looking for. You keep your wits about you. And then there are your premonitions, of course, where you see a few tracks over, what might happen or what could have been… That’s why we want you to join us.”

“Join you? Who the hell are you?” You struggle in the seat, but a wave of pain tells you there are at least a few broken bones. To think, you’re going to bleed to death or burn in the wreckage and your last conversation is with a madman.

He takes out an old-style fob watch with too many dials. “I’ll need your answer within 32 seconds. The fire hits the tanks then. To answer your question: we are the Curators. We locate the precious key moments of time, and if there’s an instability – a crack, if you like – we fix it.”

“And you want me to do that? But I have a marketing meeting in Seattle in four hours.”

“No you don’t. You don’t have a future. You don’t have a life. And you most certainly don’t have four hours. You have – “ he consults the watch “ – fifteen seconds. Yes or no? In or out? Life or death?”

Either way, this is the last day of your old life. But you could have a new life. If you agree to his offer, turn to 1. Just don’t take fifteen seconds to think about it.

We didn't use it. Why? Because we realized that the folks buying those old gamebooks aren't looking for a reboot. They want the untouched text. The classic edition, if you like. That's why we eventually released Blood Sword without completely overhauling the baroque tactical combat rules that I loathed. And similarly, Falcon came back to life exactly as if the intervening 30 years had never happened. And that's real time travel, I guess.



POSTSCRIPT: The time repair agency concept is one that's often explored in classic SF. To take one example: Philip K Dick's characteristically paranoid  "Adjustment Team", which inspired the movie The Adjustment Bureau. A rather more successful film adaptation was Predestination, based on Robert A Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies".

You never have to wait for breakfast

The Thomson-Smith series everybody talks about is The Way of the Tiger. Fair enough. Mixing Japanese martial arts with Dungeons and Dragons doesn't do it for me - and the ninjutsu and bushido stuff was never part of Mark Smith's original conception of the world of Orb either. But in the '80s it was all black pyjamas and nunchuks. Even Daredevil seemed to be wall-to-wall ninja back then. Way of the Tiger rode that wave, and you can't blame them.

Another '80s fixture was British comic 2000AD. Of course Judge Dredd wasn't my favourite. I preferred Nemesis the Warlock (which felt a bit Moorcockian), Ace Trucking Company (definite shades of Keith Laumer), and the resolutely downbeat Strontium Dog, whose demise (later retconned as "legend") surely inspired Avenger's apparently sticky and sudden end.

More of the spirit of Johnny Alpha was evident in the Falcon gamebooks. Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson wrote these books around the same time as Way of the Tiger, but that series has always overshadowed them. It's a shame. Falcon's time-travel concept allows for a diversity of setting and tone that WotT could never achieve. There's a dry humour as well as a dark bite to Falcon's adventures, and with multiple timelines as the theme sudden death is no longer quite such a metafictional minefield. Put it this way: Falcon could make a respectable movie or TV show, whereas in the case of WotT you could hardly help asking why an Occidental-looking guy kept using Japanese words and was trying to drop-kick that shoggoth with an orc on its back.

Well, no need to pick sides. You can have your kēki and eat it, because Fabled Lands Publishing is bringing back the Falcon series, starting this month with The Renegade Lord. It's 3033 AD, you're an agent of the Temporal Executive, and you have to stop the time traveller who is trying to change history before he, she, or it deletes the present. The wrinkle in the time stream is that the miscreant you're after seems to be one of your own superior officers.

We had this book ready for release at the end of last year, but we didn't know what to do about a cover. Then Jamie happened to get in touch with Peter Andrew Jones, the near-legendary artist responsible for some of the great gamebook covers of the '80s and '90s. Mr Jones kindly offered to remaster the cover for the new edition. So that's a point in favour of Facebook, in case you're still missing your hoverboard.

The votes are in

It looks to me as if Biggles and the Martian Manhunter are thinking about ordering the lobster, but no doubt Falcon fans will explain what's really going on in this picture.

Anyway, we ran a poll to decide how the series should end, and although the response was about on a par with support for a sequel to John Carter, the results are decisive:

57% want to see multiple endings for the final book, and 42% asked for a more upbeat ending. Presumably the other 1% are content to be reduced to the ranks because field agents have more fun.

I think it will be a while before we get around to the Falcon books. There are Blood Sword, Way of the Tiger and a few others to come first, but Jamie and I will take it on board. One nice thing about fully interactive ebooks is that it's very easy to add new sections - I've been putting lots of extra bits into the Virtual Reality series.

Talking of which, here's the mock-up cover for Heart of Ice. I now have this running in iBooks and all it's crying out for is colour art and maps. Those who clamour for print should not panic, however - that version is typeset too, though it won't have the new material that's in the ebook.

Worlds of IF

I've been dropping enough hints that it will hardly come as a surprise to learn that the Fabled Lands LLP gamebook back catalogue (which includes Blood Sword, Way of the Tiger, Virtual Reality, Falcon and Golden Dragon) is the secret third strand in the new Osprey Adventures imprint.

The Critical IF series will comprise new versions of classic gamebooks by me, Jamie, Oliver Johnson and Mark Smith, alongside new titles such as the Wild West fantasy Undeadwood which Jamie will be getting back to as soon as he's finished writing Dark Lord book 3, our new kids' SF series Starship Captain, and a few other things.

The books will be released in both print and ebook editions, the latter being fully interactive. So the sections are not only hyperlinked, but your hit points are automatically updated, skills and codewords checked, and so on. It's a miracle of technology (what passes for a miracle in the ebook world, at any rate) courtesy of the master coders at Spirit Entertainment, who are also developing the new Fabled Lands apps. You knew that. I know you knew that.

We'll be launching in the spring with Heart of Ice, Down Among the Dead Men, Necklace of Skulls, Avenger, Assassin and Once Upon a Time in Arabia. Oh, that last one? That's Twist of Fate as was, finally blessed with a title I approve of.

These aren't the covers you'll see on the finished books. These are just mock-ups (courtesy of Pieter Bruegel and Maxfield Parrish) I did so as to have some working copies by my side while editing and revising the manuscripts. Osprey have their artists working on all-new covers, maps and interior fillers.

To whet your appetite, I'll leave you with links to Per Jorner's comprehensive, no-holds-barred reviews of Necklace of Skulls, Heart of Ice and Down Among the Dead Men, and Mrs Giggles' reviews of Assassin! and Avenger! There, I even put the exclamation marks in this time.

2013 is "Open Sesame" for gamebooks

Here's what I've been working on while waiting for the proofs for The Court of Hidden Faces to come back from the printer. It's by Leo Hartas, of course - the doyen of gamebook cartographers - but can you name the book?

This is one of six titles with which we're launching our gamebook  co-publishing venture next spring. I can't reveal the full details till we have those contracts inked and in the safe, but all the books will be published in print and ebook editions, with worldwide distribution, and a couple of them (including this one) will also be turned into deluxe iPad apps by the masters of illuminated interactivity, Inkle Studios.

These are all pretty rare gamebooks, so for many readers they'll be completely new. And one of thse six launch titles will be new to everybody, because Jamie is only just starting to write it now. That's the one I've been calling Undeadwood. Think 30 Days of Night meets Django and you won't be far off.

Following those, if they're successful, we'll have Way of the Tiger, Blood Sword, Falcon - and more new titles too. You thought 2012 was turning out to be a good year for gamebooks? You ain't seen nothing yet.