More deep dives into the future

Google's NotebookLM is my latest toy. I've been having a blast unleashing it on various books of mine, game write-ups, favourite novels, etc, and listening to the podcast discussions it generates. They're not perfect -- a bit repetitive, and sometimes the virtual hosts get the wrong end of the stick, but this is still in experimental mode. Imagine what it will be like in a couple of years. And NotebookLM also has a serious use as a tool for writers. That's my excuse for playing with it, anyway.

Here are a few of its analyses; you'll need a Google account to listen to them.

Can You Brexit (Without Breaking Britain)?

"Can You Brexit is a political thriller that follows a fictional British prime minister as they navigate the complexities of Brexit negotiations. The book explores a variety of potential Brexit outcomes, including a 'hard Brexit' where Britain leaves the European Union and the single market, a 'soft Brexit' where Britain leaves the EU but remains in the single market, and a 'Swiss model' where Britain has a more limited relationship with the EU. The book delves into the internal political pressures the player faces as they attempt to negotiate a Brexit deal that satisfies both their own party and the British public."

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion here.

The Conclave 

"The story follows a group of wizards on a quest to find a prismatic jewel in a labyrinth on the island of Tartuva. They are hunted by a powerful adversary named Pale, who seeks to erase all names in the world. The wizards are aided by various spirits, including Surma, a wizard who is worshipped as a god, and Wax, a shaman who can communicate with the dead. The story highlights the importance of names in the world, and the struggle between those who seek to control them and those who seek to preserve them."

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion (admittedly with a few hallucinations about the plot) here.

Dark Lord: The Early Years

"The story of Dirk Lloyd, a young boy who believes he is the Dark Lord transported to Earth by a magical mishap. While he grapples with his new reality, Dirk tries to adapt to life as a human child, and plots to reclaim his powers. The novel delves into themes of identity, power, friendship and good versus evil, with a darkly humorous tone."

Hear those puny mortal AIs talk about the great Dirk here.

Down Among the Dead Men

"The story follows the player-character as they navigate treacherous seas, battle pirates, face undead monsters and ancient demigods, and ultimately try to rescue Queen Titania from the clutches of the villainous Captain Skarvench."

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion here.

Dragon Warriors

"From the medieval-inspired kingdom of Albion to the exotic Ta’ashim lands, the game portrays a vibrant and diverse world with distinct societal structures, belief systems, and unique inhabitants."

Here are the automaton town criers to tell you all about it.

Florien

"Diana encounters a mysterious and alluring young man called Florien. The novel is characterised by a romantic and supernatural tone, with Florien appearing and disappearing at will, leaving Diana to wonder about his true nature and his relationship to the girl, Janice, who lives in a dark and forbidding manor house. It explores themes of obsession, captivity, and the allure of the dark and dangerous, particularly Diana's attraction to Florien and his mysterious and potentially sinister nature."

See what the Deep Dive hosts made of it here.

The Hammer of the Sun

"The Great River lies barren, its lifeblood drained by an ancient curse. Journey through scorching sands and forgotten ruins, where sphinxes guard lost secrets and skeletal Spartoi wage perpetual war. Explore a vast open world where brooding sphinxes, proud Amazons, and forgotten gods cross your path. Uncover the mysteries of Iskandria, a once-great city now lost to time, and face challenges that will test your courage and cunning. Seek out mythical creatures, confront deadly foes, and collect powerful artifacts as you race against time to restore balance to the land. Will you become a legend, or be forgotten beneath the relentless hammer of the Sun?"

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion here.

Lifeform Three

"The story of Paftoo, an artificial 'bod' in a dystopian future who works at Harkaway Hall, a nature reserve created from the ruins of a lost civilisation. Paftoo has no memory of his past, and his life is a constant cycle of work and night mode, where his mind is wiped clean. The novel explores themes of memory, identity, and the nature of reality as Paftoo tries to piece together fragments of his past and understand the true nature of the world he lives in."

Watch the bods discuss it on YouTube.

A Minotaur at the Savoy

"A series of letters sent to the Royal Mythological Society from individuals across the globe, detailing their encounters with fantastical creatures and events during the Year of Wonders, a period in which the lines between reality and imagination became blurred. The letters are a mixture of the mundane and the extraordinary, with correspondents reporting on everything from mischievous fairies and shape-shifting demons to giant birds carrying people off to ancient palaces. The letters serve as a humorous record of this extraordinary time, offering a glimpse into the impact of fantastical occurrences on everyday life."

Listen to the Deep Dive hosts talk about it here.

Necklace of Skulls

"The adventure involves the player taking on the role of a Mayan character searching for their lost brother in a fantastical mythological realm, encountering various challenges and finally confronting the semi-divine mage Necklace of Skulls, who may or may not be an aspect of the god of death."

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion here.

Richer source material typically inspires the AI to give a more interesting discussion. There's more depth to a novel like Lifeform Three than you'll find in any gamebook, even Heart of Ice. On the other hand, here's a case of our virtual hosts rising to a seemingly impossible challenge and acquitting themselves well.

Going to the gods

If you believe in gods and in life after death, it's not inconceivable that you might consider it an honour to be sacrificed in order to carry a message to the world beyond. Some real-life cultures seem to have taken that view. Frazer gives several examples in The Golden Bough and talks about the sacred king whose reign might well end with a trip to the afterlife. Describing the 16th century customs of the Chichimecas, the friar Marcos de Niza said: "They cast lots to decide who will have the honour of being sacrificed, and with joy they crown him with flowers upon a bed on piles of wood which they set on fire, and so he dies. The victim takes great pleasure in this rite."

"Great pleasure"? Anthropologist Kathryn M Koziol isn't so sure about that. In this paper about another Pre-Columbian culture she says, "Among the Natchez, the mortuary rituals of the elite Suns [chiefs] included the killing of retainers. These retainers were members of the Natchez population and gained prestige for their kin by willingly dying, or at least by performing their willingness to die, to accompany their leaders." My emphasis there.

Professor Nicholas Humphrey gets outraged at the suggestion that the Inca "Ice Maiden" might even have been an enthusiastic participant in her own ritual killing (40 minutes in to this video)...

But Humphrey is a psychologist, not a historian or anthropologist, and the simple fact is we don't know. The sacrifice of the Ice Maiden might have been a crime inflicted on an unwilling victim; it might have been a signal honour jealously coveted among the Inca. Even framing it in those terms only makes sense in the context of our own culture.

Players of my gamebook Necklace of Skulls may have been on the receiving end of such an honour. On your visit to Chichen Itza ("Yashuna" in the book) the priests of Chaac invite you to jump into the sacred cenote with a message for the gods. Of course, in the gamebook the cenote undeniably is a gateway into the mythic world. In real life (see photo above; that's me on honeymoon) it's just a dirty great pond in which you'd soon go down for the third time. Pleading hydrophobia was no get-out, as there was always the option of getting sacrificed as an esteemed ball player, which is what the spouting snake-heads represent in this carving:

It's not just in Native American cultures that we encounter the willing (and even apparently eager) sacrifice. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, writing in the 10th century, gives a vivid account of a Viking ship burial in which a female thrall has sex with each of the mourners in turn and is then ritually killed. Wikipedia wonders at the attitude of the thrall herself (a volunteer, according to ibn Fadlan) and says, "While the scholarly consensus assumes that the slave girl would have felt happy and privileged about having sex with many people before being killed, recent work has suggested that we should instead see this as an account of rape and brutal strangulation."

What "recent work" could that possibly be? Time travel? A séance? Because otherwise they just mean "somebody's recent opinion", which is utterly useless. It only tells us about the attitudes of the West in 2021, not of the Rus in 921. We cannot know how people from those far-off cultures regarded a sacrificial victim without knowing what the world looked like through their eyes. Even the word victim implies a modern viewpoint. To them the afterlife was probably as real as sunlight and rain, whereas we know perfectly well they were not off to see Chaac or Odin with a message from the mortal world but were simply being snuffed out. Would they have been frightened or honoured? Both, probably. As Professor Koziol says at the start of that paper I cited, human societies are capable of acts that are simultaneously great and terrible. Our rituals aren't unambiguous, so why should our reactions to them be?

No matter how sure you are that you're about to enter the afterlife, there's got to be a natural fear of death too. A kamikaze pilot crashing into a warship no doubt had feelings of both fear and pride. The September 11 attackers presumably felt exalted, terrified, uncertain and excited all at once. They were told their martyrdom would earn them immediate entry into a heavenly paradise, but did they completely believe that? Would Wikipedia describe them as feeling "happy and privileged" or as having been manipulated and psychologically abused? If we can't even exactly pin down the mentality of modern jihadists, how are we going to judge the cultural mores of five or ten centuries past?

Yet thinking our way into other cultures and other mind-sets is part of roleplaying. On Tekumel, prisoners of war who aren't of glorious enough status to be worth ransoming back to their clans will usually get sacrificed to the gods. In Tetsubo, a character performing seppuku believes he is undertaking an act of courage and dignity. Spock in Wrath of Khan knowingly took a lethal dose of radiation as an act of logical altruism -- it wasn't his fault he was then doomed to an eternal afterlife of sequels, and we can only hope that any player-character attempting the same thing in an SF campaign would be granted the dignity of a true death.

We don't know what it's actually like to be a person raised in another era or culture, but we are all human and we have universal emotions and our imaginations. We can conceive of a credible mindset for a kamikaze pilot or a 10th century slave girl on a pyre or a Maya citizen jumping into a sinkhole. That's as good as it's going to get.

IF critique

This made for a lovely start to my year: an in-depth, considered and very flattering review by D F Chang of my four Critical IF gamebooks. "Compelling characters, perfectly plotted, amazingly written..." I didn't bribe him to say that, honest. Mr Chang's comments on Once Upon A Time In Arabia are more than fair, and three out of four A-ratings is nothing to gripe about. I just came across the video by accident, but you can bet modesty won't stop me sharing it every place I can.

Mr Chang raises a few interesting points, some of which have been addressed in earlier blog posts but this is a good opportunity for a recap. There were six Virtual Reality gamebooks but I only wrote the four that were republished as Critical IF; Mark Smith wrote Green Blood and The Coils of Hate. I wrote Down Among The Dead Men first, then Necklace of Skulls, then Heart of Ice, and finally Twist of Fate -- which was retitled Once Upon A Time In Arabia for the new edition.

Mr Chang has some valid criticisms. He doesn't like 'Necklace of Skulls' as the wizard's name. My only defence is that the nobles and kings of the Maya tended to be called things like that, if we interpret their names literally: Bird Jaguar, Sky Witness, Centipede Claw, Shield of the Sun, Curl Snout. It was anyway fashionable to translate them like that in the '90s, rather than attempt to recreate the sound of the names (K'inich Kan B'alam, for instance) which are even more deeply lost in the mists of time.

I agree that my inspiration was flagging when it came to the Arabian book. Or maybe I was trying too hard to recreate the picaresque feel of the Tales of the Arabian Nights boardgame, where the goal is likewise to scoot all over the world in order to achieve riches and honour. Probably I lavished too much energy on Heart of Ice and had nothing left to spare for the final book, and the deadline didn't permit me to take a break and recharge. That's why, when editing the new edition of Twist of Fate, I took the opportunity to change the lame title and rewrite the introduction to the story.

But how marvellous it is to hear of readers still getting pleasure from books I wrote twenty-five years ago and more. I'm nearer the end than the start of my writing career, but that reward never gets old.

Just my cup of tea

Still on the theme of Necklace of Skulls, what do you reckon to this far-from-ugly mug? It's one of a set of sixteen created by Cubus Games from the beautiful Mayan-themed artwork of Xavier Mula.

Click here to see them all. Which is your favorite?

Hero twins of the One World

Mayan history – the part of it we still have that wasn’t burnt by Christian missionaries – is not like modern history. Since Herodotus, the First World has had the tradition of objectively establishing facts from multiple sources, reporting events in a dispassionate register that opens a window upon the past. But reading the history of the Maya is like reading one of those Ancient Egyptian historical accounts in which untrustworthy foreign diplomats become snakes and a severed tongue can still tell a tale. It’s as much a magic realist novel as an account of what really (Calvino or Borges would insist on inverted commas there) happened.

Take the story of the hero twins from the Popol Vuh. Is this a holy book, a work of fiction, an allegory, or a chronicle? All of the above. The Mayan scholar-priesthood drew no distinction. They’d had no Plato to say that poetry tells lies. They used drugs and blood-letting to reach a point where hallucinations revealed the deeper truth beneath the veneer of ordinary events.

The hero twins’ father has annoyed the lords of the underworld by making too much noise while playing in his ball court. They invite him to play a match against them, misleading him into taking the black road into Xibalba, the Place of Fear. That’s where it all goes south, or rather west, as the twins’ father is subjected to various ordeals and finally sacrificed and his head hung in a calabash tree.

At this point in the story, the twins’ father is dead but (bit of a snag) they haven’t been born yet. A maiden goes to pick calabash gourds. She might in fact be the moon, but that’s a detail. The father's skull spits into her hand, or maybe she eats it thinking it’s a fruit, and she's sent away to live in the upper world when her mother notices she’s pregnant.

The twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, grow up to be star ballgame players like their dad, annoy the lords of the underworld in just the same way, and get invited to Xibalba. But these hero twins, they’re clever. They send a mosquito to bite the underworld gods, who call out each others’ names, allowing the twins to greet them correctly. They foil the ordeals, using red macaw feathers to make it seem that their cigars have stayed lit all night. When one of the twins is decapitated (even the Popol Vuh must have an “all is lost” moment), the other temporarily reanimates his body with a squash for a head and, forced to play a match using the brother’s head, substitutes it and brings him back to life. The twins then trick one of the lords of the underworld into allowing himself to be killed. They subjugate the Place of Fear, at which point we discover it isn’t just the mythical land of the dead, it’s also a hostile nation whose power over the Mayan city-states has now been broken.

So that’s the flavour I wanted to capture when I started writing Necklace of Skulls. I’d just got back from honeymoon in Central America, and having gone to the top of every Mayan pyramid I could find, and into the tunnels inside them too, I felt exactly ready to do it. What I wanted to avoid was that kind of wasted cultural appropriation you get in so many roleplaying games, where a minor deity like Xiuhcoatl would get a Monster Manual write-up as “a” xuih dragon, with 8 dice hit points and a fiery breath attack, located in a Pre-Columbian themed corner of the game world like one of the zones in Disneyland. You know what I mean. When I roleplay, I want to go the fount of ideas, not have it brought to me in a plastic bottle.

In Necklace of Skulls you play a Maya called Evening Star whose twin has gone missing in the far western desert. As in all the Critical IF books, you get to customize your character by picking your skills, and you can choose to be either sex, as it is never stated whether you’re Morning Star’s twin brother or twin sister. Sneaky, huh? (There’s actually a precedent for that in the Popol Vuh, Xbalque’s name translating as either “Little Sun Jaguar” or “Lady Sun Jaguar”.)

While you’re trying to find out what happened to your brother, the big event happening in the background is the collapse of the Great City, which is sending out ripples of chaos and fear even as far as your own Yucatan home. History buffs may think that this ties the book to 540 AD and the fall of Teotihuacan, but I couldn’t possibly comment. My version of the One World of the Maya is not an archaeologist’s version, in any case. This is a setting the ancient Maya themselves would hopefully recognize, in which heads grow on trees, a sinkhole can be a shortcut into the land of death, and playing a game in the ball court is a ritual as potent as any spell.

That’s why I’m so delighted with the app version of Necklace of Skulls, published today by Cubus Games to (belatedly) mark the Mexican Day of the Dead. This is much more than just a gamebook ported over to mobile devices. The Cubus team, headed up by Jaume Carballo, have taken the original book as a foundation and built a fabulous, beautiful interactive story game on top of that. Combat, for example, uses a mini-game of brinkmanship and tactics instead of digital dice. You select one of several Mayan icons to create a persona for your hero-twin. And the text itself has been rewritten and sharpened to make it more immediate, better suited to reading on a phone or tablet rather than a printed page.

And the art… Everything I said above about wanting to evoke a setting that has the feel of both reality and dream, history and myth – you only have to look at any one of the images to see how brilliantly Xavier Mula has achieved that. I want to see gamebooks pull up their old gnarly roots, shed the ‘90s scales, and become something fresh and exciting. This app shows that Cubus are right at the forefront of that revolutionary movement, and I’m proud to have the book that was born out of my honeymoon emerging in a new glittering incarnation, its old bones suddenly sprouting new foliage and bright flowers – just like, in fact, one of the Mayan hero-twins.

You can get the Necklace of Skulls app on iTunes USA or iTunes UK. Or anywhere else in the world come to that. And for Android users, the Google Play link is here. Or there are the print books, of course:


[Photo of Xiuhcoatl by Tony Roberts; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.]

The time of year for fear

Halloween is nearly here. Tell my next-door neighbours - they've had plaster pumpkins and a big witch's-hat display on their porch for weeks. If you get yourself all worked up that early, I think the actual day loses its spooky shine. Premature horripilation, Dr Freud would've called it. But if you're not sick of ghosts and goblins yet, here are some suggestions for an enjoyable shudder:

The image above is from "Wrong Turning", a comic strip in the Creepy style that I wrote for Martin McKenna after a fog-shrouded week at Shute Gatehouse. You can read the story here for free, but if you want to see the works of real genius that inspired it, Steve Ditko's collected Creepy and Eerie strips are here.

If that lights your turnip lantern, the comics connection gives me a segue to "A Dying Trade", a story I originally cooked up for a ghost-written Clive Barker book that didn't happen. I tried turning it into a comic with the help of Russ Nicholson, but that didn't get off the ground either. But eventually Dermot Bolton produced it as a short movie directed by Dan Turner, and you can watch that here.

Talking of movies, The Book of Life is out now and has to be worth a watch, because if two Mexican maestros like Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Gutierrez don't know their Day of the Dead, who does? As del Toro says:

“[What is it with Mexicans and death?] Ultimately you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It’s an impulse that’s intrinsic to the Mexican character. And when people ask me, what is so Mexican about your films, I say me. Because I’m not a guy that hides the monster: I show it to you with the absolute conviction that it exists. And that’s the way I think we view death. We don’t view it as the end of end all. You say 'carpe diem' in Dead Poets Society; we have that in a much more tequila-infused, mariachi-soundtrack kind of way.”

That whole vibe of wild partying and the flowering of life in death resonates with me, maybe because I got married in Mexico (just after the Day of the Dead, in fact). I like the fabulist notion of death teeming with all these passions and possibilities, which probably accounts for me being such a big fan of Tim Schafer's adventure game Grim Fandango. Boy, I wish somebody would turn that into a movie. Or a kids' TV show. Or a comic or a series of novels. (Well, maybe somebody did the last of those, kind of, only without Manny Calavera's decent-little-guy charm.)

The thing about Halloween is the fairground fun side of it. It's the ghost train version of scariness, a chill to enjoy by the fireside on a dark and stormy night. That's why I love John Whitbourn's classic series Binscombe Tales - not exclusively horror stories as such, but all of them open a window on an unsettling world of weird. They've been anthologized more widely, and won more awards, than any eerie English yarns this side of Algernon Blackwood, and the main reason for that is the storytelling warmth that accompanies the grave-deep chill and feverish fizz of Mr Whitbourn's imagination.

A more serious take on a tale of dread is to be found in Frankenstein, which (I'm sure you know) I turned into an interactive novel a couple of years back. There's no comfort to be found there, no cosy shiver before bedtime. This isn't the Universal horror movie version to be taken with popcorn and a pinch of salt, it's Mary Shelley's bleakly brilliant work of SF - only with more humour and characterization and fewer descriptions of mountain walks and river journeys. Oh, and I added a solution to the knotty problem of how the monster got the corpse of Frankenstein's murdered friend to Ireland, which otherwise makes no plot sense whatsoever. (Sorry, Mrs Shelley.) Read Dr Dale Townshend discussing the story with me here, or go and grab a copy (for iOS or Android) here.

More exploration of nightmarish unease was supposed to happen in Wrong, the online magazine I launched with Peter Richardson. Unfortunately the creators involved were all too busy trying to make a crust to throw in their time for free - myself included. But I still stand by our manifesto:

The most unsettling fears are the ones you can’t quite put your finger on. It needn't be anything as cosy as werewolves or vampires; nothing so comfortingly concrete as a madman with a knife. The supernatural, when it appears, can be a catalyst evoking the real horror that comes from within. ...Dreams are also a kind of truth, and bad things are more sinister when they happen to the blameless. Not everything is always explained and neatly tied up. There are often loose ends that will leave you uneasy. Rod Serling would be at home here. 

To round off, let's go back to Mexico. As well as getting hitched, I was there researching Maya mythology for my gamebook Necklace of Skulls. Eldritch encounters abound with skeletal noblemen who invite you to join them for a chat, threshold guardians on the way into Xibalba, disembodied heads, and the like. You can buy that in its new Fabled Lands Publishing edition, and if you get the paperback then the Kindle version is free, but I recommend waiting a week or two for Cubus Games's all-new app version. The full gleeful ghoulishness of the Day of the Dead has rarely been so vibrantly evoked as by Xavier Mula's artwork.

Step into myth

If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video must go at least an order of magnitude beyond that. So instead of my customary long screed, this time I'm just going to leave this trailer from Cubus Games and this sample image by Xavier Mula to tell their own story.

Cubus Games announce Necklace of Skulls app

More about this later in the month, but here's the first official announcement by Cubus Games of the forthcoming Necklace of Skulls app. If you're not already familiar with Cubus's great work on interactive story apps The Sinister Fairground and Heavy Metal Thunder, check them out and you'll see why we're thrilled to have them working on several of Fabled Lands Publishing's gamebooks. The vibrant artwork by Xavier Mula is a breath of fresh air after decades of a hobby dominated by clunky mail-clad dwarves and dank dungeons.

So this is quite a time for Critical IF, what with Inkle's adaptation of Down Among the Dead Men still riding high on the gamebook charts, Heart of Ice prepping for development, and of course the paperbacks all still available if digital isn't your thing. And before anyone asks, Necklace of Skulls should be out for Android as well as iOS.

And if you think all that is exciting news, wait till you hear about Jamie's new novel. If I had to Hollywoodize the pitch, I'd say it's Percy Jackson meets Galaxy Quest. Come back tomorrow and I'll tell you all about it.

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...)

Necklace of Skulls

This is one of my very favourite Russ Nicholson illustrations for one of my favourite gamebooks. It's a Maya nobleman who tries to commandeer your boat to evacuate his family after the fall of Teotihuacan in Necklace of Skulls.

Two days' sailing brings you to Tahil, a busy trading settlement on the far coast. The others squint warily as they bring the vessel in to the harbour. You can see at once there is trouble here. Instead of the stacks of trade goods that would normally be piled up along the quayside at a port like this, there are milling crowds of refugees carrying everything they own on their backs. As you tie up at the quay, a man whose elegant clothing marks him as a lord of the Great City comes striding towards you.

We're currently formatting this book, along with three other titles from the Virtual Reality series, for re-release in the autumn. These were originally supposed to come out as part of the Infinite IF gamebooks we planned with Osprey, but that turned into a digital-only venture and I think readers prize these books enough to want to own physical copies.

Fabled Lands LLP's agent is talking to other traditional publishers, because it would be great to get proper bookstore distribution - for as long as high street bookstores survive, anyway. If those talks go nowhere, Fabled Lands LLP will publish the books, the only difference being that you'll have to order them from Amazon.

The four books have all-new covers by Jon Hodgson and if Fabled Lands LLP publish them I'm going to spend some of my spare time cleaning up some crisp 600dpi scans of Russ's original drawings. After twenty years, the VR books are a bit yellow and blotchy (just like Jamie) so getting a good scan involves razor-blading them apart, followed by far too much time in Photoshop - and me an author, not a graphic designer, after all.

If you just can't wait, Russ has put up all the Necklace of Skulls images on his blog. And thanks to the magic warehouse robots of Amazon, you can still buy the original mid-90s edition.(That's UK; US readers go here.)

A saga of the hero twins

I've been doodling some sketches for the covers of the Infinite IF books. This one, for Maya heroquest adventure Necklace of Skulls, is going to be painted by my favourite Dragon Warriors artist, Jon Hodgson. Which is really rather exciting, actually.

There will be few interior pictures this time out, so if you want to appreciate the great job Russ Nicholson did in evoking the One World when the book was first published, I recommend snapping up a secondhand copy on Amazon. Or you could wait for Russ to post those illustrations up on his blog, which he plans to do shortly.

I'll sign off with the doubtless du Maurier inspired opening of the book:

Last night you dreamed you saw your brother again. He was walking through a desert, his sandals scuffing up plumes of sooty black sand from the low endless dunes. It seemed you were hurrying to catch him up, but the sand slipped away under your feet and you could make no headway up the slope. You heard your own voice call his name: 'Morning Star!' But, muffled by distance, the words went rolling off the sky unheeded. 

You struggled on. Cresting the dune, you saw your brother standing close by, staring at something in his hands. Your heart thudded with relief as you stumbled through the dream towards him. But even as your hand reached out for his shoulder, a sense of dread was growing like a storm cloud to blot out any joy. You saw the object Morning Star was holding: an obsidian mirror. You leaned forward and gazed at the face of your brother reflected in the dark green glass. 

Your twin brother's face was the face of a skull. 

 

Face off

I can never look at this picture from Necklace of Skulls without seeing red.

That's not Russ's fault, I hasten to say. It's always an honour and a delight to have one of my books illustrated by him. I can still remember the thrill I got whenever a package of new pictures from him would drop through the letterbox. He is, as I have said before, the consummate visualizer of fantasy worlds, and the only reason he's not doing the illustrations for the new editions is that I didn't negotiate the contract.

In the case of Necklace, I'd just returned from honeymoon in the Yucatan. Russ handed in this picture. Everyone was happy except for the art director, who declared that the faces of the children at bottom left were "too oriental", the ridiculous implication being that this was potentially racist. Evidently she was unaware of the racial provenance of pre-Columbian peoples. At any rate, she had Russ repeatedly Tipp-Ex (oh yeah, none of your fancy digi-drawing in those days) and redo the faces. Finally he delivered what you see here. To begin with the kids had looked just like the Mayan children I'd seen on honeymoon, and very charming they were too. Now that they had more Anglo-Saxon features, the art director declared herself satisfied. She pulled the same trick on another child's face in the same book. I don't know why the art directors in British publishing so often mess up everyone else's work (I refer m'lud to numerous exhibits including the logos of Golden Dragon and Blood Sword) but they do. I usually have to wait for the French edition to see how the artwork should have been treated.

Anyway, short of setting up my own publishing house and hiring the art director myself (now there's an idea) I am resigned to such farragos. Here's a little bit from the early part of Necklace in case you don't want to buy it now and would rather wait for the iBooks edition:

The high priest winds a white cloth across your eyes and leads you through to the inner shrine. A deep chill abides here; the thick stone blocks of the Death God's temple walls are never warmed by the sun. The sweet tarry smell of incense hangs in the air. You feel a hand on your shoulder, guiding you to kneel.  

A long period of utter silence ensues. You did not hear the high priest withdraw from the chamber, but you gradually become sure that he has left you here alone. You dare not remove the blindfold; to gaze directly on the holy of holies would drive you instantly insane. 

A whispering slithers slowly out of the silence. At first you take it for a trick of your unsettled imagination, but by straining your ears you begin to make out words. 'The way to the west lies through the underworld,' the whispering tells you. 'Go to the city of Yashuna. North of the city lies a sacred well which is the entrance to the underworld. Take this path, which is dangerous but swift, and you will emerge at the western rim of the world. From there it is but a short journey back through the desert to your goal.' 

The whispers fade, drowned out by the thudding of your heart. Frozen with terror at the words of the god, you crouch motionless on the cold flagstones. The cloying scent of incense grows almost unbearable. 

Suddenly a hand touches your shoulder. After the initial jolt of alarm, you allow yourself to be led out onto the portico of the temple, where the blindfold is removed. You blink in the dazzling sunlight. You feel as weak as a baby and the smell of incense clings to your clothes. After the cool of the shrine, the heat of the afternoon sun makes you feel slightly sick. 

The podgy priest is looking up into your eyes. 'You heard the voice of the god,' he says simply.

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.

Cover versions

I'm right in the throes of getting these four gamebooks ready for release next spring, so I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me for keeping this one short.

The first thing I ought to say is that these aren't actually the covers they're going to have when they go on sale. I just knocked these up to have handy copies to write in. It beats feeding reams of paper into the laser printer. Instead, I just have to fiddle around on Lulu for a half hour and lo, it's all sorted and some spanking new paperbacks arrive a few days later. The cover design process is quite therapeutic, too, after hours of flowcharting and proofreading.

The eagle-eyed will notice Twist of Fate has a new title. I never liked the original and this one explains what it's about. Mind you, I have yet to find out what our new publishers think. It could be The Thief of Bagshot by the time it comes out.

Ah yes. Our new publishers... Because this is not a Spark Furnace venture, but rather a partnership with a leading international publisher. If you're any sort of a gaming or fantasy nerd, you'll have heard of them - and, if you're like me, you'll have been collecting their books since you were a kid. I'll let you know who it is (assuming you haven't guessed) as soon as the ink is dry on the deal.

As well as these four books, we'll have an all-new gamebook by Jamie that I'm still going to refer to by the irritatingly tantalizing title of Undeadwood just so I'll have something to post about when we're ready to announce what it's really called. And for the sixth book - well, I'm still hoping it'll be the first in the Way of the Tiger series, and the news as of today is that it probably will be. Maybe even two Way of the Tiger books to kick off and we hold back Undeadwood till the autumn. What would your vote be on that?

Art of ice

A brilliant illustration by Russ for one of my Virtual Reality gamebooks, Necklace of Skulls. He had to Tipp-Ex out the little girl's face in the background and redraw it because the art director said the original looked "too oriental". I had just returned from honeymoon in Mexico and Guatemala, where I had seen a lot of Mayan kids, and Russ's original drawing was in fact spot-on.

The same art director on the same series made Russ redraw the Gargan sisters in Heart of Ice. He had them in army-style muscle t-shirts and she wanted them wearing something big and baggy. Which made no sense at all; they were hardbody soldiers and proud of it, not the sort to favor dungarees that gave them the outline of an old floor cushion. If we turn Heart of Ice into an e-gamebook, that'll be the first thing I fix.

Coming up in the next eight weeks or so: the floodgates are open and you'll be seeing masses of Abraxas concept art and world background, followed by more of the Invaders & Ancients books including a never-before-published role-playing scenario. Plus lots more of Russ's amazing art on those and another couple of projects that we've got bubbling away at the back of the Fabled Lands Studio. Less than a week to go now before that all kicks off.