Roots & Claws

One for the diehard Fabled Lands players this week, as I came across the original titles that Jamie and I were considering for the later books in the series. We must have drawn up this list right after writing FL books 1 and 2. The books up for discussion, clockwise from top left, later became known as Over the Blood-Dark Sea (book 3), The Serpent King's Domain (book 7), The Plains of Howling Darkness (book 4) and The Legions of the Labyrinth (book 10, still unpublished).

I've already recounted our struggles to get the publisher to accept Devils & Howling Darkness as the title of book 4, but WH Smith's were worried that any mention of devils might scandalize fundamentalist religious groups. Jamie and I didn't think they'd buy the FL books anyway, but we argued the point in vain.

The notes refer to our editor, Ian Marsh, who also helmed the Virtual Reality gamebook series. I believe he also digitally typeset the books, though I don't suppose the publishers paid him anything extra for doing that.

My biggest regret here (other than the book 4 title) was not being able to use The Blood-Dimmed Tide for book 3. Jamie and I are both fans of Yeats, as you will have noticed if you read The Chronicles of the Magi novellas -- but there I had to pay out of my own pocket to use the poem, because Yeats's work didn't enter public domain till 2009, and we'd have hit the same problem with FL book 3. So we borrowed a line from Homer instead (oînops póntos) and took liberties with it: haîmops póntos, I suppose it would be, "the blood-eyed sea". Given that the book takes place on the Violet Ocean, maybe wine-coloured would have been a better fit.

Pirates ahoy

There's a lot of talk about generative AI hallucinating, but what kind of hallucination has to happen in a human brain for them to think it's right to take someone else's work, slap their own name on it, and put it up for sale (aye, and here's the rub) at more than the price of the genuine article?

The question isn't purely rhetorical. While creating links for the Fabled Lands bookstores (US here, UK here) I came across some of my own gamebooks on sale on Apple Books under different titles. Well, nearly different -- whoever pirated them was dumb enough to leave "Critical IF" in the name, which is why they popped up on a Google search.

As you can see, one rip-off edition wasn't enough for them. And that time could have been so much better spent teaching themselves English. And, I dunno, ethics. Others have pointed out that they've also ripped off images owned by some big hitters, who might well come gunning for them with more than a rusty cannon. Happily, Apple's legal department has now deleted the books, though I suspect the same piratical individuals will just upload them again under new titles.

If you think all that is bad (and I hope you do) you should hear what happened to my wife. A company offering online courses ripped off the entire contents of her Nail Your Novel books and spent years selling "their" writing course for considerably more than the cost of the books. She only found out about it because the company had lazily cut-&-pasted everything from the books including a mention of her name, enabling one of their customers to track her down to ask if she'd be doing any more courses. (In fact she does have a bona fide online course, Become a Ghost-Writer.) She found a lawyer, but after months of effort all she got was a desultory payout -- a fraction of the money the company had made off the back of her work. Sadly, often crime does pay.

Anyway, on the principle that one has to rise above such knavery, I'll just point out that you can get the most up-to-date editions of the Critical IF books for less money from legitimate sources. Don't let the hornswogglers win!

Critical IF e-books are available on Amazon US and Amazon UK from $0.99 to $2.99.

The Age of the Triffids

Writing a sequel to The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham's 1951 science fiction classic, is something most authors couldn't even attempt. It's not enough to pastiche Wyndham's style; that would just leave you with a quaint literary curiosity. The sequel needs to match the inventiveness and blistering shock value of the original but in a modern idiom. Think the retooled Battlestar Galactica or the way J J Abrams created a new take on 1960s-era Star Trek.

Perhaps the only writer who could hope to do justice to such an undertaking is John Whitbourn, one of England's greatest living practitioners of fantasy and science fiction. In The Age of the Triffids, he leaps ahead to twenty-five years after the time of the first novel. Bill Masen's community on the Isle of Wight has grown and on the surface appears to be thriving, but with fields of triffids covering most of the mainland and spores ever drifting on the wind, there are threats from outside and perhaps an even greater danger posed by the concomitant social fault lines between the pre- and post-apocalyptic generations.

"Resist the temptation to hide. Otherwise you’re trapped and you'll never get out. Triffids have all the time in the world. Sooner or later, hunger or thirst drive you into the open. They will be waiting."

For copyright reasons The Age of the Triffids is only on sale in Canada and New Zealand. But if you can't wait two decades for the rest of the world to catch up, why not see if a Canadian friend (or bookshop) will send you a copy?

I'm strenuously opposed to book series that go on and on long after they've run out of steam, but what would be your choice for another classic standalone SF or fantasy novel that's crying out for just one good sequel?