Gamebook Friday: RONIN 47

RONIN 47, the seventh ACE Gamebook (to be published this summer by Snowbooks), now has a cover. And it's gorgeous!

Art and logo design by Neil Googe, colours by Len O'Grady, design by Emma Barnes.

I love how bright it is and the use of coloured text on the back, which you can see below.

RONIN 47 finishes on Sunday 15 August at 1:00pm!

RONIN 47 is down to its final 24 hours on Kickstarter, so if you have yet to pledge your support, hurry before it's too late!

Gamebook Friday: Mechs Vs Kaiju!

Check out the new Kickstarter video for RONIN 47, and then - if you haven't already - pledge your support here.

Gamebook Friday: K-Day is coming!

It's official! RONIN 47, the seventh ACE Gamebook, is coming to Kickstarter a week today, on Friday 16 July 2021! Put the date in your diary now!

I hope you will check it out and pledge your support to RONIN 47 when it goes live, and it pays to back early. Back within the first week and you'll get a discount on your pledge price. Back within the first day and the discount doubles!

Rewards on offer to backers include signed hardbacks, custom dice and playing cards, and exclusive art prints, as well as a unique slipcase edition that includes both a paperback and a signed hardback copy of the book. And everyone who pledges to receive a physical reward will also receive a collectible ACE Gamebooks pin badge.

As well as paying for the production of the RONIN 47 gamebooks and backer rewards, the money raised by the Kickstarter will also pay for fifteen full-page illustrations and other filler images by Neil Googe.

We also have a whole host of incredible art Stretch Goals, and every piece of pin-up art unlocked will appear in the collector's hardback edition of RONIN 47. Whether you are a gamebook fan or a comics aficionado, you are going to want to back this Kickstarter! And then get all your friends to back it too, so that you can have even more incredible artwork in your copy of the book.

You can check the project page here, but please bear in mind that it is still a work in progress. That said, if you do notice any glaring errors, please do let me know.

Please spread the word far and wide, and I shall look forward to seeing you again next Friday, 16 July 2021.

Gamebook Friday: RONIN 47 is coming to Kickstarter!

I have been sitting on this one for a while, dropping random hints here and there, but I am finally ready to announce that my next ACE Gamebook is going to be RONIN 47, a Mech-vs-Kaiju post-apocalyptic epic, and the Kickstarter to fund its production will be launching later this month.

One hundred years from now, following an attempt to genetically re-engineer coral to make it more resistant to climate change (using something called the K Compound), Earth has been overrun by what are effectively, if accidentally, man-made Kaiju. Society has collapsed and groups of people exist in isolated bubbles around the world.

The apocalypse has been and gone, and amidst the ruins of the old world, what is left of the human race fights for survival against gigantic, hyper-evolved Kaiju. Mankind's most effective weapons against the monsters are the colossal Mechs developed by the Guardian Programme.

One of these pockets of humanity is Ako Base, a heavily-fortified and well-defended island community in the Philippine Sea. Squads of mechs operate out of the facility, tasked with keeping the tide of ever-evolving Kaiju at bay.

In RONIN 47, YOU take on the role of Commander Oishi, a Samurai-class mech pilot and leader of Phoenix Squad. When Deputy Director Kira turns traitor, killing Director Asano and stealing the new prototype Shogun-class mech, only YOU are left to pursue the villain and bring him to justice, battling all manner of mechs and mutated monsters along the way.

My 23rd gamebook will be illustrated throughout by acclaimed British comic book artist Neil Googe. Neil is an extremely talented artist, who also works in commercial illustration and concept development. He is well known for his work for the UK anthology comic 2000AD (and its sister title The Judge Dredd Megazine), which includes Judge Dredd, Survival Geeks, and Hondo-City Justice. He has also worked for DC Comics, drawing the likes of Wonder Woman, The Flash, Harley Quinn, Injustice, and Wildcats. As one of the co-founders of the British independent comic publisher COM.X, he is also the creator of Bazooka Jules.

There goes Tokyo...

There are all the usual kinds of rewards on offer that you would expect to see from an ACE Gamebooks' Kickstarter, but it really pays to pledge your support to the project early on. Back within the first week and you will receive a discount on the listed pledge levels, but back on Day One - K-Day - and you will double your discount!

Also, anyone who pledges to receive a physical reward, at any point during the Kickstarter's run, will also receive this brand new ACE Gamebooks pin badge!

So keep an eye on my social media feeds - and this blog, of course - and make sure you get in early when RONIN 47 launches on Kickstarter within the next couple of weeks.

Tie-in Tuesday: Judge Fear's Big Day Out and Other Stories

From the pages of the Judge Dredd Megazine:

A shopping mall where droids sell organs harvested from street trash… 

A murderous imaginary friend…

A psychotic composer drafting music from pain… 

All in a day’s work for the Lawman of the Future.

Edited by and with an introduction by Dredd veteran Michael Carroll, Judge Fear's Big Day Out and Other Stories gathers the very best short stories from more than a decade of the Judge Dredd Megazine, including stories by legends Alan Grant, Gordon Rennie and Simon Spurrier, among countless others…

As seems to be my lot with short story anthologies I've contributed to in recent years, I am one of the "countless others", even though I actually have four tales in the collection. They are:

Psimple Psimon

One-Way Ticket

You'd Better be Good, for Goodness' Sake...

and Miracle on 34th and Peltzer

Judge Fear's Big Day Out and Other Stories is published this Thursday, 12 November 2020, but you can pre-order it now.

Tie-in Tuesday: Forever Autumn

Today, Tuesday 22nd September, is the autumn equinox.

There are a couple of short story anthologies coming out this autumn, featuring tales by Yours Truly.

Uprising: A Necromunda Anthology is released on 1st October.

My story, Paradise, sees a gang of Orlocks looking for a lost dome, rumoured to be an oasis of fresh water and clean air; a veritable... paradise. But the Dust Dogs aren't the only ones searching for it...

Paradise is the first piece of Necromundan fiction I have had published since 2003.

Judge Fear's Big Day Out and Other Stories is a collection of prose tales that first appeared in the monthly Judge Dredd Megazine and the anthology comic 2000AD.

The 'Other Stories' include four of mine, that first saw print a few years ago. If you missed them at the time, look out for Judge Fear's Big Day Out and Other Stories when it is published on 12th November.

Steampunk Thursday: Scarlet Traces - Out Now!

Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, edited by Ian Edginton, is available now!

It is the dawn of the twentieth century.

Following the Martians' failed invasion of Earth, the British Empire has seized their technology and unlocked its secrets for themselves. It is a Golden Age of discovery, adventure, culture, invention—and of domination, and rebellion.

Scarlet Traces reveals a world of ant-headed nightmares; vacuum salesmen; war machines; deadly secrets; clockwork marvels; and Sherlock Holmes, T. S. Eliot and Thomas Edison as you've never seen them before...

Including stories by Stephen Baxter, I. N. J. Culbard, Adam Roberts, Emma Beeby, James Lovegrove, Nathan Duck, Mark Morris, Dan Whitehead, Chris Roberson, Maura McHugh, Jonathan Green, and Andrew Lane.

Ian Edginton is a New York Times bestselling author and multiple Eisner Award nominee.

His recent titles include the green apocalypse saga The Hinterkind for DC/Vertigo; Steed and Mrs Peel for BOOM, the steam- and clock-punk series Stickleback, Ampney Crucis Investigates and Brass Sun for the legendary UK science fiction weekly, 2000 AD; game properties Dead Space: Liberation and The Evil Within for Titan Books, and the audio adventure Torchwood: Army of One for the BBC.

He has adapted the complete canon of Sherlock Holmes novels into a series of graphic novels for Self Made Hero, as well writing several volumes of Holmes apocrypha entitled The Victorian Undead. He has also adapted H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as well as writing several highly acclaimed sequels, Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game.

He lives and works in England. He keeps a bee.


Also out today is Dr Janina Ramirez's brand new Ladybird Expert book about Beowulf. And yes, that is the same Dr Janina Ramirez off the telly who wrote a cover quote for Beowulf Beastslayer.

Shark Week = Sharkpunk

As it's the start of Shark Week 2019, isn't it time you read Sharkpunk?

Sharks - the ultimate predators, masters of their watery domain, a world that is entirely alien and inhospitable to man. So many aspects of the shark are associated with humankind's most primal fears. The tell-tale dorsal fin slicing through the water, the dead eyed-stare, the gaping jaws full to unforgiving teeth, the remorseless drive to kill and feed...Inspired by such classic pulp movies as Jaws and Deep Blue Sea - as well as such ludicrous delights as Sharknado and Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus - the stories contained within are rip-roaring page-turners and slow-build chillers that celebrate all things savage, pulp and selachian. Covering the whole range of speculative fiction genres, from horror and Steampunk, through to SF and WTF, these are stories with bite! Come on in. The water's fine...

You can pick up your copy of Sharkpunk here.

Magnificent Desolation

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The Moon has inspired people in so many ways for countless millennia, including me. Ulysses Quicksilver braved the Moon's magnificent desolation in the sixth Pax Britannia novel, Dark Side, published nine years ago in 2010.

Ulysses Quicksilver visits the British lunar colonies, searching for his missing brother, Barty, believed to be on the run from gambling debts on Earth. The clues lead our detective and his faithful butler into the path of unsolved murders, battling robots, shady millionaires and stolen uncanny inventions. Used to working inside the law, Ulysses is stalled when his pursuit puts him on the wrong side of the Luna Prime Police Force.

But why is Ulysses' ex-fiancée Emilia also in the colonies? Who is the strange eye-patched man following Ulysses? And what is really happening in a secret base on the dark side of the moon? Used to meeting every adventure with a devil-may-care attitude and a snappy one-liner, Ulysses will be forever changed by the revelations he discovers on this most deadly of trips.

You can pick up a copy of Dark Side here.

Warhammer Wednesday: Inferno! Volume 4

I've been sitting on this news for a while, since last year in fact, but seeing as how Inferno! Volume 4 was recently announced on the Black Library website, I thought it timely to let you know that I have a story in the forthcoming anthology.

It's the first new piece of fiction I've written for the Black Library for some six years.

Inferno! Volume 4 is available to pre-order from 12th October, and is published on 31st October, meaning that October is going to be a busy month for JG releases.

Thought for the Day

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

~ Isaac Asimov, science fiction author

Short Story Saturday: One of the Many

Yesterday, news broke on the Barnes & Noble website about a new anthology edited by Marie O'Regan and Paul Kane. And here's the cover...

See that 'and many more...' at the bottom? I'm one of the many, having contributed a story based on one of my favourite parts of the whole Alice mythos*. Wonderland: An Anthology is due to be published later this year, on 17th September 2019.

But twelve days before that, on 5th September, Scarlet Traces: A War of the Worlds Anthology, edited by Ian Edginton, is due to be published, and here's the cover...

See that 'AND MANY OTHERS...' at the bottom? I'm one of the many again, having also contributed a story to this particular anthology.

So if you're a fan of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The War of the Worlds, and my short fiction, then there's plenty to look forward to this September.


* If that's a thing.

Short Story Saturday: Kaiju Rising II - Reign of Monsters

Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters is published today, by Outland Entertainment! And if you take a look at the book's Amazon listing you will be able to read an extract from my contribution to the anthology, The Ghost in the Machine.

Tie-in Tuesday: Dinosaur Day

According to Twitter, today is Dinosaur Day. My working days are filled with dinosaurs at the moment, as I'm nearing the end of writing the first draft of NEVERLAND - Here Be Monsters!

But of course it's not the first book I've written that features the terrible lizards. There's Terrible Lizards for one. There are also dinosaurs in the Fighting Fantasy gamebook Bloodbones, and the Pax Britannia novels Unnatural History and Leviathan Rising.

Like many 5 and 6 year-olds, I was obsessed by dinosaurs. I would spend hours tracing the dinosaurs in the colouring book I had, and I loved films like The Land That Time Forgot, Valley of the Gwangi, and One Million Years BC, shown on TV during the afternoon at weekends. When I was a little older, by father and I would make Airfix kits of dinosaurs together, and I have very fond memories of travelling up to London on the train with him, specifically to visit The Natural History Museum and its dinosaur collection. I even remember an English lesson, early on in Secondary School, in which we studied an extract from Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, focusing on the arrival of a T-Rex.

All of this clearly had an impact on my growing up, and I still have a passion and fascination for prehistoric life today. Last year family Green visited New York and I dragged everyone to the American Museum of Natural History, just so that I could see the dinosaur exhibits, which did not disappoint! And because it had an impact on me growing up, it has also impacted upon my writing.

But I have never explored dinosaur life in so much detail as I have in NEVERLAND - Here Be Monsters! For a start, the book includes over 30 different dinosaurs, marine reptiles, flying reptiles and other prehistoric creatures. But one of the fun things about writing the book has been coming up with new names for dinosaurs, because most of the characters in the story wouldn't have known what the nascent fossil hunters had called these primeval beasts.

I'm keen for the book to be finished and out there in readers' hands for various reasons, but one of them is to see if people can work out which dinosaur is which. Maybe I'll reveal the answers next Dinosaur Day.

Steampunk Thursday: Mad Science in Pax Britannia

Seeing as how this week is British Science Week, it seemed like as good a time as any to plug my Pax Britannia steampunk books.

Early on in writing the series I made the decision not to include anything supernatural or magical in the books. Yes there are vampires and werewolves, but these are a form of genetic mutation.

However, having said there's no magic, there's actually magic aplenty in the books, it just goes under the catch-all term of 'mad science'. The crazy inventions and experiments of various characters have the same affect as magic on the narrative, helping to drive the plot into unexpected places and generally causing Ulysses Quicksilver and his friends no end of grief.

If you've not tried the books out for yourself yet, there are eight in total, plus various short stories, and the first six novels have been collected in two omnibuses.

     

Talking of mad science, Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein* text is published today, complete with husband Percy’s corrections of her misspellings.

Frankenstein inspired Stan Lee when he was creating the Incredible Hulk, and both of them inspired my own take on the Creature that appears in the Weird War Two adventure Anno Frankenstein.

* And first published 200 years ago this year.

Thought for the Day

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.”

~ Professor Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II - 48 hours to go!

There are now has just 48 hours left until Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II concludes its run on Kickstarter.

My contribution to the anthology is called The Ghost in the Machine.

Rewards include a limited edition hardcover of Kaiju Rising II, with a hand made slipcase, and a limited edition hardcover of Kaiju Rising I with a matching slipcase too!

If giant mutated coral monsters float your boat, make sure you back the Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II Kickstarter before it's too late.

Short Story Saturday: Kaiju Rising II - 4 days to go!

Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II now has just a few days left to run on Kickstarter with over £1,000 to go until it funds.

My contribution to the anthology is called The Ghost in the Machine and here's an extract:

Keoni gasped. With the appearance of the strange tentacles he had momentarily forgotten all about the Great White. It suddenly surfaced again beside the outrigger, threatening to smash the port boom to matchwood as it fought to free itself from the tightening tentacles. The huge fish twisted and turned with such force that Keoni was worried that, even if it didn’t destroy the outrigger with its desperate thrashing, it would swamp the boat with seawater and cause it to sink it just the same.

The shark snapped its jaws open and closed, as if in a feeding frenzy, but still it could not free itself from the clutches of the tentacles. Inexorably it was being dragged backwards through the water towards the centre of the atoll, where the water was darker.

The sea frothed and foamed as the shark continued to fight the tentacles, but it was a fight it could never hope to win.

But if being witness to what he had thought was the apex predator of the Coral Sea being captured by this only half-seen tentacled leviathan wasn’t shocking enough, what happened next expanded Keoni’s understanding of the truth of his world in ways he could never have imagined when he had set out that morning.

As the shark was hauled in, the tentacles began to rise out of the water, impossibly high for a giant squid, or even an overgrown octopus.

It very soon became apparent that it was no mutated squid that had caught the shark but something much, much bigger.

As the tentacles rose out of the water Keoni saw that they surrounded a vast mouth that now made the monster look more like a gigantic starfish or some impossibly large anemone. The writhing limbs were there solely to feed food into the gaping maw, and as Keoni stared dumbfounded at the leviathan emerging from the Great Blue Hole, he saw the frantic shark disappear inside.

Rewards include a limited edition hardcover of Kaiju Rising II, with a hand made slipcase, and a limited edition hardcover of Kaiju Rising I with a matching slipcase too!

So, if giant mutated coral monsters float your boat, make sure you back the Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II Kickstarter before it's too late.

Short Story Saturday: Kaiju Rising II

Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II is now into its final two weeks of funding and still has half the money it needs left to raise.

If you've been considering backing this Kickstarter project - which features a brand new story by Yours Truly, called The Ghost in the Machine - then you may be interested to learn that some new rewards have been added, along with a couple of stretch goals.

Outland Entertainment are now offering a limited edition hardcover of Kaiju Rising II, with a hand made slipcase from Two Tone Press. These will be signed, numbered, and extremely limited.

Furthermore, they are offering a limited edition hardcover of Kaiju Rising I with a matching hand made slipcase!

This will be your only chance to get a hard cover edition of Kaiju Rising II.

If the Kickstarter raises $16,000 (or more), the book will feature seven pieces of artwork. If it reaches $17,000, it will feature another seven pieces of artwork!

Outland Entertainment also have a few other things they're cooking up to roll out over the last half of the Kickstarter. So pledge your support today, and keep an eye out for more announcements!