Pax Britannia: Dark Side - new review

With the release of Pax Britannia: Anno Frankenstein only days away, I was delighted to read this review of the previous Ulysses Quicksilver adventure Pax Britannia: Dark Side from Mass Movement Magazine.

Once again, Jon Green takes us back to the world of Pax Britannia, the steam-punk powered alternate world where the Victorian Empire still exists at the end of the twentieth century and technological progress has ensured that man has taken great strides to conquer his immediate celestial surroundings, and once again, we’re in good company as we embark on another rip roaring adventure with Ulysses Quicksilver, agent by Royal Proclamation and defender of Her Majesty’s interests and realm, and his manservant Nimrod. This time, Quicksilver is on holiday, of sorts, to find his wayward brother who has taken himself off to the Moon in order to escape his gambling debts and creditors. Or so we, and Ulysses, are led to believe. However, holidays and Quicksilver don’t make the most comfortable of bedfellows, and from the moment the star liner sets off from Earth, our hero finds himself caught up in the machinations of crazed industrialists and Nazis, whilst battling killer robots, trying to discover a murderer, stumbling across alien civilisations and desperately attempting to save reality from the warping effects of a time machine that he thought he’d already destroyed. This is pulp fiction for the twenty first century, and Green is a master of the art form, combining high adventure and story with a literary flourish, dropping tantalising titbits and treats for fans of the genre into the story throughout its duration, crafting a tale that Wells and Verne or Howard and Lovecraft, his predecessors in the realms of science fantasy and fiction would have been proud to call their own. Pure, undiluted steam-punk fantasy at it’s finest… (Tim Cundle, Mass Movement Magazine)