I always wanted to write a computer game, so I've dedicated my spare time to making one (sorry family!). Finally it's got to the point where it is actually playable. I very loosely based it on my book When All Moons Rise. It's free on itch.io: When All Moons Rise. 

For the next few days two of my books are available for free download on the Kindle. You can get copies of  "Thrall", the first part of the Crimson Man, and "When All Moons Rise" from the Amazon Kindle store. Merry Christmas. Ho ho ho!

The son of an old friend (Dennis, of Clash of the Princes fame) has launched a point and click adventure on Kickstarter. As I admire young fellows setting out to build things for themselves, particularly adventure games, I thought I'd post a link to the project here in the hope that it might be of interest to at least some of my meagre number of readers.

Enjoy, Vincent the Vampire...

Jack Vance RIP

Jack Vance died a couple of months ago. This is my little homage to him, one of fantasy's greats and an important influence on my own writing. I first became aware of Jack Vance when I was about 14 years old, when my brother brought home The Eyes of Overworld from the local book exchange. There was something about this book that fired my enthusiasm, not in the same way that The Lord of the Rings did, for that was a totally immersive experience at 14. No, it was something else. Jack Vance had style.

His characters spoke with polite, elliptical yet crisp mannerisms, that on the surface said one thing, yet nakedly revealed the speaker's real message. The opening pages of Eyes of the Overworld demonstrate Vance's economical style at its best:

On the third day of the fair Cugel had disposed of only four periapts, at prices barely above the cost of the lead itself, while Fianosther was hard put to serve all his customers. Hoarse from bawling futile inducements, Cugel closed down his booth and approached Fianosther's place of trade in order to inspect the mode of construction and the fastenings at the door.

Fianosther, observing, beckoned him to approach. 'Enter, my friend, enter. How goes your trade?'

'In all candor, not too well,' said Cugel. 'I am both perplexed and disappointed, for my talismans are not obviously useless.'

'I can resolve your perplexity,' said Fianosther. 'Your booth occupies the site of the old gibbet, and has absorbed unlucky essences. But I thought to notice you examining the manner in which the timbers of my booth are joined. You will obtain a better view from within, but first I must shorten the chain of the captive erb which roams the premises during the night.'

His neologisms and names were fascinating. The monsters: erbs, grues, simes and bazils - barely described, if at all - were evocative of an entirely different sort of world. A place occupied by such fantastic personalities as Phandaal, Magnatz, Pharesm and the dismal Lodermulch and Nolde Hruska. I found his inventiveness and sense of the apposite in the creation of his names and places to be dazzling, and I have never fallen out of love with his use of language. While I dearly loved Cugel and his two books (why, Jack? Why no more?), I think he really hit his fantasy stride with the Lyonesse series. And yet they, despite fully demonstrating his wonderful skills, also fell prey to what I think is his weakness.

Jack Vance often seemed to have less interest in the story than in creating fantastic situations, cunningly, magically revealed. He seemed to be a fan of the simple solution, often wrapping a story up with almost peremptory haste, which could make the plot suddenly seem thin and not entirely satisfying. Three volumes of Lyonesse, full of inventive Vance at his best, each book possibly better than the last, and then at the end everything is pushed along with an unnecessary haste, and a resolution that seemed implausible in human terms: a quick war, the baddies killed, all set to rights. The end was not important to Jack, I feel. The spectacle along the way, the amazement of magic, strange worlds, that was what his stories were about, and that is how his stories should be read. They are an exotic buffet of fruits and flavours never before savoured, but rounded out at the end with bread and butter pudding and a glass of warm milk.

Alas, so there was a limit to his genius. He could not pull and push his creatures to be loved and loathed, but only to be one or the other. My favourite fantasy author he remains, despite this weakness, for his works are the best of comfort food. Just pull out any one of those beloved volumes, reach into it anywhere, and savour every word.

The Crimson Man

I have released my fantasy epic, The Crimson Man, on the Kindle. This book is composed of three novels bundled into one large book. These are Thrall, Freeman and Bringer, also available separately. At 250,000 words it is a hefty tome and quite the longest story I have ever written.

In brief:

For centuries the Farlig in their long ships have been sailing to undiscovered worlds through the mysterious portal that lies at the heart of the Sea of Mists. And for centuries the raiders have returned with their vessels brimming with slaves and the spoils of war. Yet when Eorl Volsung Silverhair returns with the slave Anatol Kirilov from a place called Earth, the Farlig suddenly find themselves living within a prophecy as old as the Sea of Mists itself. The Crimson Man has arrived. Long have the seven Farlig Keepers watched with their magic for this great hero’s arrival. Long have they feared the first glimpse of the wave of terror and destruction from which it is prophesied he must save them.

I have finally released Invaders : the gamebook for the Kindle. Unfortunately I could not arrange enough suitable illustrations in a timely fashion and so have elected instead to go with a non-illustrated version (though there are a small number of images in the book's introduction). Invaders was originally written in 1986 while I was in Japan, and was intended for inclusion in a short-lived Australian series of gamebooks planned by Puffin Australia (at least it was my intention that it should be included, ha ha). This series died quickly after the release of its first title. As to what the title of that book was, or indeed who wrote it, I cannot say. Clearly they should have led with Invaders instead ;)

I have always been a bit proud of Invaders, so I'm pleased to be able to get it out there for the reading pleasure of at least a handful of people.

When All Moons Rise is once again available as a paperback, currently from Amazon, distributed by Ingram.

How I became a Fighting Fantasy writer - part 3

In due course, the rejection letter arrived:

21 April, 1983

Dear Andrew

ASSASSIN

Thank you very much for sending us your manuscript. Unfortunately, Penguin Australia is not publishing books of this nature at present, although our UK company has published several very successful manuscripts like yours.

If you wish to pursue the matter further, you could send your manuscript to Penguin in England, etc.

Well, OK, I'm determined never to be a wage slave again, so I'll send it to England, though of course the postage in those days was horrendous, and return postage for the manuscript even harder to arrange, particularly for someone with no income. But off it went. In the interim, too ignorant to give up, I started working on my next Fighting Fantasy book: The Rings of Kether.

Remarkably, the letter from England was not long in coming.

3 June 1983

Dear Mr Chapman

Thank you for sending us your manuscript for ASSASSIN! Which looks very good. However, as you know, we publish the fighting fantasy games by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone and we cannot take on other books in their area. Maybe you could approach Penguin Australia, etc.

Comedy? Farce? In truth I don't recall what I did next. Did I throw my hands in the air, or did I plug on with Kether?. I can't imagine that I was inspired by this interchange. But a few weeks later, another letter arrived from Penguin Australia.

29 June, 1983

Geraldine Cooke of our Penguin company in the UK thought we may be interested in your 'fantasy game manuscript'.

Could you please send me a copy of you manuscript. I'd certainly be delighted to consider it for our Australian publishing programme.

Much more encouraging, so off went the manuscript again, where it vanished into the sort of silence that I - and doubtless thousands of other writers - have become all too familiar with. The weeks passed, the months, nothing. Was it actually being read? Or was it just some oversized coaster collecting coffee rings on the editor's desk?

And then another letter, but unexpectedly, this time from England.

11 October 1983

I am writing to you again about your manuscript ASSASSIN.

If you have still got the manuscript, and have not sent it out to another publisher, I would be most interested to look at it again as our policy has slightly changed in this area. I am now trying to broaden the scope of our fighting fantasy games books. If I am able to consider your manuscript, it is possible that we could talk about other ideas.

I look forward to hearing from you and hope that you do not find this change of heart too extraordinary.

Your sincerely,
Geraldine Cooke

And this was followed up by another letter from Penguin Australia.

25 October 1983

I am sorry for the long delay on your Assassin manuscript. Our UK company wishes to reconsider it since they are expanding their Fighting Fantasy series, so we have sent it to them today.

PS I hope something good comes from all this delay and to-ing and fro-ing.

Blood oath, you and me both, darlin'. Unfortunately, all this delay had led to a cash crisis, ie, I had none. The torture of employment could not be avoided any longer. Worse, my only prospects were back with the Australian Public Service, and in November or December of that year I was offered a dismally junior position with the Department of Social Security. In some respects this situation was better than that offered by the Bureau of Statistics. True, the pay was less and I had to contend with the shame of failing my sacred vow, plus there were the death threats from recently released criminals demanding their dole money NOW, but on the other hand, I didn't have to move to Canberra, and there were real people to talk to rather than the automatons that populated the warrens of the ABS.

And from Penguin? Silence. Long, tortuous silence. The treasure seemed slowly to vanish at the end of the rainbow.

Then disaster. The Department of Social Security had overstaffed itself. The most recently employed staff were all to be redeployed. To my disbelief I found myself suddenly working for an organization that made the ABS look like a jolly lark: the Australian Tax Office. At the beginning of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life there is a faux short about an accountancy firm where the poor clerks toil at their mechanical adding machines, desks all neatly in rows, one man looking over the next's shoulder. That was the Adelaide office of the ATO in 1984. Worse, they had time clocks, so there would be no skiving off. This was a tight spot. As I was led to my place in the galley and chained to the desk, could my boss see the beads of sweat on my brow? Was there a hint of irony in his voice as he clapped me on the shoulder and said, "Andrew, you're really going to enjoy it here, much more interesting than Social Security".

Sweet Jesus, I was in a tight spot. How was I going to get out of this one?

I think that moment had to be the nadir of my working life. Fortunately, it lasted only 4 weeks.

16 March 1984

I am writing to you about your two manuscripts and particularly in this instance THE RINGS OF KETHER.

...

We have now decided to set up a series of STEVE AND IAN PRESENTS.... I am writing to ask whether you would wish your manuscripts to be included in this series.

...

Yours sincerely
Geraldine Cooke

The next morning I rang the gang at the ATO and told them I was never coming in again.

How I became a Fighting Fantasy writer - Part 2

So there I was, newly unemployed, back in the rust belt of South Australia, and determined never again to be subjected to the tedious wage slavery of such organisations as the Australian Public Service. Yet I had no clear idea of what to do, only some vague impulse to create something. Paint? Draw? Write? And then by chance The Warlock of Firetop Mountain passed through my hands on its way as a present from my parents to my younger teenage brother.

This was so early in Fighting Fantasy history that there was not even a Fighting Fantasy series yet. There was only "Warlock of Firetop Mountain".

Years before this, back in third year university, where I had majored in psychology, we had been given valuable time on the university's new mainframe to learn the intricacies of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The new mainframe (a Vax-11/780) was a great improvement over the old (a Cyber 173), mainly in that it was also provided with video terminals. The old Cyber had to be fed punched IBM cards and waited on patiently for it to spit out a few pages of dot-matrix output.

I immediately began using this valuable computing resource to write an interactive random text-based dungeon bashing computer game based on D&D. In first year I'd done half a subject on Pascal and Fortran programming, and chose Pascal for the job. My programming skills were not well developed at that time, and I recall overhearing some real Computer Science students who had somehow got hold of a hacked version of my game decrying how badly written it was. Eventually enough people were spending enough time playing hacked versions of my game that the system admins deleted it from everyone's storage.

As soon as I saw the future Fighting Fantasy book #1 I realised that it was just a text based dungeon bashing computer game based on D&D without the surrounding hardware. I knew that I could write one, too.

I started work on Assassin, choosing a science fiction theme rather than fantasy because clearly these Jackson and Livingstone fellows -- whoever they were -- had already cornered the fantasy corner. As I wrote it, in an ad hoc, haphazard way, not really planning my way through it, I wrote my own combat rules. Since I had no idea that a Fighting Fantasy series was being spawned, it didn't occur to me that I would be part of it. I wrote expecting that Assassin would stand apart. And finally, at the end, I had this ungainly manuscript of some 360 sections -- the future Space Assassin -- which I sent off to Penguin in Australia.

Breton translation of Invaders

Ronan Le Deroff is translating my Australian adventure gamebook "Invaders" into Breton, which he suggests will make it the only gamebook to exist in that language. He has also found several link errors in the original manuscript (for which I thank you, Ronan).

Section 245 : the picture at the bottom should not have a button next to it.

Section 272: "North ? Turn to 65" (Should be 365)

Section 275: "North ? Turn to 6" (Should be 16)

Section 363: "[...] turn to 351 [...]" (Should be 35)

Ronan plans to release it as a paperback, so I wish him the best of luck with it.