1968 / Audiobook / 205 pages / USA
***
This mildly subversive fantasy saga might have absorbed me if I'd read it at ten, but today it's only the world-building that did anything for me.
It's better than Harry Potter, but that's a low bar.
It's better than Harry Potter, but that's a low bar.
Steve Jackson, Steve Jackson's Sorcery!: The Shamutanti Hills
1983 / Ebook / 176 pages / UK
****
This is already shaping up to be one of the great gamebook series. Less childish (comparatively) than the parent Fighting Fantasy series and more akin to Lone Wolf, its USP is a spell system that requires buying a companion book to properly get to grips with (crafty), before you proceed to buy the three sequels to finish the game. There's also an unusual realist streak that punishes players for treating it like a video game and not making time for dinner and naps, while at the same time offering a deus ex machina continue screen if you get in a real pickle. I completed it on the fourth try, there are more feindish books out there.
1973-87 (collected 1987) / Ecomic / 72 pages / France
****
It would be too entitled to expect Moebius to write as well as he draws. These darkly comic fantasies get by on mood and spectacle, the adventures of his pterodactyl-riding warrior-rapist dispensing with text altogether.
Faves: 'Arzach,' 'The Detour.'
1992 / Ebook / 136 pages / UK
***
I would have written this off as a calculated Beethoven rip-off. Finding out that that's basically what it is doesn't make me appreciate it any more, but good effort at a defence.
2014 / Ebook / 152 pages / USA
***
I normally listen along with these, but it was too distracting, the guy didn't shut up, so I just trusted that this twitterpated analysis was accurate and the problem must be with me. When he's not topping up a supreme narcissist's ego, there's an interesting essay on the digital world we live in.
