Harry Harrison, You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat: An Interactive Game Book1985 / Ebook / 176 pages / USA
*
So lazy and contemptuous of the "interactive" format – with its perpetual loops, arbitrary reasoning and forced choices – it might actually be a pisstake.
2003 / Ebook / 121 pages / UK
**
An uninterested history and backhanded compliments about the pleb favourite, giving way to liner notes cataloguing personnel and versions when he runs out of things to say. Why didn't he write about something he actually cared about?
Rhys Hughes, Young Tales of the Old Cosmos
2011 / Ebook / 46 pages / UK**
This uncharacteristically banal story cycle of personified celestial bodies and predictable Milky Way puns isn't strong or substantial enough to stand alone, so I don't know why he didn't incorporate it into The World Idiot or something. A couple of subsequent anthologies have taken the bullet and sunk their averages in the process.
Fave: 'The Pink Giant'
2012 / Ebook / 47 pages / Poland
***
Battered chess pieces strewn over surrealist landscapes with unhelpfully cryptic titles. Work it out for yourselves, but you'll have to squint when we start compressing more pictures onto each page towards the end because printing's expensive. Can he do Dizzy Dizzy Dinosaur next?
2013 / Ebook / pages / UK
***
An aspirational children's novel for young psychopaths reliably goes off the rails when a vegan turns out to be from Vega and the horizons of conquest extend across galaxies, the afterlife and cyberspace. Someone should film these, I dare them.
