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Scott Lynch's GENTLEMAN BASTARD series optioned for film

Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series has been optioned for film by Phoenix Pictures, it has been announced.

Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series got off to a roaring start with The Lies of Locke Lamora in 2006. Since then, two more books have been published: Red Seas Under Red Skies (2007) and The Republic of Thieves (2013). Four more books in the series are projected, with The Thorn of Emberlain having been delayed several times but hoped for release in late 2019 or early 2020.

Phoenix Pictures have produced a number of notable movies over the years, including The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Apt Pupil (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Shutter Island (2010) and Black Swan (2010).

This is only an option and there is no major studio involvement, but this is a solid first step to getting the books on screen. It'll be interesting to see how this develops.

The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Magic is losing its power throughout Earthsea. Ged, now the Archmage of Roke, decides to investigate and embarks on a fateful voyage which will take him to distant corners of the archipelago. He is accompanied by Arren, Prince of Enlad, a young man who is also seeking his own destiny and fulfilment.

The Farthest Shore (1972) concludes the original Earthsea trilogy, which was never meant to be a trilogy; Le Guin started work soon afterwards on a fourth book, Tehanu, but for various reasons it was delayed and not completed and published until 1990. Still, as a wrapping-up of storylines and character arcs from the three books it does thematically feel like the ending of a series.

At its core, The Farthest Shore is the story of confronting one's own demons and recognising the consequences for poor choices. In this sense the book feels like an echo of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), the first novel in the series. In that novel Ged unleashes a dark shadow of himself into the world and has to find and confront it, which he eventually does at great cost. In The Farthest Shore the threat is more traditional, with Ged having acquired a nemesis in his adventures who now seeks revenge on Ged and domination over all the lands of Earthsea. In terms of the standard, trope-filled fantasy narrative, The Farthest Shore is the most traditional book in the series, with a callow young youth hero (Arren) learning wisdom from his mentor (Ged), who seeks out the enemy who would become a dark lord.

But this is a crude, reductionist reading of the story. As with the earlier Earthsea books and indeed much of Le Guin's work, the tone is melancholy rather than celebratory. Ged is a much older man than the last time we saw him and any hope that he may have found a life of happiness with Tenar (the protagonist of The Tombs of Atuan) appears to have been dashed. His life has been filled with great accomplishments and deeds, but Ged seems decidedly unhappy and bowed with the weight of responsibility. The decision to leave these behind and strike out himself in search of the answer to the mysteries afflicting the islands is clearly joyous. This novel, then, is the story of Ged resolving the lingering issues of his childhood and trying to find a way of achieving happiness in middle and older age; The Farthest Shore may therefore be the quintessential mid-life crisis novel, but with dragons.

As usual, Le Guin's inventiveness with worldbuilding and striking prose makes for an atmospheric and at times haunting story. Her characters are interesting, complex figures, although Arren occasionally risks blandness compared to Ged, his enemy and the dragons. The Tombs of Atuan was interesting in that it presented Ged solely from Tenar's point of view and gave us the external image of the character we spent all of A Wizard of Earthsea getting to know. The Farthest Shore gives us both, with Arren's view of Ged contrasting with Ged's own, less awe-inspired reflections.

This is therefore a sombre and at times dark book, but also one that is ultimately life-affirming, ending on a note that gives Ged and Earthsea hope for a much better future.

The Farthest Shore (****½) wraps up the opening Earthsea trilogy in fine, if occasionally maudlin, form. It is available now in the UK and USA as part of The Books of Earthsea omnibus edition.

GAME OF THRONES Season 8 gets air date

The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones will begin airing on 14 April 2019, HBO have announced.

The final season of Game of Thrones consists of just six episodes, although these are all expected to be at least partially longer than the standard 50-odd minutes in length. Assuming no mid-season breaks, this means that the last-ever Game of Thrones episode will air on 19 May 2019.

The last season of Thrones will be written by Dave Hill (episode 1), Bryan Cogman (episode 2) and the team of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (episodes 3-6). It will be directed by David Nutter (episodes 1, 2 and 4) and Benioff & Weiss (episode 6), with Miguel Sapochnik handling the apparently "big" third and fifth episodes.

The season may mark the end of Game of Thrones, but not the franchise as a whole. HBO are already developing a spin-off prequel series, with the working title The Long Night, which has a pilot in pre-production.

CBS commissions fourth STAR TREK TV series

CBS All Access has commissioned its fourth Star Trek TV series, this time a live-action spin-off series focusing on Section 31. Michelle Yeoh will star, reprising her role as the Mirror Universe version of Phillipa Georgiou. As established in Star Trek: Discovery's first season, Georgiou was the Emperor of the Terran Empire in that universe and was brought into the "prime" universe and left there, after helping the crew of the Discovery end a war with the Klingons.

Despite Discovery's own relative youth - the show's second season only starts airing next week - it has already spawned two other spin-off shows. A series set 20 years after Star Trek: Voyager and the movie Nemesis is in pre-production and sees Patrick Stewart reprising his role as Jean-Luc Picard. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon is on the writing team for that series, which promises to be interesting. Apparently it is currently planned as a mini-series with the potential to spawn a further series if it is a success (although the long-term commitment of Stewart - who turns 79 this year - is unclear). An animated series called Lower Decks is also in pre-production.

The news of Michelle Yeoh starring in a new TV show - Star Trek or otherwise - is very interesting and welcome, although there is also a feeling that perhaps CBS is running before it can walk by introducing so many projects so quickly, before Discovery itself is a proven long-term success. Still, it'll be interesting to see what comes of these shows.

Board Game Catch-Up #2

Following on from the previous board game catchup, here’s a few more games I’ve managed to try out in the last few months. 

X-Wing Miniatures
Fantasy Flight Games

This is a pretty straightforward game: one player has X-wings, the other has TIE fighters (approximately three million expansions are available to change this up, of course) and they fly around a board trying to shoot each other. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail and sometimes they crash into an asteroid or one another in a somewhat anti-climactic fashion.

There is a phenomenon in board gaming called “spectacle gaming”, where the quality of the gameplay itself is rendered irrelevant by how beautiful the miniatures are and how cool they look sitting on the table. X-Wing Miniatures certainly fits into this bracket: the pre-painted spaceships are gorgeous and it’s fun moving them around the board. It’s less fun when your game has been going on for ten minutes and no-one’s managed to hit one another yet because of the dice rolls, or the game ends because someone’s flown their X-wing into an asteroid and can’t avoid it because space in the Star Wars universe isn’t three-dimensional, apparently.

I was a bit disappointed by this one, but the good thing about it is that it’s been enormously popular, meaning the model runs are large enough to make the models very well-priced, so if you want Star Wars ships on your shelves for decorative purposes instead (or perhaps to illustrate a roleplaying campaign), this is one of the best ways of doing that. I would be intrigued to give Armada (which is this game scaled up with capital ships) a go, as I suspect the rules work far better with slower ships, firing arcs and other fun elements from big ship combat. 

Zombiecide: Black Plague

CMON Games/Guillotine Games

Most zombie games employ clever mechanics to make for games of gut-wrenching terror and tension. Zombiecide: Black Plague has no truck with this and allows your team of heroes to run around annihilating zombies like there is no tomorrow. This is basically Hero Quest with zombies and that’s enormous amounts of fun up to a point, when the game starts feeling a little repetitive and a bit too easy. A fun and good-looking game, but not one I’d rush out to buy.

Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Ragnarok Publications

An amusing card game designed by fantasy author Mark Lawrence, with guest flavour text from authors including Robin Hobb and Wesley Chu. Basically the four horsemen of the apocalypse are rolling into town and the players have to organise things so that they are left standing rather than the other players. There’s some great tension and ideas here, but the game feels a little fiddly in the rules and the quality of the cards could be a lot better, especially given the price. Diverting but not essential.

Exploding Kittens
Ad Magic/ADC Blackfire

One of the biggest Kickstarter successes of recent years, this is fast-paced comical card game where there are kittens primed to explode and players have to avoid getting blown up by them using a battery of comical cards designed for this purpose. The game is funny (in a dark kind of way), with great artwork from the Oatmeal team and allows for some interesting strategy, although it’s still a relatively lightweight game. Good for kids, parties and after-meal entertainment.

BattleLore 

Fantasy Flight Games 

A fantasy take on Richard Borg’s Command & Colours system (also used in Memoir ’44, which we discussed last time and Battles of Westeros, see below), which adds magic, gryphons and undead to the classic C&C gameplay. This is a handsome-looking game with great production quality and some added tactical depth to the C&C rules which makes for a more interesting game, but also a somewhat-longer playing one. This is a very fine game but it does sacrifice one of the main appeals of Memoir ’44, the fast setup and playing time, in favour of somewhat more depth, which arguably it doesn’t quite achieve. As usual, there are also a lot of fairly expensive expansions which you really need to keep the variety and interest up. The game has recently gone out of print, effectively replaced by the somewhat more generic Runewars Miniatures Game, which is a shame.

Fallout: Wasteland Warfare
Modiphius Entertainment

Wasteland Warfare is the second tabletop game based on the Fallout video game, following on from Fantasy Flight’s decidedly underwhelming board game from 2017. Wasteland Warfare is unapologetically a tabletop miniatures wargame whose primary goal is to sell an absolute ton of add-on models, but it cleverly includes enough stuff in the base box to actually work very well as a standalone board game (especially if you access the fan community to download more scenarios and missions). There’s a lot of fun to be had here, especially the mission objectives which are quite varied, but beware getting sucked into the money pit of spending lots of cash on awesome models.

The rules are quite decent (and a major round of applause for including range tokens in the box instead of asking people to bust out rulers and measuring tape), although I think ultimately the game might be more useful as the miniatures component of a roleplaying campaign, with Modiphius rumoured to be working on an RPG behind the scenes. 

Axis & Allies: Zombies

Avalon Hill/Hasbro 

Axis & Allies: Zombies is a variant of the classic WW2 board game which adds zombies to the mix. This initially appears to be gimmicky as hell, but the game remarkably uses the idea to really mix the game up, causing massive land battles to take place where normally there is no combat at all in a regular game (such as the North and South American mainland, or in Africa). The result is a game that overcomes Axis & Allies’ perennial problem – the predictable opening moves of a standard game – and adds fresh life to an old favourite. The game is also excellent value for money, as you can play it as Axis & Allies 1941 (the base “introductory” version of the game) or Axis & Allies & Zombies, and it also includes a deck of cards for use with Axis & Allies 1942 (the current “standard” version of the game) to add zombies to that version as well. An unexpectedly strong game.

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu Z-Man Games

Do you like Pandemic? Do like Lovecraft’s books? Why not mix the two together? This also sounds a bit gimmicky, but the revamping of the Pandemic rules to account of hordes of cultists and shoggoth running around works really well, with you now having to move around several classic Lovecraft locations shutting down portals instead of curing the virus, with the “outbreak” cards instead replaced by a different Old One arising, their influence impacting on the game in different ways.

Rather than being a silly mash-up game, it’s one that cleverly rewrites the rules to accommodate the theme and is a different enough game to warrant some table time alongside standard Pandemic. Nicely recommended.

878: Vikings 

Academy Games

t’s 878 AD and the kingdoms of England are being overrun by invading Danes. It falls to King Alfred of Wessex to unite the people and rally large armies to throw back the Danes into the sea. The result is an excellent team game of strategy. Team games are surprisingly rare in modern board games, which tend to be either co-op (everyone versus the game mechanics) or competitive (everyone vs everyone), with teams often being alliances of convenience with backstabbing not uncommon (see A Game of Thrones: The Board Game or Twilight Imperium). 878 has two permanent alliances with the two players on each side cooperating (to the point of moving each other’s units around) and using their unique faction abilities to bolster themselves on the field of battle.

The result is a fast-moving strategy game with lots of interesting twists and is relatively straightforward and easy to understand.

The Expanse
WizKids

Based on the TV show and James S.A. Corey’s novel series, the Expanse board game reflects the space opera influences of its inspiration by…being a worker placement Eurogame?

The Expanse is one of the odder games based on a licenced property to emerge recently. Each player controls one of the four major factions from the TV show and books (Earth, Mars, the OPA and Protogen) and seeks to build up influence over individual planets, bases and their orbital spaces. Space battles aren’t a key part of the game, although it is possible to build new warships and blow up opponent ships, with instead the focus being on point-scoring. In this manner the game is reminiscent of Catan, Ticket to Ride or Lords of Waterdeep. However, the game’s rather poorly-explained rules make it harder to recommend than those games, which are all faster to setup and play and work the theme into the gameplay much more successfully. The Expanse's rather poor production values - a bland board and murky photography from the show - also feel a bit of a letdown given the game's not-inconsiderable cost.

Still, once the rules were better-understood the game becomes a lot more enjoyable to play, and there are some nice twists on the standard worker placement paradigm, such as scoring only when one of the scoring cards pops up. This makes timing incredibly important in the game, and knowing when to make certain events to happen for maximum impact. It’s still a somewhat fiddly game, it urgently needs a new and better-written rulebook and the theme feels almost incidental (the Rocinante crew “wild card” is rather underwhelming), but there’s enough going on here to make it worthwhile. 

Ticket to Ride: New York

Days of Wonder

Ticket to Ride is one of the very best light or intro boardgames around, a strong title with a fun competitive streak. There are numerous expansions and revisions of the core game, mostly bringing the game to different countries or continents and ramping up the complexity, but New York does the opposite: it streamlines the game right down and the scale with it, being set on a small board depicting New York City.

Ticket to Ride is a pretty light game anyway, so a streamlined version seems redundant. But New York still works, being a fun and small game which works perfectly as a travel game, something you can bust out on a train journey. You can get a game done in under 20 minutes and it's very enjoyable. For home gaming, it's rather unnecessary (and leaves you wanting to play the original Ticket to Ride) but as a travel game it's fun and also impressively cheap.

Battles of Westeros 

Fantasy Flight Games

Yet another game employing Richard Borg’s Command & Colours system, this time in the world of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The box proclaims this to be “a BattleLore game,” which is quite thoroughly misleading, as the game has a very different ruleset and is not compatible with BattleLore at all.

This game is worthy of a deeper dive at some point, but briefly this game changes the traditional C&C rules by dumping the three sector approach (where the board is divided between a centre and two flanks) and instead making everything about the leaders. Each faction has at least 2 leader characters who are present on the battlefield and who exert control over a “zone of command” around them. Rather than ordering units in each sector, you instead order units within the zone of command. The game also randomly generates (via dice) command tokens which you can use to order remote units on the battlefield outside any commander’s zone of command.

This approach is then given further depth by each commander having special tactics cards which are mixed into the standard command deck, which adds tremendous variety to the game and to each battle.

This surprisingly elegant system immediately addresses the primary criticisms of the earlier C&C games (that they are too reliant on the right cards coming up) by giving each player much more control over the cards they can use and where they can use them on the battlefield. It also creates more interesting choices as your leaders are also combat units in their own right, but if they are defeated on the field, they can no longer issue orders, so you have to decide between throwing them into the fray or holding them back. The result is much greater and more interesting tactical decisions.

On the downside the game is rather fiddly: you have to manually glue the figures into their bases, there’s a lot of unnecessary tokens and the core mechanic of twisting the units’ flags around after they’ve moved will very quickly result in broken flag poles and flags. I just used fire tokens instead to show when each unit had been activated, which was far easier and quicker.

This game has gone out of print, unfortunately, effectively replaced by CMON Games’ A Song of Ice and Fire Miniatures Game, which has much more impressive miniatures but decidedly less engaging rules. Snap up Battles of Westeros (and its expansions) whilst you can.

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Stellan Skarsgård cast as Baron Harkonnen in the new DUNE movie

Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård has joined the rapidly-filling cast for Denis Villeneuve's two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel Dune.

Skarsgård will be playing the primary villain of the novel, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The ruler of the dark, industrial world of Giedi Prime and the sworn nemesis of Duke Leto Atreides, Vladimir Harkonnen is a debauched, cruel and monstrous tyrant, but also a clever and manipulative one.

Skarsgård is best-known for playing Bootstrap Bill Turner in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Bill Anderson in Mamma Mia! and its recent sequel, and Dr. Erik Selvig in four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies (Thor, The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World and The Avengers: Age of Ultron).

Skarsgård joins Dave Bautista - who will be playing his nephew, Rabban - Timothée Chalamet, who is playing Paul Atreides, and Rebecca Ferguson, who is playing Jessica Atreides.

It is anticipated that the first Dune movie will shoot later this year for a likely 2021 release.

GAME OF THRONES prequel series announces more castmembers

HBO has confirmed some additional cast and crew for the Game of Thrones prequel spin-off show that is due to start shooting imminently.

The series, provisionally entitled The Long Night, takes place thousands of years before the events of its predecessor and chronicles the descent of Westeros from the glory of the Age of Heroes into the terrors of the Long Night, when the White Walkers appeared for the first time and the Night's Watch was founded.

HBO previously confirmed that Naomi Watts and Josh Whitehouse would be starring in the show, whilst Jane Goldman will be working on the series as head writer and showrunner. To that they have added Naomi Ackie, Denise Gough, Jamie Campbell Bower, Sheila Atim, Ivanno Jeremiah, Georgie Henley, Alex Sharp and Tony Regbo.

Ackie is an up-and-coming actress who attracted attention for her role in Idris Elba's directorial debut, Yardie. She also has a role in the upcoming Star Wars: Episode IX. Tony Regbo has been a semi-regular on The Last Kingdom, playing Æthelred, Lord of Mercia in Seasons 2 and 3.

Jame Campbell Bower is an interesting addition. He played the role of Ser Waymar Royce in the original 2009 pilot for Game of Thrones, but was unable to reprise the role for the series proper, as he had been cast as King Arthur in Starz's short-lived Camelot series. The role was recast with Rob Ostlere playing the (short-lived, as he dies before the title credits begin) role.

HBO have also confirmed that British director S.J. Clarkson will be directing the pilot. She has shot episodes of series including The Defenders, Jessica Jones, Orange is the New Black, Banshee, Dexter, Heroes and Life on Mars. She is also provisionally booked to shoot the fourth Star Trek movie to be produced by J.J. Abams, although the fate of that film remains unclear due to an ongoing cast payment dispute.

The pilot episode for the new series will shoot shortly, with HBO due to make a decision on the project in the summer or winter. If greenlit, production would resume with an air to the show launching in mid or late 2020.

Game of Thrones' eighth and final season will air in April 2019, consisting of six episodes, although each episode is expected to be significantly longer than normal.

Dave Bautista cast in the new film version of DUNE

Guardians of the Galaxy actor Dave Bautista has signed on to Denis Villeneuve's two-part movie adaptation of Frank Herbert's seminal novel Dune.

Bautista will be playing the role of the Beast Rabban, the nephew of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the story's primary villain. Rabban is a brutal, sadistic murderer who is placed in charge of spice mining operations on the planet Arrakis by his uncle, resulting in a reign of terror that helps spur an uprising by the natives.

The film marks Bautista's second project with Villeneuve, having previously played the small but memorable role of Sapper Morton in Blade Runner 2049. It also marks Bautista's latest foray into genre fiction, having previously starred in films such as The Scorpion King 3 and Riddick.

The movie has already cast Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides and Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica Atreides, with cinematographer Greig Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty, Lion, Star Wars: Rogue One) also on board. Villeneuve, whose previous two movies Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 were highly critically-acclaimed, is hoping to adapt at least the first novel in the Dune saga and possibly more of the later books if the first two are a success.

Legendary Pictures are producing for a likely 2021 release date. This will be the third adaptation of the novel, following on from David Lynch's 1984 movie and a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series in 2000, both of which ran into problems with either time (in the former's case) or money (in the latter's). Third time, hopefully, will be the charm.

Night of Knives by Ian Cameron Esslemont

The Malazan Empire is expanding in all directions, consolidating its control of the Seven Cities subcontinent whilst its armies fight a grinding war of attrition on Genabackis against the Crimson Guard and their allies and an ugly stalemate develops on the continent of Korelri. The Empire's expansion has carried the glory and centre of attention away from the place where it was founded, the island of Malaz located off the coast of the Quon Tali continent. The empire was born on Malaz Island, but the empire has grown up and moved out of home. Yet, on the night of a mysterious convergence known as the Shadow Moon, this backwater city once again becomes the centre of attention...



Night of Knives was the first novel written by Ian Cameron Esslemont, set in the world he had co-created with his friend Steven Erikson for roleplaying. The original draft of the novel was written in 1987 but it wouldn't be published (somewhat revised) until 2004, when Erikson was already five books deep into his Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Night of Knives is therefore an odd book, with a different author's viewpoint on a complex fantasy setting. It also kicks off Esslemont's own six-volume Malazan Empire series and acts as a prequel to the entire saga, telling the story of the ill-fated night of the Shadow Moon and what happened to Kellanved and Dancer.

Although, to be honest, it doesn't really, as that momentous event takes place mostly off-stage (and I suspect we won't find out what really happened until Esslemont wraps up his Path to Ascendancy prequel series). Instead, the novel focus on a number of different characters in Malaz City on the night of an ill-omened convergence of magical forces. Our main characters are Kiska, a young thief so desperate to escape the boring island that she even courts joining the Claw, and Temper, a formidable warrior having to hide his true history from his comrades.

Night of Knives is a strange and expectation-defying book. It's strangely minimalist, with sparse descriptions and laidback prose (and a modest page count) that feels very different to Erikson's dense, multi-layered and yak-stunning doorstoppers. It's also not the best book to read without context. Back when I first read the novel, midway through the Malazan Book of the Fallen's release cycle, Night of Knives felt like a viable alternate place to start the series, being much easier to read than Gardens of the Moon. However, on this reread the book felt a lot more random and lacking in background detail. Without having read Erikson's novels first, I'm not sure it's really clear what the hell is going on at any given moment in the book. Temper's backstory also feels really meaningless without the reader knowing who his former commanding officer is.

It's also an odd book in that it sets up multiple awesome confrontations which then happen off-page: Kellanved and Dancer meeting their fate and an awe-inspiring magical battle between Tayschrenn and the Stormriders are both mighty events, but our viewpoint characters manage to miss them both.

On a character level, the book is better in that it establishes Temper and Kiska (who go on to play a role in both Erikson and Esslemont's subsequent novels, particularly The Bonehunters and Return of the Crimson Guard) well, the story is moody and atmospheric, and there's a sense of wandering into a friend's D&D campaign when it's half over and only just about following what's going on but enjoying the action and exploding magical hijinks anyway. Looking at the book from the perspective of having read all twenty published novels in the combined Erikson/Esslemont series (to date), I'm not sure it's a particularly essential read, although certainly not an offensive one.

Night of Knives (***) is a solid but somewhat random first novel which does nicely expand on many plot elements hinted at in Erikson's novels, but does work better when the reader has a more solid grounding in the world from Erikson's books. It is available in the UK and USA now.

Note: The original version of this review was published on 30 August 2007 and can be found here.