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Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 01

Earth, 2099. The eastern seaboard of what was once the United States of America is dominated by a colossal conurbation known as Mega-City One, stretching from Nova Scotia to Florida. Eight hundred million people live in a society that is heavily automated and served by robots. With over 92% unemployment due to automation, people survive by following fads, watching TV and picking fights with their neighbours. With most of the rest of the world reduced to post-nuclear ash, aside from a few other distant mega-cities, this creates a special kind of pressure cooker in the city where crime and stress is rife.

In charge of law and order are the Judges, custodians of the law who can investigate crimes and deliver sentences - even death sentences for serious crimes - on the spot. The system would be in danger of corruption, but one Judge and his utterly implacable loyalty to the law stands as an example to everyone else: Judge Joseph Dredd. Dredd has to tackle not just a full-scale robot uprising in the city and a six-month secondment to the Luna-1 colony on the Moon, but an even more annoying situation: his inadvertent acquisition of a servitor robot called Walter.

Judge Dredd is possibly the single most famous British comic character of all time. Debuting in weekly anthology comic 2000AD with its second issue in March 1977, Dredd has appeared in every single issue since then (as of today, that's 2,471 issues and counting), as well as the monthly Judge Dredd Megazine since 1990. A stoic dispenser of law and order and the owner of the most famous chin in comics, Dredd has been a firm fan favourite in the UK, thanks to his satirical world and cynical outlook. Video games, audio dramas and two movies (one okay, one excellent) have furthered the character's appeal.

If you want to catch up on the extensive Dredd mythos, publishers Rebellion have provided a handy way of doing so. The Complete Case Files aims to collect together every single story featuring the lawman since his inception. I say "handy," rather than "inexpensive" because this is certainly a long-term and pricy endeavour, and one that's ongoing for some time to come. As of last week, The Complete Case Files had reached Volume 49, featuring stories published in 2010.

For total newcomers, this is probably not the place to start. Dredd is best-known for his expansive, massive mega-epic sagas expanding over dozens of issues. Stories like The Cursed Earth, The Day the Law Died, The Apocalypse War, Democracy, The Dead Man, Necropolis and Judgement Day combine action, character development, themes, satire and worldbuilding to superb effect. The problem is that none of those stories are here: The Cursed Earth and The Day the Law Died are both in the second volume, The Apocalypse War is in the fifth, and the rest are some way off.

Volume 01 is instead basically Judge Dredd: The Prototype, or Early Instalment Weirdness: Dredd Edition. The creative team are really working on the fly here, experimenting from story to story with tone, how much serialisation they should be dealing with and how to handle Dredd's character, what there is of it. The tone is definitely whackier and funnier (though still jet-black in its composition) than it can be later on, with Dredd's stoic demeanour often being undercut by extreme social awkwardness, a feature of his character that is downplayed in later years. The worldbuilding is also basically being done ad-hoc: the first story even calls the setting "New York," with NYC only being incorporated into the much vaster and far crazier technourban hellscape of Mega-City One in the next instalment. Early issues also suggest that Judges are relatively rare law enforcers dealing with high-level crimes (or whatever crimes they happen to personally bump into) and there's a "proper" police force working below them, an idea which is dispensed with pretty quickly, whilst Mega-City Three is frequently mentioned before it is replaced by Texas City towards the end of this first volume.

The average quality of the stories is also not that great. You can tell the writers are aiming the stories firmly at 1970s teenage kids who've graduated from The Dandy and The Beano to something more adult, with lots of violence and explosions solving problems, although some stories do have Dredd using his brain more to outsmart his opponents. The majority of the stories in this volume are one-off adventures of the week (and these are much shorter issues than the US norm) with limited or no continuing elements, which makes the flow of reading it feel choppy. There's an awful lot of filler here.

There are a few stories that stand out, though. Robot Wars is the first multi-part, long-running Dredd epic and, though low-key compared to the really big hitters, it does show the advantages of longer-form storytelling. There's more character and world development, and we get our first memorable entry to Dredd's formidable rogue's gallery, with the renegade robot Call-Me-Kenneth. Unfortunately this story also lands Dredd with his lisp-inflicted comic sidekick, Walter the Wobot, who is Code Jar-Jar in terms of annoyance levels. His appearances become more sporadic over time, but he is very present in this volume, which can be trying. The volume even collects a series of one-page adventures starring Walter that 2000AD ran for a while, which is both laudable from a completionist point of view and intensely irritating from literally any other (fortunately, readers can simply ignore those stories).

Another early highlight is The Academy of Law, which sees Dredd gain a protege in the form of trainee Judge Giant. This story is the first to delve into the worldbuilding of the Justice Department, the gruelling twenty-year training every cadet must undergo, and how Dredd is very much not a typical Judge. Oddly, Giant doesn't show up again in this collection, but does later become a recurring character.

The most accomplished single story in the collection is The Return of Rico, in which Dredd's clone-brother Rico Dredd returns to Mega-City One for revenge after twenty years in maximum security prison on Titan. We get a lot of backstory to the Judges, the city and Dredd himself (who has mostly been an enigma to this point), and find out what happens when Judges go bad and how they are dealt with. It's the most personal character development Dredd gets in the whole collection, and the only story to really engage Dredd's actual humanity (though only briefly).

The collection rounds off with the loose Luna-1 arc, where Dredd is appointed Judge-Marshal to the moon colony for six months. The moon is a lawless frontier, which Dredd is keen to clean up. This arc leans heavily on the "the moon as the Wild West" metaphor which is...odd, but a choice they commit to and keep up. Like most of the collection it's variable, but in the First Luna Olympics we get additional worldbuilding by discovering that there are "Sov-Cities" in Eurasia which are effectively in a new Cold War with the American Mega-Cities (something that becomes hugely important later on). At the end of the arc Dredd returns to Mega-City One and fortunately the stage is set for the significantly stronger Volume 02, which gives us both The Cursed Earth and The Day the Law Died epics.

It has to be said that as an introduction to Judge Dredd, this collection can be pretty rough. Even going into it knowing it's a collection of fifty-year-old action comic strips aimed (predominantly) at teenage boys, with characterisation, worldbuilding and any kind of thematic development happening almost by accident, it can be underwhelming. This collection is Dredd at his most superficial and least interesting as a character, and the satirical take on Mega-City One as a horrible place to live which is effectively governed by fascist cops is not really explored at all, instead being played completely straight.

If you want a proper introduction to Dredd, The Essential Dredd collection is a better (and considerably shorter) place to start. If you've already sampled those and want to take a completionist approach and are going into this with your eyes open, there is some fun to be had with these stories. Robot Wars is interesting and The Return of Rico is the closest the collection comes to an actual classic, but you do have to accept a lot of filler (and a few straight-up terrible) stories to get there.

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 01 (***) is widely available now, with is more than can be said for some of the later collections. An intriguing historical artifact which does set the scene and lay the foundations for the much better stories that follow.

The Complete Case Files Volume 01 contains every Judge Dredd story printed from Prog (issue) 02 to Prog 61 of the comic 2000AD, published from March 1977 to April 1978 (no Judge Dredd story was published in the first issue). The stories are set in the years 2099 and 2100. The writers in this collection are John Wagner, Pat Mills, Robert Flynn, Kelvin Gosnell, Charles Harring, Malcolm Shaw and Joe Collins. The artists in this collection are Carlos Ezquerra, Mick McMahon, Ian Gibson, Brian Bolland, John Cooper and Massimo Belardinelli.

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RED DWARF co-creator returns to franchise after 30 years with new novel

Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant is returning to the franchise he created in 1988 with a new novel. This will mark his first contribution to the Red Dwarf mythos since his 1996 novel Backwards, published three years after his last contributions to the TV series.

Rob Grant created Red Dwarf alongside his writing partner Doug Naylor, expanding on ideas they originally created for the radio comedy sketch Dave Hollins: Space Cadet. Red Dwarf is set three million years in the future, aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf which had to flee out of the Solar system when an onboard radiation leak sterilised the ship. The sole survivor is chicken soup repair technician Dave Lister, sentenced to suspended animation for bringing an unregistered cat on board. The ship's powerful-but-deranged AI, Holly, releases Lister from suspended animation and charts a course back to Earth. To keep Lister sane, Holly resurrects his officious and pedantic superior officer Arnold J. Rimmer (the J stands for Judas) as a hologram. They later discover a humanoid creature who descended and evolved from Lister's cat, and then rescue a sanitation droid named Kryten to round out the crew.

Red Dwarf ran for six seasons on the BBC from 1988 to 1993, with Grant and Naylor also penning two spin-off novels, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989) and Better Than Life (1990). The series became a massive smash hit success. The show went on hiatus after Season 6 due to creative differences between Grant and Naylor and legal troubles for some of the cast. Grant decided to pursue solo original novel projects, penning Colony (2000), Incompetence (2003), Fat (2006) and The Quanderhorn Xperimentations (2019), the latter based on a radio series for BBC Radio 4.

Meanwhile, Doug Naylor returned to helm six further seasons of Red Dwarf, airing intermittently in 1997, 1999, 2009, 2012, 2016 and 2017, followed by a TV movie in 2020. Grant occasionally contributed interviews to various re-releases on DVD and Blu-Ray, but did not seem interested in returning to write new material.

In 2022, a legal battle erupted between Grant and Naylor for control of the property. The events were disputed, with Grant confirming that Naylor was continuing to develop new TV projects with the existing cast whilst he was in talks to develop a new reboot TV series that would allow the franchise to continue indefinitely (with the existing castmembers now ranging from their late fifties to early seventies), whilst Naylor complained he'd been forced out of the loop. In 2023, the two sides confirmed all legal issues had been resolved, with both Grant and Naylor free to continue developing their respective projects.

Grant's project is Red Dwarf: Titan, originally planned as both a TV series and novel. Titan is a low-key reboot of the Red Dwarf premise, deliberately set in a parallel universe to avoid clashing with the established canon (though Red Dwarf's approach to canon and continuity has always been "relaxed," to say the least). This fresh take is set on Red Dwarf whilst it is still in the Solar system, and before the nuclear accident that wipes out the crew. The story starts with the crew of the ship accepting shore leave on Saturn's moon Titan, where Lister and Rimmer reluctantly have to work together after receiving an ominous message from the distant future.

Plans for a possible TV version of the project remain on the backburner, so Grant has proceeded with the novel, cowritten with his recent writing partner Andrew Marshall (best-known as the creator and writer of the hit 1990s sitcom 2point4 Children).

The novel will be published on 16 July 2026 by Gollancz in the UK.

Doug Naylor's plans for further Red Dwarf adventures with the original crew have apparently hit problems caused by the collapse in funding for a lot of UK shows in the post-pandemic era, with Dave (the UK channel that commissioned Seasons 9 through 12 and the 2020 special) no longer able to fund original programming as it used to.

Royal Shakespeare Company confirms launch of GAME OF THRONES: THE MAD KING for Summer 2026

The Royal Shakespeare Company has confirmed it will debut its production Game of Thrones: The Mad King, based on George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels and HBO's Game of Thrones TV series, in June 2026. Tickets will go on sale on 14 April this year.

The Mad King is an immediate prequel to both the novels and TV show. Set fifteen years before the events of the books, the play is set during the great tourney at Harrenhal, where a young Robert Baratheon, his best friend Eddard Stark and Eddard's older brother Brandon and younger sister Lyanna rub shoulders with the likes of Jaime Lannister, Ser Arthur Dayne, Prince Rhaegar Targaryen...and King Aerys II Targaryen, the Mad King, whose increasingly erratic rule threatens the peace of the realm.

The full press release follows:

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) today announces the world premiere of Game of Thrones: The Mad King, a new play based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, adapted by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King will have its world premiere at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in Summer 2026. Priority booking will go on sale from 14 April 2026 with public booking to be announced in April 2026. For early access, visit rsc.org.uk/join to become an RSC member. More information will be announced later in the year. Full details of the upcoming RSC season will be announced on Thursday 26 February 2026.

Enter the world before.

A long winter thaws in Harrenhal, and spring is promised. At a lavish banquet on the eve of a jousting tournament, lovers meet and revellers speculate about who will contend. But in the shadows, amid growing unease at the blood-thirsty actions of the realm’s merciless Mad King, dissenters from his inner circle anxiously advance a treasonous plot. Far away, the drums of battle sound.

Family bonds, ancient prophecies, and the sacred line of succession will be tested in a dangerous campaign for power. Who will survive? Who will rise?

Wars aren’t won by those with most cause, but whose story’s best told.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King is a sweeping new stage epic from the world of George R. R. Martin, written by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke. Spanning the final years before the events of the novels, this powerful drama reveals a legendary chapter of Westerosi history.

Come face to face with familiar characters from the houses Targaryen, Stark, Lannister, Baratheon and Martell and witness the events that set the stage for the world’s most critically acclaimed series.

Executive Producer and creator George R. R. Martin said: “When I first wrote Game of Thrones, I never imagined that it would be anything other than a book. It was a place for my imagination to exist without limits. To my great surprise, it was adapted for a series and viewers have been able to enter the world of my imagination through the medium of television. For my work to now be adapted for the stage is something I did not expect but welcome with great enthusiasm and excitement. Theatre offers something unique. A place for mine and the audience’s imagination to meet and hopefully create something magical.

“For me, the RSC was the obvious choice when thinking about putting a Game of Thrones story on the stage. Shakespeare is the greatest name in English literature, and his plays have been a constant source of inspiration to me and my writing. Not only that, he faced similar challenges in how to put a battle on stage, so we are in good company. It will be thrilling to watch the events of this new play unfold in a live environment. Duncan’s masterful script honours the world completely, and I am so excited for both fans of the series, and perhaps people who have never picked up one of my books, to experience this new story in a theatre.”

Adaptor Duncan Macmillan and director Dominic Cooke said: “The play is a prequel, taking place over a decade before the events of Game of Thrones. A long winter has started to thaw and, for the first time in years, all the great houses come together for a tournament - destined to be the greatest of the age. It feels like a new dawn, full of hope and opportunity. But tournaments always have a darker purpose.

“George’s storytelling is Shakespearean in its scale and its themes - dynastic struggle, ambition, rebellion, madness, prophecy, ill-fated love. From the beginning, Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies have been our primary reference for the ambition of this production, so the RSC feels like a natural home.

“It will be thrilling for us to share this new play with audiences, both those that know and love George’s books and HBO’s series, but also audiences who know nothing and want to come and experience something both beautifully intimate and truly epic.”

RSC Co-Artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey said: “When we first read Duncan’s script, it was immediately apparent how this epic cycle of warring families sits in a continuum with Shakespeare’s history cycles. So it feels like an exciting and apposite marriage between the RSC and Game of Thrones universe.

“Stories of power, ambition and the complexities of succession are evergreen - and this adaptation explores the true nature of authority through the lens of young people grappling with inherited identities. The story will have all the epic qualities audiences would expect from Game of Thrones, but ultimately, it has a very human heart.”

Pinnacle launches DEADLANDS 30th Anniversary Kickstarter

Pinnacle Entertainment has launched the Kickstarter for the 30th Anniversary celebration of their seminal tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands.

Originally launched in late 1996, Deadlands used a novel rules system built for fast, six-shootin' action mixed in with magic and weird science. The game combined different die types with cards for greater randomisation and a whole magic system built around deck-building (this was streamline later on). The game was notable for its setting, which mixed Wild West action, Lovecraftian horror, steampunk science and black comedy. Think of Army of Darkness meets Unforgiven meets The Difference Engine with zombies and you're most of the way there. It's not for nothing that the legendary Bruce Campbell himself provided the introduction for the revised edition of the game in 1999.

The game had a revised edition in 1999, two sequel TTRPG games (Deadlands: Hell on Earth and Deadlands: Lost Colony) and a spin-off miniatures game using a simplified version of the rules, The Great Rail Wars, but an attempt to pivot to the d20 rules system (derived from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition) in 2002 backfired spectacularly and nearly drove the company out of business. Regrouping, the company used The Great Rail Wars rules as the basis for a new, universal rules system, Savage Worlds. The company released new versions of Deadlands for Savage Worlds, namely Deadlands Reloaded in 2006 and Deadlands: The Weird West in 2020. Both have been successful.

For the upcoming 30th Anniversary, Pinnacle decided not to re-release the original game. A 20th Anniversary reissue of the revised edition was released in 2017, and was recently reprinted and should be (for now, anyway) widely available. Instead, they've decided to look to the past of the game but focus on revised material for the current edition of the game.

First up in the Kickstarter package is Deadlands: 30 Years of Games, Grit, & Ghost Rock. This is a history and behind-the-scenes account of the making of the game over three decades, with exclusive new information on various movie and TV adaptations of the property that never quite took off, as well as multiple video games that were in development at one time or another but were cancelled. The book also acts as an art book, collecting most of the cover art for all of Deadlands' various editions and sourcebooks over the three decades. The book also includes the introductions to previous editions by Joe Lansdale, Mike Stackpole and Bruce Campbell, and an account of the time Campbell played the game.

As well as the requisite coins, cards and special dice, the set includes a new rulebook for playing the game. Deadlands: Core Rules combines the Savage Worlds Adventurer's Edition rulebook and the Deadlands: The Weird West corebook into one integrated edition, with irrelevant material from Savage Worlds (i.e. lasers and spaceships) removed and some material from the Deadlands: Weird West Companion added. This creates an all-new starting point for the game which is easier on both the wallet and the brain whilst trying to look up rules and not being able to remember which book they're in. This rule book will be available in a regular edition and a leatherbound special edition.

An additional new book is Deadlands: Rascals, Varmints, & Relics, a combined bestiary and item book collating previous material and adding new information on monsters and items.

The set also includes the Deadlands Accessories Box, which includes a GM's Screen, action deck, ammo tracker, poster map, dice and reference cards, and the Deadlands Starter Set, which includes a simplified "showcase" set of the rules for new players, an adventure called The Cursed Caverns, maps, tokens, pawns, another Action Deck, templates, archetype cards and so forth. 

Available as various add-ons are the extant material for the current edition of the game, including the adventure/campaign books Hell on the High Plains, The Abominable Northwest, Horror at Headstone Hill, Carnage in the Cascades and Night Train, and various map packs and archetype card sets (customisable pregen character cards, basically).

The Kickstarter will be running until 14 March and, predictably, has already been fully funded.

BALDUR'S GATE TV series in development at HBO from LAST OF US team

HBO is developing a TV series based on the Baldur's Gate video game series, set in the Forgotten Realms fantasy world and Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. The TV show will be set shortly after the events of the video game Baldur's Gate III and will see some returning characters from the game alongside new faces.

If Lump the Enlightened is not in the TV show, we riot.

Craig Mazin, the showrunner of The Last of Us and Chernobyl, is lining this up to be his next project once work on the third and now-confirmed-to-be-final season of that show is completed. Mazin will be the main writer, showrunner and producer, with Chris Perkins from Wizards of the Coast serving as consultant. At this stage, none of the team from Larian Studios, who produced Baldur's Gate III, are involved, and it appears that Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood has also not been consulted on the project so far. However, some of the voice cast from the video game may return, either voicing or playing their characters where that makes sense, or in new roles if not.

Mazin, a noted gamer, has completed Baldur's Gate III more than once, having put over 1,000 hours into the game and completing it on the challenging "honour mode." He is also an avid tabletop gamer, having run ongoing D&D campaigns for over fifteen years straight.

Baldur's Gate is apparently designed to share continuity with The Forgotten Realms, the Shawn Levy-produced show in development over at HBO's now (or soon-to-be) sister streamer, Netflix.

With the final season of Last of Us not likely to land before mid-2027, the Baldur's Gate show may be lucky to hit screens before the end of the decade.

Sales of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE surpass 100 million

It's been a long time coming, but sales of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire sequence, perhaps better known by the name of its TV adaptation, HBO's Game of Thrones, have finally and officially passed the 100 million mark.

The Juniper Books rejacketing of the Song of Ice and Fire series.

The news was buried in The Hollywood Reporter's recent article on Martin, although the main focus was elsewhere (yes, The Winds of Winter still isn't out yet, and yes, the fall-out from Martin's public dissatisfaction with House of the Dragon continues to reverberate).

The series started off a little sluggishly, with A Game of Thrones only doing okay on its first publication in August 1996 (the series turns thirty this year) and it taking until the paperback was released before sales picked up, something Martin attributed to the cover quote from fellow fantasy author Robert Jordan, of Wheel of Time fame. Sales and critical acclaim grew with the release of A Clash of Kings in 1998 and A Storm of Swords in 2000. By the time of the release of A Feast for Crows in 2005, sales of the series had approached or exceeded five million. At least twelve million copies had been sold by the time A Dance with Dragons was published and the Game of Thrones TV series launched, both in 2011.

The immense success of Game of Thrones propelled sales of the novels to insane heights. The books reportedly sold a further nine million copies in the first year of the TV show alone (from 2011 to 2012). Sales hit 70 million in 2016 and are believed to have reached 90 million around the time of the pandemic, coinciding with the - contentious in some parts - conclusion of the TV series. With the franchise off the air and no new novel in the mainline series appearing, sales appear to have slowed, although spin-off books The World of Ice and Fire (2014), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015, collecting three earlier-published novellas) and Fire & Blood (2018) all sold extremely well.

Sales of the series appeared to uptick again after House of the Dragon launched to initial success in 2022, and no doubt there has been another sales boost from the successful launch of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms a few weeks ago.

Crossing the 100 million mark puts Martin in rarefied company. In the secondary world/epic fantasy field, he is just behind Sir Terry Pratchett and Robert Jordan, who have both also crossed the 100 million mark in the last few years, though of course J.R.R. Tolkien continues to rule the roost with at least 300 million sales of his various Middle-earth books (and this figure is highly conservative). Stephen King has over 400 million sales, but only around a tenth of those comes from his epic fantasy or at least epic fantasy-adjacent work, the Dark Tower series and Eyes of the Dragon, meaning that Martin may comfortably be the biggest-selling living epic fantasy author (unless you count Harry Potter as epic fantasy, which most don't seem to).

How long he holds onto that crown will be interesting to see. Brandon Sanderson recently passed 50 million books sold, but Sarah J. Maas recently hit 75 million copies sold and is selling books at a staggering rate.

It should also be noted that book sales are famously sluggish in their reporting, with the reporting sometimes trailing the real figures by many years. Martin's actual sales could be a fair bit higher than this number.

If the books continue to generate hit TV shows, we'll likely see a steady increase in sales. Obviously one thing would blast sales through the stratosphere again, but when those winds will blow remains to be seen.

Hugh Cook's epic CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series returns to print

In unexpectedly splendid news, Hugh Cook's idiosyncratic, funny and genuinely inventive Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series, all ten volumes, has been brought back into print. Fans at the r/hughcook subreddit acquired the rights to the series, formed Zenphos Press and have brought the series back as both ebook and print editions.

Hugh Cook was born in 1956 in Billericay, England, but grew up after the age of six in Kiribati. He then moved to New Zealand, where he served in the military. He began writing fiction in the 1970s, publishing his first novel, Plague Summer in 1980. In 1986 he began the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness fantasy series, planned to run to twenty volumes, with two series of equal size, Chronicles of an Age of Wrath and Chronicles of an Age of Heroes, to follow. The series was cancelled after just ten volumes due to disappointing sales.

In 1997 he moved to Yokohama, Japan, and worked on additional books, short stories and poetry. He published the Oceans of Light fantasy trilogy and the standalones To Find and Wake the Dreameri and Bamboo Horses. After suffering a bout of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, he wrote a candid memoir about the experience, Cancer Patient (2005). Unfortunately, the disease returned and he passed away in 2008.

Discussion of his fantasy masterwork was kept alive by both ardent fans and also a new generation of fantasy writes who cited Cook as an inspiration. China Mieville, leading doyen of the New Weird fantasy movement, wrote an introduction for a reprint of the fourth volume in the series, The Walrus and the Warwolf (which Scott Lynch once cited as the greatest title for a fantasy novel of all time). Adrian Tchaikovsky has also revealed himself to be a major fan, penning introductions for two of the books in this reprint run.

A decade ago, I summed up the series in its entry in my History of Fantasy project thusly:

Few could accuse New Zealand novelist Hugh Cook of lacking vision. In 1986 he published The Wizards and the Warriors, the first novel in a series he called Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Cook's plan was for this series to run to twenty volumes, to be followed by two series of equal length, Chronicles of an Age of Wrath and Chronicles of an Age of Heroes. The sixty-book plan was overly ambitious despite Cook's high speed of output, but ultimately he only finished the first half of the first series (ten novels in six years) before it was halted due to lack of sales.

Unusually, the series was not one massive epic story. Instead, it was more episodic with some novels taking place simultaneously alongside others, with events varying depending on who was witnessing or instigating them. The books used unreliable narrators and a prose style that could vary significantly from volume to volume. The books also eschewed a lot of epic fantasy tropes, with the books not following a set chronology and not having a central hero or villain. The books featured whimsical humour and influences from sword and sorcery as well as planetary romance. Some books were reminiscent of the later New Weird movement (Adrian Tchaikovsky, China Mieville and Scott Lynch are big fans). Some books were more like roleplaying games, with Paizo Publishing reprinting one of the volumes, The Walrus and the Warwolf, as part of its Planet Stories line.

After the series concluded (prematurely) Cook published several more books before sadly passing away in 2008 from cancer. His massive mega-series was never finished, but its breadth, vision and general batshit insanity remain intriguing (and echoes, intended or not, of the tonal variations, dark humour and continent-skipping structure can be found in Steven Erikson's Malazan novels).

All ten books in the series are now back in print and available from the local Amazon of your choice and nationality:

1. The Wizards and the Warriors (1986)
2. The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (1987)
3. The Women and the Warlords (1987)
4. The Walrus and the Warwolf (1988)
5. The Wicked and the Witless (1989)
6. The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers (1990)
7. The Wazir and the Witch (1990)
8. The Werewolf and the Wormlord (1991)
9. The Worshippers and the Way (1992)
10. The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster (1992)

Splendid news indeed.

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Dispatch

Robert Robertson III is the third person in his family to take on the persona of "Mecha Man," using a powerful mech suit to fight crime. During one particularly tricky battle, he suffers a crippling defeat to the evil Shroud. His suit is put out of commission, and he is instead recruited to work for the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN) as a dispatcher, using his knowledge of superhero tactics to help the dysfunctional guys and gals of Z-Team work better together. But Robert is also working hard to repair his mech suit and bring Shroud to justice, once and for all.

Twenty-two years ago, veterans of the LucasArts adventure game team regrouped to found Telltale Games, a company dedicated to furthering the adventure game genre, a genre rooted in good writing and storytelling. Thanks to the massive success of their 2012 Walking Dead game, Telltale went on to enjoy a prolonged period of success. Unfortunately, the company ended up over-exploiting their style of gameplay with increasingly limited innovation, and the company almost completely fell apart as disillusioned developers left. One such group of devs founded AdHoc Studio to carry on the Telltale style of gameplay, but also being bolder in how they would approach the genre.

Their first game, Dispatch, has been a deserved, high-profile success. The premise is simple: an ex-hero becomes a dispatcher, basically a 911 (or 999, in the UK) call receiver who determines what help to send. There's a lot of different, competing priorities, forcing the player to make hard choices when they can't solve every single problem simultaneously. This premise also gives the game an interesting structure we haven't quite seen before: a key gameplay loop as well as the interactive storytelling the team had perfected back in the Telltale days.

The game is divided into eight episodes, with each episode usually spanning a day and a night. Each episode has lengthy, high-quality, professionally-animated sequences that look as good as any modern 2D cartoon, as well as gameplay sequences using a map of the area showing where crimes are taking place and what heroes are available to deal with them. The gameplay sequences are relatively basic, but do increase in complexity as the game goes on, with Robert having to not only send heroes to trouble spots but sometimes has to more directly intervene to provide assistance through hacking surveillance networks or disabling the bad guys' tech. As the game goes on, the roster of heroes changes (sometimes due to Robert's actions, such as deciding which under-performing heroes to fire or which potentially useful ones to recruit), and their suite of skills and synergies with other heroes accordingly.

This core gameplay loop is interesting, but perhaps a little under-developed. It feels like you could flesh out these mechanics and make a more in-depth and interesting game entirely out of this stuff, but they wanted to retain their traditional adventure format as well. This requires taking part in conversations, choosing replies which may or may not make characters feel well-disposed towards you, navigating possible romances and trying to make the best calls to bring the team together, rather than driving them apart.

The episodic structure gives the game a pacy feel, with each episode presented as an episode of a TV series, roughly an hour long (a bit more for the finale), with a different story and character focus in each episode whilst also furthering the overall story arc. Plot and backstory revelations follow at a steady beat, with some fun twists to the story and characters. The writing is humorous without being too contrived, and the humour falling on the slightly darker edge of the spectrum is refreshing. There's some smart writing choices, and the old Telltale problem of the game not fully responding too all of your choices granularly is there but not as big an issue. There are several major choices you can make resulting in different endings, different rosters of heroes and even different missions appearing as the game goes along. Voice acting is excellent throughout, as I think is now widely-known, and at a bit under nine hours, the game has a decent length without outstaying its welcome, but is short enough to welcome replays to see other story outcomes.

This is an adventure game where the story is the main focus, rather than the city crime-solving gameplay, and sometimes the latter has a tendency to end just as it's getting interesting, which can grate a little. The game could also perhaps flesh out the team a bit more. As it stands, it feels like three or four of the characters get a ton of development, two or three more get a moderate amount and the rest can feel a little under-used.

But it's hard to criticise Dispatch (****) too much. The game is fun, funny, well-written, well-acted and has a lot of heart, even if it's not a game you're going to be sinking hundreds of hours into. The game is available now on just about every platform going.

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Brandon Sanderson's COSMERE setting picked up for adaptation by Apple TV

Apple TV+ has closed an "unprecedented" deal to bring the Cosmere universe from American fantasy author Brandon Sanderson to the screen. Apple has apparently prioritised the deal and is planning to develop the Mistborn sequence for film and the Stormlight Archive series for television.

Sanderson's Cosmere setting is the home of almost all of his adult, original fantasy fiction. So far he has published seven novels in the Mistborn sequence (with at least six more planned), five in the Stormlight Archive series (with five more planned), and one each in the Elantris and Warbreaker series. He has also released the White Sand graphic novel trilogy in the setting, and the stand-alone novels The Sunlit Man, Isles of the Emberdark, Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. A new standalone Cosmere novel, The Fires of December, will be published this year, and a further Mistborn trilogy is planned for release in 2028-30, before he resumes work on the Stormlight Archive. He also has a further trilogy, called Dragonsteel, planned, which will expand on the setting's expansive backstory. In addition to this he has a short story collection in the setting, Arcanum Unbounded, and several short stories and novellas published since. Sanderson has sold over 50 million copies of his books, and raised almost $100 million in crowdfunding projects related to the Cosmere setting, including the most successful project in Kickstarter history.

The Cosmere setting incorporates numerous planets, each with its own extensive worldbuilding, history, cast of characters and different magic system. These worlds are home to different types of magic, derived from different "shards." In the distant past, all the shards were united as one god or entity, but these were shattered by a catastrophic event. The various books explore what happens when the shards are destroyed or gain new owners, who become gods at the expense of their own souls.

The setting has been optioned for both film and television before, but budgetary concerns seem to have stymied producers on how to get them on screen. Sanderson also seemed to become wary of adaptations after working as an advisor on Amazon's Wheel of Time TV series (Sanderson co-wrote the final three novels in the Wheel of Time series after the original author Robert Jordan passed away, using Jordan's notes and outlines). Sanderson felt that the Wheel of Time TV series made too many unnecessary changes to Jordan's source material and lost a lot of the feel in the story in the process.

Sanderson's deal with Apple suggests he will be more closely involved in the process, and will have more approval over scripts and writing choices. He may also write some scripts himself, and will executive produce all the projects. This level of control is unusual, to say the least.

Apple have already put The Stormlight Archive into development, assigning production company Blue Marble (run by Theresa Kang) to make the project a priority. However, I'd be surprised to see anything on-screen this side of 2028 or, more likely, 2029.