Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I’m obviously using regular in the metafictional sense here but my intentions are pure, I promise.
To kick off this new Golden Age Of Regular Posting, this week’s guest is game designer and writer Andy Chambers! Listing Andy’s credits in their entirety would result in a fatal case of whatever the typing equivalent of severe dry mouth is, but if you’ve ever looked at a Warhammer thing and thought “cool!”, there’s a decent chance he had a hand (or bubonic paw) in it. Cheers Andy! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I’m just finishing a collection of all the Zothique stories by Clark Ashton Smith. A friend tempted me in with one of the stories in the collection, and as we share a love for 1930’s Pulp fantasy I was duly tempted. Wonderful stuff; rich and very evocative prose about dying lands, eldritch horrors and ancient sorcerers (heavy on the Necromancy it must be said). CA Smith was a contemporary of HP Lovecraft and RE Howard and his writing embodies the same exotic richness as Howard but with similar elements (and uncomfortably 1930’s outlooks at times), but very different outcomes, to Conan adventures. I’ve been enjoying it so much I’ve found myself questioning how I got this far through life without reading it before.
It might be a pretention of age but you start to see connections and inspirations wending their way through media you enjoy more and more. In Zothique’s example you can see the preceding influence of Lord Dunsany from the turn of the century, and a clear inspiration to Jack Vance in the 50’s and 60’s picking up the same torch with his Tales Of The Dying Earth series. Follow that through and you get into the inspirations that gave us Forgotten Realms and early Dungeons And Dragons. You also get to Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun Quadri-logy , which was a big inspiration for me when I was working on the Warhammer 40,000 universe for Games Workshop back in the 90’s.
What did you last read?
The last thing I read prior to Zothique was a novelette called A Colder War by Charles Stross. A short but very entertaining narrative on the outcome of a US/USSR Cold War with the strategy of mutually assured destruction enforced via notably different means than solely by nuclear weapons. I don’t want to say any more about it as it’s all about creeping realisations from incomplete knowledge, and it would be a crime to spoil any of it. Recommended as a short read though!
What are you eyeing up next?
Soldier of Arete by Gene Wolfe. I’ve read a lot of Gene Wolfe down the years and the Book Of The New Sun in particular was a big inspiration for me when I was starting out trying to build weird and wonderful worlds. The love of archaic language in The Book Of The New Sun (not rifle, Jezzail. Not cannon, demi-culverin) really left a mark on me and the creatives I worked with, it showed us something about adding favour and texture to imaginary places and events just with the words you use to describe them. Somehow, much like Zothique, Soldier of Arete has evaded me until now, even though I read the next book in the trilogy a while back.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
That always seems to come back to Tolkien and The Lord Of The Rings in my head, but I suspect that’s because Peter Jackson so ably evoked many of them in his movies over (yikes) twenty years ago that it’s made the words come to life in pictures(‘Death!’) so that feels like a cop out. So I’ll split the difference by having a quote and an unseen scene. For the quote the one that popped into my head immediately was the opening line of Neuromancer by William Gibson, the OG Cyberpunkmeister himself, ‘The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ even though it’s rather lost impact now tv technology has moved forward. One of my favourite scenes is the closing ones in Iain M Banks’ Player Of Games when the Culture representative is really finally shown as a playing piece in the unfolding game, rather than the player he believes himself to be all the way through it.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
First hand accounts and autobiographies, some are very interesting and entertaining reads in their own right. I read Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean a little while back and it was such a fun read and Maclean had such an interesting career I found myself recommending it to others. Another excellent read I often recommend is The Big Show by Pierre Clostermann, an evocatively written personal account by WW2 fighter pilot. Most recently it’s been the Strugatsky brothers’ brand of post War Soviet sci-fi books; Roadside Picnic and Monday Begins Of Saturday in particular.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
There’s actually a couple of Jack Vance books that are ripe for it; Planet Of Adventure (multiple competing alien races on the same world, tech variation but no dominance) or the Dragonmasters for the sheer diversity of ‘dragon’ and human troop types in a nice, feudalistic battle-ready environment. I am, of course, working on the assumption that ‘someone’ in this case is me. The Expanse would be fantastic as a game or games, but definitely best served with a proper digital title at the strategic and/or roleplaying levels, something I hope I live long enough to see someday.
And that’s me with a massive grin on my face after learning that my beloved Skaven Warplock Jezzails were likely inspired by Gene Wolfe. As for personal recommendations, I’ve been binging Eliza Clark’s two novels after finishing her short story collection She’s Always Hungry. I’ve also found a new all-timer favourite film in Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin. In tabletop, I recommend nabbing Warlord’s Judge Dredd skirmish game (which Andy worked on) before it goes out of print. Its campaign rules feature a post-match crime tally with corresponding Iso-Cube sentences, which is a neat touch.
I’m going on a mass guest booking email spree tommorow so do let me know who you’d like see in the column in the coming months. Book for now!