Pax Britannia - New Reviews!

Even though the first Pax Britannia novel was published almost ten years ago, some people are still coming to the series for the first time. And when it's someone who enjoys the stories they devour the lot pretty quickly, thanks to the wonder of eBooks.

One such reader is Bob Marlowe who has recently posted reviews of all the Pax Britannia books - Al Ewing's as well as mine - and here's what he has to say about them.

Unnatural History
"A readable style which flows along nicely with enjoyable characters... Very enjoyable evocation of a pulp style and there are plenty more to come. A recommended read."

Leviathan Rising
"Here we have a cocktail of Agatha Christie, Titanic, The Poseidon Adventure, the X-Files and dear old Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and with Green's enjoyable pulpy style, it's a good read."

Human Nature
"The story itself is quite simple but well structured (things in the prologue that seem irrelevant are revisited later) and the good pulpy style of Green makes for a well paced roller coaster."

Evolution Expects
"As ever, a cocktail of monsters, steam punk and nods to well know characters & stories etc. including this time a Bond like board meeting scene, a character named Brundle after the 1987 version of The Fly and a bit of Talons of Weng Chiang amongst others... This series shows no signs of letting up, both novel and novella are a well-paced read, guaranteed to liven up any journey to work."

Blood Royal
"The writing is of the usual high standard with a monster infested St Paul's Cathedral especially well described... I love this series -and am sad I've less than halfway to go to the end."

Dark Side
"I had the feeling Jonathan Green had as much fun writing this as I had reading it. There's the usual tributes to films, book et al that he's enjoyed , the First men in the Moon and Voyage dans la Lune and every chapter takes its name from a film e.g. The First Men in the Moon, Sphere... These stories will never be on the Booker Prize shortlist but the Booker winners I've read were never this much fun!"

Anno Frankenstein
"Naturally this is a blockbuster mix that we have come to expect of monsters and set pieces and does not disappoint, Green handling all the ingredients with his usual skill."

Time's Arrow
"The influences here are Edgar Allen Poe's Murder in the Rue Morgue, The Island of Dr Moreau and The Phantom of the Opera, characters names including Moreau and Leroux. The new characters work well and the story races along at Green's usual pace."

If you're yet to sample the delights of the Pax Britannia steampunk universe, you can buy the books and eBooks here.

The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus - Vol. 2... OUT TODAY!

I love the smell of Steampunk in the morning! That's right, today is new book day - again!

I've actually got three books out this week, and they're all Steampunk-related - Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland the gamebook, the Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland Colouring Book, and today's release from Abaddon Books, The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus Volume 2!

In his ongoing adventures in the services of the Empire, Ulysses Quicksilver - hero and dandy - is increasingly confronted with the darkness at the heart of Britannia.

This worthy tome collects three tales of desperation:

The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus - Volume 2

Look what arrived in the post today!

Feel better with Feelgood's

Remember that particular tag line from Evolution Expects, my fourth Ulysses Quicksilver Pax Britannia novel? Or perhaps you remember this?

Well, if you're coming along to the Litarium at Steampunk Doncaster this weekend, you could pick up some of Dr Feelgood's Tonic Stout Fudge!

Yes, you read that right - fudge! That you can eat! (And that doesn't do this to you.) It's been made especially for me for this event by Empire Edibles, so make sure you grab some early before it all sells out!

Ulysses Quicksilver, Hero of the Empire!

Ulysses Quicksilver and his various adventures have inspired a number of artists to produce their take on the character. The latest of them is Kit Cox who recently produced a portrait of the Hero of the Empire and another of Ulysses' loyal sidekick Nimrod, the bare-knuckle boxing butler.

Simon Parr (a.k.a. Pye Parr) has produced several pictures of Ulysses and Nimrod as well. Here are just a few of them.

And then there's Pax Britannia cover artist Mark Harrison's take on the character, most easily seen on the cover of Anno Frankenstein.

There are also a growing number of illustrations of masked vigilante Spring-Heeled Jack. The most recent is by that gentleman caricaturist Kit Cox again but Mark Harrison also produced a portrait of the character back when I was writing Evolution Expects.

Evolution Expects revisited

Caricaturist, raconteur and vaudevillian extraordinaire Kit Cox (a.k.a. Major Jack Union) has put his artistic skills to good use and realised a scene from my fourth Ulysses Quicksilver Pax Britannia novel Evolution Expects. And here it is...

You can follow the latest exploits of Jack Union, Victorian Monster Hunter, here.

Kit is also currently taking commissions to produce cartoon caricature for discerning clients. If you would like him to do one for you, you can contact him here.

Everything's Better With Monkeys

I only discovered the other day that there is an actual recognised writing trope 'Everything's Better With Monkeys'. I didn't realise this when I wrote Evolution Expects (which is definitely enhanced by the appearance of the primates in the House of Monkeys) nor when I started plotting Time's Arrow (of which Part 1 is soooo nearly finished). But Time's Arrow is also improved by the addition of a primate - in this case a 800lb cybernetically-adapted silverback gorilla that goes by the name of Ishmael.

And you can meet Ishmael and his friends come October when Time's Arrow Part 1 is released in eBook form by Abaddon Books. Just don't call him a monkey, otherwise something like this is liable to happen...

And because everything's better with monkeys, I no longer wish to be known as a freelance writer. From now on I'm going to introduce myself to people at parties as a certified penmonkey!

Pax Britannia: Evolution Expects on Scrolls

At the SFX Weekender back in February I was interviewed by Dion Winton-Polak for the Scrolls podcast. (You can read about it here.)

Well I get a mention on the most recent Scrolls podcast too, over at the Geek Syndicate. The subject under discussion is 'Heroes' and Ulysses Quicksilver, along with my fourth Pax Britannia adventure Evolution Expects gets an honourable mention.

UQ is described as 'a wonderfully built character' whilst my writing is described as 'like watching a film', which is very flattery and very satisfying to hear.

If you want to listen to the podcast yourself, follow this link and listen from about 44 minutes in.

Pax Britannia - now available on Kindle

The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus (Vol.1) - review round-up

The first omnibus of my Pax Britannia novels has been getting some good press of late - better than some of the books that appear within it received when they first came out. (Go figure.)

Anyway, here are just some of the very nice things some very nice people are saying.*

First up there's this from the Midwest Book Review:

The Ulysses Quicksilver series is a land of a unique world with many twists. "The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus" will prove an excellent way to break readers into this series, a steampunk world where Queen Victoria is nearing a two century reign, diving into the deep sea is a vacation, and where even the thieves are a bit off kilter. A riveting read of three novels that should definitely prove quite fascinating, "The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus" is a volume that will prove very hard to put down and very highly recommended.

And then there's this the Falcata Times:

Having been a fan from the beginning of this quirky character, I really couldn't help but rediscover the joy of this dashing dandy of a secret agent in Steampunk Victoriana glory. After all that's what this title is all about and to be honest whilst some may not be the biggest fan of this literary hero, he's got a hell of a lot to offer the modern reader in a similar sort of way that Moore brought when he did his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to the screen.

Add to the mix that this is an omnibus and you know that it has value for money built in. It's an ideal stocking filler if you love action and when backed with a hero that readers will just love to hang out with alongside the full extent of everything from Darwinism gone wrong, a touch of reanimator and a whole host of interesting supporting cast and it really is a spiffy read.

If you need to get up to speed with the Pax Britannia series before picking up either Evolution Expects, Blood Royal or Dark Side, you can pick up a copy of the omnibus here.

* And if you're one of those nice people, sorry for using the adjective 'nice' to describe you. It's been a long day and I'm right out of other adjectives. My cupboards are metaphorically bare. Sorry.

Pax Britannia at Graeme's Fantasy Book Review

Graeme Flory of Graeme's Fantasy Book Review has faithfully reviewed all of my Pax Britannia adventures published to date. And they've all received very favourable reviews.

Here's a round-up of his reviews along with rankings based on the scores he gave each of them (out of 10).

1st - Blood Royal (9.5)

2nd= - Unnatural History (8.5)

2nd= - Dark Side (8.5)
4th - Human Nature (8.25)
5th= - Leviathan Rising (8)
5th= - Evolution Expects (8)

I'm intrigued to discover how Anno Frankenstein fares when it's released later this year.

Pax Britannia book reviews

Yours in a White Wine Sauce! has some great reviews of most of my Pax Britannia novels.

There's Unnatural History, Leviathan Rising, Human Nature, Evolution Expects, Blood Royal and The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus Vol.1. Al Ewing's El Sombra also gets an honourable mention.

Meanwhile, people are feeling the love for Al's Gods of Manhattan here and saying lovely things about Blood Royal here as well.

Spring-Heeled Jack

Spring-Heeled Jack is of course one of the heroes of Pax Britannia: Evolution Expects but he's made a few cameo appearances since then as well.

The character is, of course, based on the spectre that haunted Barnes Common during the 19th Century (and other parts of the country besides). The following video sums up what we know about this particular villain rather well.

Pax Britannia - review round up

A couple more reviews of my Pax Britannia books coming your way this afternoon...

#1 Unnatural History

Okay, this book was one of the goofiest I have read in a long while and I really liked it. It was over the top, silly steampunk that didn't take itself seriously and you shouldn't either. The names of the characters are even tongue in cheek, which some readers who have reviewed the book don't seem to get. Also, people were complaining that the science part of the plot was bad - it wasn't supposed to be great science fiction. It is supposed to be a lighthearted fun read. No, this isn't a classic. No, this isn't superb fiction. It is a lighthearted and comic tongue in cheek look at steampunk and the genre.

#2 Leviathan Rising

Leviathan Rising, above everything else, is fun. Deliriously so. Every page is infected with a wonderful sense of joy. Don't get me wrong, I love my "worthy" genre fiction - gloomy, dirty, big heavy themes, existential angst & questions of identity - but after reading so-bloody-many in a row, this is the perfect antidote. Leviathan Rising is something different, yet no less special. This is the sort of book that makes me giddy and ten years old again, my mind filled with impossible adventures and wild daydreams.

And, to give Mr Green credit, creating this sort of work is a rare and wonderful talent. Being over-the-top is commonplace, but being genuinely entertaining is rare - the difference between telling a dirty joke and being Bill Hicks. Leviathan Rising, the author deftly combines punchy dialogue with lurid description; painting a wonderful, exotic world and then populating it with sharp heroes, sinister villains and horrendous beasties. This is pure, unadulterated pulp - the sort of fiction that made fiction fun to begin with.

#4 Evolution Expects

Overall this is a very good and easy read the main novel ticks all the right boxes and has a good mix of humour and some very dark moment indeed. The novella, Conqueror Worm, which is to my mind even better than the main novel, is a swashbuckling adventure with highwaymen, sinister plots and a particularly nasty creature as it's centre piece.

I certainly wouldn't class this series of books as anything more than good "pulp" adventure, but then again they are not trying to set themselves up as anything other than that.

Although each of the books can be read individually there has been a connecting plot building subtly in the background over the whole series, so I would certainly recommend that anyone new to the Ulysses Quicksilver books starts at the beginning with Unnatural History!

It's nice to see Conqueror Worm receiving some love. It was a story I really wanted to tell and loved writing.

You can read more of this review here at Pulp Zen!

Attack of the Automaton Spiders!

If you've read Pax Britannia: Evolution Expects, you'll remember the scene where Ulysses Quicksilver and Eliza run into a pack of robo-spiders. When I wrote this I obviously had something more clockwork in mind, but then I came across these the other day...


Perhaps if Pax Britannia was more cyberpunk than steampunk...

If you like these then you'll love this.

Evolution Expects gets an electronic makeover

News from the Abaddon camp... Their Pax Britannian eBooks have undergone something of a makeover. Here's Abaddon desk editor David Moore to explain...

Those of you who read the hardcopy books - and you really should - will know that the Pax Britannia titles normally have lovely borders, twiddly Victoriana stuff around the chapter heads, mock-newspaper adverts for hair tonic and the like. Stuff which is normally hard to convey through the slightly limited mark-up tools of eBook designers.

But &E7 has been hard at work, exploiting new developments, tweaking the paramaters of the software, and... now Evolution Expects is out with all those bits kept in. Yes, Virginia, you can enjoy both the convenience of electronic reading and the beauty of our fine gentlemen's adventure chapbooks...

To find out more, follow this link.

Pax Britannia is just great

Not my words, but the words of Pablo Cheesecake, who says other very nice things about the Pax Britannia books - and Evolution Expects in particular - here!

New review of Evolution Expects at Mass Movement Magazine

As the title of this post says, there's a new review of Evolution Expects, this time from Mass Movement magazine.

The bits I like are 'Part James Bond, part Indiana Jones, and part David Dickinson (yeah, seriously!)' and 'there are several neat set-pieces that would translate well to celluloid if anyone ever mustered a budget to try and recreate this in Hollywood, namely a show-down with clockwork spiders in an underground bottling plant and the destruction of a giant weather station hovering over Smog-smothered Londinium Maximum' and 'the series is quite addictive, in a cheap ‘n’ cheerful potboiler kinda way'.

You can read it for yourself here.

Evolution Expects reviewed

Came across this review of Evolution Expects the other day.

"Awesome." (4 out of 5 stars)

Nice and succinct, I think you'll agree.

Great review of Evolution Expects

There's a great review of Evolution Expects over at Only The Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Follow this link to read it for yourself. To buy the book, click here.