Past Imperative

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"The Great Game” series is set during the First World War, but most of the action takes place on a world called Nextdoor, where pseudo-gods play vicious games with mortals to while away eternity. You may read into this any moral or religious message you want, but it was intended only to entertain. The title comes from Rudyard Kipling's Kim and T'Lin Dragontrader bears no small resemblance to Mahbub Ali, Kim's horse-dealer friend. Those are about the only direct references to Victorian or Edwardian stories that I recall inserting, so don't treat these as puzzle books, fictional romans à clef. Nevertheless, I wrote them partly as an experiment in nostalgia.

No, I am not old enough to remember the First World War, but I do remember the Second and the years of shortage that followed it. Books were hard to come by in Britain during my childhood and much of what I read then was already very old—works by Jules Verne, H G Wells, R M Ballantyne, Kipling, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard. I did read some Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, but only because I was forced to. Among the “later” books I recall are Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Gods of Mars (1918) and David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Not least among the hints I picked up from those particular stories is that there are many ways to travel to other worlds.

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