Mass Movement Magazine

Jonathan Green – Pax Britannia: Blood Royal (Abaddon)
Only in the totally bonkers alternative reality of Jonathan Green’s steam-punk Pax Britannia books could you find giant locusts rubbing chitinous shoulders with a cyborg Jack The Ripper, Vlad The Impaler, a 160-year-old Queen Victoria, Rasputin, werewolves and, er, dinosaurs. Seriously. And if you think it sounds nuts, it is, but it’s FUN as well, and what’s wrong with that in these dreary times? ‘Blood Royal’ is based around the further adventures of Ulysses Quicksilver, upper class hero of the Magna Britannia Empire and basically a poncy git (although Green is starting to have fun with his dandy daredevil these days, giving him a few Bondian one-liners to mutter once he’s offed another rotter!), as he and his trusty manservant Nimrod (the comic book cliches come fast and furious) battle to overthrow a plot to kill the Tsarina of Russia and annihilate the bloodline of the British monarchy (sounds like a half decent plan, actually). Green’s pace of writing suggests he’s frothing at the mouth in his excitement to drop his characters into ever more crazed situations, and he does pull off some great action scenes, not least of all the werewolf attack on the Siberian Express train and Quicksilver’s rescue mission into an insect-infested St. Paul’s Cathedral. Shame he can’t flesh those characters out into something more believable, and then we’d actually care when they get sliced up by robot assassins etc. Still, this reads as though it could make great cinema – given the biggest budget in the history of celluloid, of course – but the scenarios are too outlandish for their own good (pteranodons bringing down a Mongolian airship?) and we’d probably end up with another ‘Van Helsing’ or ‘Wild Wild West’ on our hands… uh, no thanks, stick to the written word and let your imagination do some work for once. Ian Glasper