Abaddon All Hope...

In between things this week I have managed to make some small progress on wargames matters. I now have three battalions (of nine) for a 6mm German infantry brigade for Élan fully painted and 1/144th Hansa-Brandenberg W.29 seaplane and Junkers D.1 monoplane fighter for AirWar: 1918 stuck together awaiting paint (with an AEG G.IV part way done). Photos of these soon, I am hoping to get the W.29 finished over the weekend.

Unfortunately a post-op hospital visit this week did not provide me with a clear prognosis but the prospect of at least one op (if not more). Nothing life threatening but it does drag you down... Whilst waiting around for consultations and pre-op assessments I managed to plow my way through most of Jonathan Green's Unnatural History, the first in Abaddon Books' Pax Britannia steampunk series.

Abaddon are for all intents and purposes producing pulp novels for today's readers and Unnatural History is a steampunk pulp book, high on entertainment and derring-do and less so on classic literature (not that it is meant to be). I must confess to being a bit of a VSF purist and prefer period fiction to modern pastiches but this was marketed as a light hearted fun read and I enjoyed it as such. It could have done with a good editor (twice a chapter ends with the main character yelling "the game's afoot!") and there is a dreadful continuity error where the bad guy fires a pistol at our hero and when we rejoin the action a couple of pages later the hero dodges the bad guys knife! This aside I did enjoy the book and would recommend it as a light hearted read full of Victoriana cliches and a possible fun Steampunk background to game in. The next one of the Pax Britannia series is sat waiting me to finish...

Black Hand Gang by Pat Kelleher, the first in Abaddon's new No Man's World series, the concept of which is similar to William R. Forstchen's Lost Regiment series, this time with a WW1 British unit ending up on an alien world (certainly an interesting gaming concept and probably easier to do than The Lost Regiment). About a third of the way in it's not grabbed me yet, there are too many characters to start with and the WW1 scenes are rather cliched, but we've just ended up on the alien planet so hopefully things will gather pace from now on. Interestingly both Pax Britannia and No Man's World have their own blogs, which you can access here and here respectively.