Future Highways (15k)

Editorial (2k)

Featured Articles (2k)

Under the Hood (2k)

On Foot (2k)

On the Road (2k)

Paint Jobs (2k)

Highwayman Role-playing (2k)

Freebies (2k)

Contacts (2k)

Archives (2k)

Letters (2k)

Letters (2k)

home (4k)


Archives (8k)

The Novels (5k)

I know I seem to keep going on about this, but if you are interested in the background of the game, then the Jack Yeovil novels are essential as so many things have changed in the alternate setting. Unfortunately they stopped before the fifth and final book was released, so does the world continue beyond 1999?

I've recently spoken to Kim Newman on the subject of the Dark Future books, and this is a cut down version on what he had to say about them:

"United States Calvary was outlined but never written. The DF book that was done at least in draft was called The Violent Tendency and was by Eugene [Eugene Byrne]; it was a direct sequel to Demon Download featuring Sister Chantal and set in various altered bits of Europe. The idea was that USC would follow that and tie up all the story threads set in motion in the previous books - looking at the outline again recently, I suspect it'd have had to be a trilogy to get everything and everyone in. It was set in the then-futuristic year 2000, from New Year's Eve to New Year's Eve and had a lot of now-horribly-dated millenniumery in it.

I did do an alternate version of some of the characters in a Kim Newman story, Where the Bodies Are Buried 2020 (in my collections Seven Stars or Where the Bodies Are Buried), but that had other things to wrap up so it's not quite part of the series."
(13th May, 2003)

I've since spoken to Eugene Byrne about Violent Tendency, and found out that the book was indeed written (but never published), however it has been lost to time when the Amstrad PCW it was written on died. Here's an edited version of what Eugene said about the novel:

"It was set in Europe, as opposed to the USA. In this Dark Future Europe, things were going to pot just as badly as they were in the states, with civil wars and terrorist attacks all over the place.

The story opened with Sister Chantal being sentenced to the penal colony of Sicily. The whole island has become a dumping ground for all the criminal scum of Europe and robotoc sharks patrol the waters around it to prevent anyone from escaping. The criminals are left to their own devices on the island and a sort of feudal system has emerged. It's run by a psychotic mafioso who's obsessed with cleanliness and has a massive supply of detergents and fabric conditioners and stuff.

We learn that she's not *really* been sentenced but is working undercover. There is a shadowy terrorist organisation called the Violent Tendency. They are a bunch of useless Marxists and anarchists but they are being manipulated by Roger Duroc, Nguyen Seth's right-hand man.

She escapes, makes her way to Berlin, surviving an assassination attempt by a robotic perfect Stepford type couple called Ken and Barbie (I'm sure we had to change that at the absolutel insistence of the lawyers). In Berlin, in a live porno club she meets Billy Priapus - Billy was a sort of half-man-half-goat porn star, an elemental force of mischief and massive sexual energy (a lot of this had to be glossed over because of the books' youngish readership). Billy and Roger hook up to move the fiendish plot forward.

We now move to Paris and discover that what the Violent Tendency and Roger and co are planning is a poison gas attack on the Paris metro - I even discovered the recipe for the tabun nerve gas. This, I should point out, was long before Saddam Hussein had it, long before Aum Shinrikyo's attack on the Tokyo underground and long before Al Quaida. Ain't I a smartypants?

Anyway, Chantal and Billy and Roger fight it out in Notre Dame cathedral, but she fails to stop the attack in time ... but it's okay because we discover that the Violent Tendency are a bunch of idiots who didn't make the gas properly."
(15th May, 2003)

So, straight from the horses mouth.
My thanks to both Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne for all their time and help in letting the truth come out in the open.

Index (2k)