Appointment with Susan

I have written about Steve Jackson's Appointment with F.E.A.R., the seventeenth entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, before. But to recap, it departs from the series' usual swords-and-sorcery based books to provide a superhero adventure heavily influenced by the Golden Age of Comic Books, and provides unparalleled replay value by hiding the information you need to find the titular meeting in different places depending on which of four superpowers you choose to play with.

One thing Appointment also contains is this encounter, at section 410:

You arrive at Parker Airport and ask the nearest security guard whether anything is happening. "The Silver Crusader!" he gasps. "Thank goodness you're here! Follow me. I'll take you to the Control Tower." You follow him up into the Control Tower where you find the place buzzing with activity. The Air-Traffic Controller greets you nervously. "Have you heard? No? The police are on their way. Some guy calling himself 'the Tormentor' has hijacked a DC10 full of passengers to London. He's mad! No demands; nothing. Says he'll crash the plane. Blames it all on 'Susan'. We don't know what to do. A complete nutter! Is there anything you can do?"

Ghost in the Magazine

On 4 October 1996, Have I Got News for You returns for its twelfth series. For some reason, several listings magazines incorrectly report the guest panellists will be David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, which the show feels compelled to address, showing the above clipping with the following joke:

"Good evening and welcome to 'Have I Got News for You', and we apologise to the millions of viewers who have tuned in expecting our guests to be the two stars of the hugely popular series 'The X-Files'. This information appeared in several newspapers and magazines, and yet no-one seems to know quite how it happened."

My purpose here today, however, is not to find out how that happened. (I don't think Anderson or Duchovny were even in the country at the time!) Two weeks later, for the third episode, the following call-back happens:

"Good evening and welcome to 'Have I Got News for You', and apologies to the millions of viewers who may have read that this week's guests were to be Lord Lawson and Mark Little, as I'm afraid they are."

One week later, the fourth show opens thusly:

"Good evening and a special hello to those of you who may have read in the current edition of TV Quick that this week's guests are Father Christmas and Rupert the Bear. So, welcome to the show, I'm Jemima Puddle-Duck."

Putting aside the revelation that HIGNFY only had one publicity image to use at the time... surely this is someone at TV Quick trying to keep the joke going for another week? (That might seem the obvious conclusion, but it's never mentioned on the show.) I wondered what the Radio Times listing for this episode said... and it doesn't mention either guest, indicating that information was not yet known and the editors of TV Quick weren't actually leaving that out just for the sake of the joke, they just decided to do the joke in absence of actually having the information available. Thereby creating a very odd non sequitur to anyone not watching old repeats in sequence, or who just happened to read the listing in isolation.

Revision Quest

Adventure gamebooks, as I have discussed on many previous occasions, were massive in the 1980s, but then towards the end of the decade the market for them apparently suddenly tailed off. Whilst a few of the hardier ranges straggled on into the 1990s, and the genre has been revived several times in the following millennium, many of their authors ended their careers in interactive fiction around then. One such example is J. H. Brennan, who authored several series of gamebooks, most of which had their tongue firmly in their cheek, between 1984 and 1986.

Over a decade later, however, Brennan returned to the genre for an imaginatively titled series called Adventure Gamebooks. The four titles in this series were Egyptian Quest, Aztec Quest, Greek Quest and Roman Quest, and, as you might be able to guess, all four featured a player character who either travelled back in time or already lived in that time. These were significantly shorter than Brennan's 80s gamebooks, aimed at a younger audience, and were largely a genuine attempt to educate readers about the history of the period.

In 1997, Egyptian Quest and Aztec Quest were published in England. The other two titles, for whatever reason, never were; Greek Quest and Roman Quest only saw physical releases in France (a country with a very large role-playing scene, and where Brennan already had an existing fanbase), a few years later in 2000. Over a decade later, however, Brennan self-published all four titles as eBooks.

Now, comparing the eBook editions of the latter two titles is probably going to be beyond me, unless a bilingual French gamebook enthusiast happens to come across this blog. But I can compare the 1997 and 2011 editions of Egyptian Quest and Aztec Quest -- because Brennan's self-published versions had some significant differences compared to the ones released fourteen years earlier.