alices_nightmare

by Jonathan Green

  Panting for breath, feeling light-headed from the rush of recollections, Alice watches, mouth agape, as the last wisps of mist are dispersed by a breeze that seems to blow up from nowhere. At the same time, the circling mirror-portals fracture again and again, into a thousand-thousand fragments, which scatter to the depthless reaches of the void, where they become twinkling pinpricks of starlight.

  Alice looks around her at the cracked and chequered plain, but she is utterly alone. “And what happens to me now?” she asks the wind.

  “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” comes a familiar voice, speaking from a grinning mouth that has materialised in mid-air in front of her.

  “Cheshire Puss!” Alice exclaims, and the rest of the Cat quickly coalesces around its smile.

  “So where is it you want to get to?” the floating feline asks.

  “I don’t much care where –” Alice begins.

  “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” says the Cat.

  “– so long as I get somewhere,” Alice adds, by way of an explanation.

  “Oh, you’re sure to do that.”

  And then the Cat too is dissolving into mist, only this mist swells and roils like massing thunderclouds, and other faces appear before Alice’s eyes, formed from coiling tendrils of vapour. She sees a serene blue face smoking a hookah pipe, the brightly-coloured beak and blue-grey plumage of a dodo, and the mechanically blinking eyes of a stuffed white rabbit – and a myriad voices seem to whisper to her on the breeze, “Thank you, Alice, and goodbye.”

  The nightmare is over, Wonderland is saved, and, most importantly of all, Alice has saved herself from oblivion.

  She feels the stress and strain of her adventures ease, the weariness in her bones melting away, and a smile spreads slowly across her face as the fractured chessboard arena and the midnight gulf beyond fade to white…

  In a Wonderland they lie,

  Dreaming as the days go by,

  Dreaming as the summers die:

  Ever drifting down the stream —

  Lingering in the golden gleam —

  Life, what is it but a dream?

  THE END

  Acknowledgements

  What started out as one person’s crazed vision has, once again through the power of Kickstarter, become a crazed vision shared by a host of like-minded individuals – that in this day and age of digital apps and console RPGs, in the 150th anniversary year of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there is still room for one more pencil and paper adventure, published in the form of a traditional, processed-tree-carcass gamebook. (Although a zeroes-and-ones eBook edition is also available.)

  There are, however, some individuals who have joined me at this Mad Tea Party that I would like to single out for particular attention and recognition.

  First of all, Emma Barnes of Snowbooks, for being so open to this new model of producing gamebooks and supporting Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland from the start, and Anna Torborg for doing such an excellent job of laying it out.

  Secondly, I must give special mention to Kev Crossley, for bravely following in the footsteps of Sir John Tenniel et al and helping to bring my warped vision of Wonderland to life – and at very short notice too! Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland simply would not be what it is without his wonderful illustrations.

  Thirdly, I must mention all of those people who helped with the Kickstarter rewards. So thank you to Jonathan Oliver, David Moore and Ben Smith of Abaddon Books for allowing me to offer my novella Pax Britannia: White Rabbit as a reward to backers; thank you to Lydia Matts of Broken Geek Designs for making the bespoke Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland necklaces; thank you to Fil Baldowski for making the All Rolled Up game rolls; and a special thank you to Saskia Powys, who designed the unique deck of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland-themed playing cards.

  But most of all, I would like to say a huge and heartfelt thank you everyone who pledged their support to this project. Without them, Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland could not have happened at all. So here’s to you, all of you.

  And just remember, in the immortal words of the Cheshire Cat, “We’re all mad here.”

  Kickstarter Backers

  Gryphon

  Martin Gooch • PJ Montgomery • Michael Hartley • Geoffrey Bertram • Michelle Edmunds • Dr Mike Reddy • Black Chicken Studios, Inc. • Pang Peow Yeong & Family • Tamsin Bryant • PD Dr Oliver M Traxel • Marc Thorpe • Michael Johnston • Kevin Abbotts • Rebecca Scott • Aaron Tyrone Utting • John Edward Kirk • Maria Walley • Ed Brenton • Rms

  White Knight

  Stephane Bechard • James Catchpole • Chris Trapp • Alice Cruickshank • Thomas Dan Nielsen • Alan Tannenbaum • Vin de Silva • Robert Schwartz • Jordan E Carey • Hayley Allen • Phillip Bailey • Andrew Wright • Kathryn Berghold • Louie Reynolds & Zoe Harrison • Vanessa Pare • Gwendlyn Drayton

  Unicorn

  Frans Buddelmeijer

  Dodo

  Amy Winchester • 林立人 Lin Liren • Don Alsafi • Mark Myers • Nicki Gray • Steve Dean • Xymon “Awesome” Owain • Colin Oaten • Mr Smiler • James A Hirons • Raj Rijhwani • Steven Pannell • Tiago Vieira Perretto • James Aukett • Amy-Jayne McGarry-Thickitt • Fabrice Gatille • Paul Windmill • Felipe Espinoza Yentzen

  Queen of Hearts

  Anthony Myers • Jeremy R Haupt • Graham Hart • Franck Teixido • Meryne Gray • Judy Kashman • Keith Tollfree • Mark and Catherine Richards • Alexander Ballingall • Luke Niedner • María Ariza • Christopher Blakely • Rhel ná DecVandé • (Dave!) David Stringer Archer • Zwolfondu • Nicole Jane Mcleary • Mr Jay S Broda • Happy Xmas Mandy, Love Matt.

  Red Queen

  Y. K. Lee • Shyue Wen • Ong • Jonathan Caines • J J Malpas • Robin Horton

  Going Back Down the Rabbit-Hole:

  Reimagining a classic

  By Jonathan Green

  Alice and the Dodo

  Lewis Carroll is celebrated throughout the world and regarded, quite rightly, as a literary legend. However, behind the famous pseudonym was the bookish, intensely clever, complex, obsessive, mild-mannered, eccentric Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer at Oxford University and Church of England deacon, with remarkably diverse talents. As well as being a skilled mathematician, logician, amateur inventor and pioneering photographer, he also devised an array of games and puzzles which are still popular to this day. And of course he was a prolific writer; as well as his many books, he produced a wide range of other published material in the form of pamphlets, papers and articles that appeared in academic journals.

  Born in 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, Dodgson spent his early life in the north of England, before moving to Oxford as an adult. He finally passed away in 1898, less than two weeks before his 66th birthday, whilst living in Guildford. However, he is most well-known for the stories which arose from his association with the second daughter of Henry Liddell, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church.

  On 4th July 1862, Dodgson went on a boating trip on the Isis with the then ten year-old Alice Pleasance Liddell and her sisters, Edith and Lorina. That “golden afternoon” he conjured up a story about a little girl called Alice, who went on a fantastic adventure after following a white rabbit, wearing a waistcoat, down a rabbit-hole. Allegedly Dodgson even included a caricature of himself in the story, in the form of the Dodo.

  The young Alice begged the academic to write the story down and eventually, after much delay, in the November of 1864, he presented her with a handwritten manuscript. It was entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and he had illustrated it himself.

  It was another year before the story finally saw publication, in July 1865, now called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (after the alternative titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour
had been rejected), with Dodgson going by the pen-name Lewis Carroll, a pseudonym he had first used nine years before. The illustrations were provided by the celebrated artist Sir John Tenniel.

  The book was an immediate hit, and counted Queen Victoria among its many fans. (According to one popular story, Victoria enjoyed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so much that she commanded that Dodgson dedicate his next book to her.)

  The massive commercial success of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland changed Dodgson’s life in ways he could never have imagined. With the fame of his alter ego spreading right around the world, he was inundated with fan mail and frequently unwanted attention. The book also made him a rich man, although he continued with his seemingly disliked post at Christ Church College, Oxford.

  Alice Through the Looking-Glass

  Late in 1871 Dodgson eventually published a sequel – Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Contained within the book is one of the most famous poems in the English language, Jabberwocky. After the Alice books, Dodgson’s most famous work is another fine specimen of the genre of literary nonsense, The Hunting of the Snark. All of these examples of his work display his skill with word play, his preoccupation with logic, and his love of fantasy.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its companion volume Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, are now considered to be prime examples of the literary subgenre known as Portal Fantasy. Other familiar fantasy tropes feature within the books, including physical transformations, anthropomorphic animals, and unpredictable – not to say, at times, nightmarish – dream-logic. But it must be remembered that when the Alice stories were first published, such elements, along with both books’ ‘It Was All Just a Dream’ endings, were not the clichés then that they are now.

  When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in the mid-19th century, there had never been anything quite like it, and as a result of it becoming such a huge hit, it went on to inspire generation after generation of readers. The story has been retold and reinterpreted again and again until its influence has become so ingrained within our culture and society that there is no escaping it. It has inspired artists, authors, film-makers, musicians and theatrical directors over and over again. These people have gone on to present their own interpretations of the tale to the world, in turn inspiring new generations of children.

  The thing about Alice Adventures in Wonderland is that everybody thinks they know the story; how one balmy, summer’s afternoon by the river, a girl follows a white rabbit down a rabbit-hole and ends up in the eponymous Wonderland. And perhaps they do, but how many of them have actually read Lewis Carroll’s original?

  I must confess that I didn’t read Alice Adventures in Wonderland properly for the first time until 2010, after I was inspired to write a Pax Britannia novella based on the classic children’s story, and thought I should make sure I knew the story inside out before putting pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard). I have, of course, read it many times since.

  It is impossible to assess the impact of Alice on our culture and society without making reference to its many alternative iterations. Each one draws out certain elements of the tale to create its own tone but the results have been startlingly different.

  Think of the good-humoured Disney animation from 1951, and yet before Mickey Mouse’s dad tackled a re-telling there had already been six versions of the story committed to film. Then there is Jan Švankmajer’s 1988 surrealist nightmare, which uses stop motion animation and live action to create a particularly unsettling mood. Meanwhile, Tim Burton’s 2010 reimagining of the story and its iconic characters could not escape the director’s gothic predilections or the influence of modern steampunk culture.

  As well as being realised on the silver screen, Alice has been presented in comic books, as stage plays, ballets, operas, even pantomimes, not to mention the many television adaptations. It has also become a staple of cosplayers around the globe. The story’s impact on the creative endeavours of others is incalculable, but among the more obvious homages are the Wachowski brothers’ original Matrix movie, the surrealist art of Salvador Dali, the TV series Lost, video games such as American McGee’s Alice and the gore-choked, survivalist horror, first person shooter, Resident Evil, and Alice in Sunderland, by renowned comic book artist and writer Bryan Talbot, who explores the origins of not only the Alice story but also considers the dream-like nature of story, myth and legend in his seminal graphic work.

  Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland

  So why attempt yet another reimagining of the Carroll classic, and in the form of an adventure gamebook at that?

  Well, first of all, no one had ever written a gamebook based on the Alice stories before, and second of all, gamebooks are my thing. On top of that, Wonderland is such a wonderful creation (if you’ll pardon the pun) that I felt it deserved revisiting. The fact that 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the book is very popular among steampunk aficionados, didn’t hurt either. Indeed, I am almost as well-known these days for my Pax Britannia steampunk novels as I am for writing adventure gamebooks.

  But it was important to me that I didn’t just retell Carroll’s original novel as a gamebook. I wanted to do something new with the source material and put my own spin on things.

  I knew that there were certain beats I would have to hit, and particular characters who would have to make an appearance, otherwise fans of the original would feel cheated and I would be in danger of making my work so unlike Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that I might as well have not bothered even attempting to connect it to the book in the first place. Hence we have appearances from the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, and the cast of the Mad Tea Party (although not as you would ever have encountered them before). I also wanted to give the setting a dark, steampunk twist, but equally didn’t want to just stick cogs on everything and make what was already nonsense, ridiculous as well.

  The beginning of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland is very like the opening chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but after that it starts to diverge and becomes much less predictable whilst still including favourite set-pieces inspired by the original. And so, as well as riffing off the original, Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland is also a sequel of sorts, to both Carroll’s Alice books.

  It was also important to me that we keep Alice as close to the character from the Alice books as possible, whilst also making her four years older and able to wield a weapon with aplomb. So it is that the Alice of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland is blonde, as she was portrayed in Tenniel’s illustrations, and not brunette, as was the real Alice Liddell.

  However, while I wanted to make my own contributions to the Wonderland mythos, if you like – such as the clockwork killers, known as the Tick-Tock Men – at the same time I didn’t want my adaptation to be marred by the influences of others’ interpretations of Alice. Everything in the book is either Carroll’s or mine (apart from a reference to a certain gamma-irradiated superhero in the second act, and some more horrific elements drawn from Victorian London urban legends). As a result, in my version the Queen of Hearts is most definitely not the Red Queen – yes, I’m looking at you, Mr Burton – and the Jabberwock is called the Jabberwock, and not Jabberwocky (which is the name of the poem as opposed to the name of the monster).

  Alice travels through various portals in the original books, and so portals became an important feature of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland, particularly mirrors, along with anthropomorphic animals and bizarre physical transformations.

  When it came to actually writing the adventure, the tale grew in the telling, and would have kept on growing – rather like Alice, after scoffing a cupcake or two – had I not called a halt before it all got out of hand. And so, an adventure that was planned out to be 400 sections long ended up being 520 sections long, which is not so arbitrary
a number when you consider that it is ten times the number of cards in a traditional deck of playing cards (minus the Jokers).

  “It’s My Own Invention.”

  When it came to creating the gaming element of the gamebook I was inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series I first wrote for back in the earlier 1990s, but I couldn’t miss the trick of giving the reader the option of using playing cards rather than dice to generate random numbers and determine the outcome of simulated battles. And when it came to naming Alice’s different attributes, once I had got as far as Agility, Logic and Insanity, Duelling and Fortitude went right out the window!

  However, I didn’t want readers to feel beholden to having to play the game aspect of the book, and so I made it explicitly clear from the start that you can ditch the dice rolling and card shuffling altogether, and simply enjoy reading through the story, although success is still by no means certain.

  But for many, the game part of the gamebook will undoubtedly be what makes reading Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland a unique experience for them. After all, playing games is how we test ourselves, how we discover how we might react or cope in certain situations. Playing games is how children learn about risk as well as how they fit with others in a social context. It is no different for adults, and playing a game with someone tells you a lot about their attitude towards life in general as well as their social values.

  People often ask me, “How do you go about writing a gamebook?” But for me, it’s no big deal. The first book I ever had published was a gamebook and I’ve had another fourteen published since, making Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland my sixteenth such title.

  To put it in a nutshell, the process goes something like this…

  Having settled on the initial idea – in this case, Alice returning to Wonderland in order to prevent the worst case of identity theft you ever heard of – I set about making screeds of notes, brainstorming the topic to see what ideas I can come up with, and doing a fair bit of research. As I make more and more notes I start to settle on a structure for the adventure as well as ideas for specific encounters and an overall narrative structure. I develop ideas for new monsters and whatever rules will work best with the adventure, and I start to make a lot of maps. These vary in complexity from scrappy spider diagrams, to pictorial charts covered with handwritten annotations. The making of the map – which is of the plot of the story more than it is of any particular place – helps crystallise the structure of the adventure in my mind and goes through several iterations.