INTERVIEW : Jonathan Green (EN)

A prolific author from the United Kingdom, Jonathan Green has established himself in the fields of fantasy, steampunk, and interactive fiction. Known for having written several Fighting Fantasy gamebooks as well as novels set in the Doctor Who, Warhammer, and Sonic the Hedgehog universes, he excels in blending boundless imagination with carefully structured storytelling. He is also the creator of the Pax Britannia series, a steampunk world inhabited by the dashing adventurer Ulysses Quicksilver. With a bibliography exceeding seventy titles, Green also ventures into playful non‑fiction with his award‑winning book YOU ARE THE HERO, dedicated to the history of Fighting Fantasy. A former teacher turned full‑time writer, he has built an international reputation through his inventiveness, discipline, and passion for rich, immersive worlds.

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• You began your career as a teacher before becoming a full-time author. How did this transition take place, and what encouraged you to take that step?

I had my first book published when I was still at university, so I was already an author when I qualified as a teacher. Upon leaving university, I moved to Nottingham and spent two years establishing myself as a freelance writer – writing for Games Workshop and Puffin Books – and supporting myself by supply teaching.

I then moved to London, where I took up a full-time teaching post and started building a career in education. But I kept writing in my spare time. However, things came to a head when I was working at a Deputy Head. By then I was married and had young children.

I had been used to doing most of my writing at weekends and during school holidays, but that was now precious family time. It was my wife who suggested I quit teaching and make writing the priority. It was a hard decision, but as one of my wife’s friends said at the time, “Jon won’t lie on his deathbed wishing he hadn’t given it a go.” And she was right.

For the next fifteen years I worked on and off in schools, in different roles, whilst prioritising my writing career and bringing up my children. However, since they left school, I have been writing full-time.

• You have written more than seventy works, spanning fantasy, science fiction, horror and steampunk. How do you manage such a vast and diverse body of work?

It’s now more than eighty books, but I will happily admit that some of those books are very short. Then again, some of them are quite long too.

I always have multiple projects on the go at the same time, at various stages of development. This variety helps keep things fresh. If a project is dragging, I’ll work on something else for a bit before returning to the original work, coming back to it refreshed.

You also need to remember that I was first published in 1993 and have been published every year since, which has helped me accumulate such a body of work. But at the end of the day, I always write about subjects that interest me, which means there’s always something new to work on.

• Your early works were Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. What role did these books play in establishing your career as an author?

I am very fortunate that the first things I had published were Fighting Fantasy gamebooks because they have only ever opened doors since. The series was a household name in the 1980s and ’90s, and a big part of so many people’s lives. And many of those people now work in publishing and for games companies.

I also learnt a lot from my editors and the people who played the adventures. As a result, I feel that I am a better writer now and my gamebook design is much fairer.

• As a former teacher, do your pedagogical skills influence the way you design the structure and narrative of your gamebooks?

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It helps me find the right tone for the right age group, when I am writing specifically for children. And all those creative writing lessons I taught over the years must have fed back into my own work, particularly when I comes to story structure.

Also, if I hadn’t read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to my class at the time, I am not sure I would have ever written The Wicked Wizard of Oz.

• You have collaborated with many iconic franchises – Doctor Who, Warhammer, Sonic the Hedgehog… Which universe proved the most challenging to write for, and why?

That is a difficult question to answer. When I write for a franchise, I immerse myself in that world as much as possible. And often, they are worlds I already know a bit about, having had a prior interest in them.

Writing the first Warcradle Gamebook, Valiant, was a challenge because I knew nothing about the world of the Dystopian Age before I was invited to pitch an idea for an adventure. Research was a challenge too because not everything about the world is in print – some of it currently only appears in various different blog posts online. But I was able to ask the people at the design studio questions, although some of the things I asked them about hadn’t been established yet within the lore.

• You are the creator of the Pax Britannia series. How did the idea for this steampunk world and for the character Ulysses Quicksilver first come about?

It actually started out as an idea for a one-off strip for 2000 AD, the British anthology comic that will be celebrating its 50th birthday in 2027. The character had a different name then, but the basic premise was there.

Fast forward many years, and computer games company Rebellion was establishing a new fiction imprint, Abaddon Books. A call went out for authors to write novels set within one of their worlds. There were the zombie-themed, but otherwise unconnected, Tomes of the Dead, the post-apocalyptic Afterblight Chronicles, Twilight of Kerberos, a classic swords and sorcery setting, and Dreams of Inan, a science fantasy series.

I responded to the call, writing to the nascent publisher saying that I could probably write for any of the proposed series but took the opportunity to pitch them a steampunk setting. That initial pitch was two paragraphs long and nothing from it was taken out when it became a full-blown setting – instead, more stuff was added in.

I wrote the first book in the series, while other hopeful authors pitched their ideas for Pax Britannia novels. However, only two other authors ended up contributing stories to the series – Al Ewing and David Thomas Moore – while I wrote the vast majority of the Pax Britannia books.

I knew how I wanted the series to continue, and had concrete ideas for at least another four novels, with a specific end goal in mind. The question my books were trying to answer was, what would it take for someone who was a hero of the British Empire, and effectively Queen Victoria’s champion, to end up being the one to put a gun to her head, with the intention of assassinating her? Unfortunately, we never found out because Time’s Arrow was the last published Ulysses Quicksilver novel.

• YOU ARE THE HERO, your documentary-style work on the history of Fighting Fantasy, has become a reference. What motivated you to explore the behind-the-scenes story of this franchise?

In the run up to Fighting Fantasy’s 30th anniversary in 2012, I pitched various books to the publisher, Wizard Books, to mark the landmark occasion. These included a Sorcery!-style trilogy set in the past, at the time of the War of the Wizards, and a prequel to The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

When these were rejected, I suggested a coffee table history of FF instead, but the publisher told me my ideas for projects were becoming too costly. So it was that I pitched the history of Fighting Fantasy to SFX magazine. While I was writing the article, I realised there was far more to the story than I knew already and to do it justice really would require a book.

Having already had such an idea turned down by Wizard Books, I planned to self-publish an eBook on the subject, until a friend told me about Kickstarter. A couple of months after the crowdfunding platform launched in the UK, I launched my first Kickstarter, to raise money to produce a large-format, full-colour history of FF. (I have just crowdfunded my 18th Kickstarter project.)

But even after writing that, I discovered there was still more to tell, and so I crowdfunded and published YOU ARE THE HERO Part 2 three years later. And five years after that I launched a campaign to produce a 40th anniversary edition, which the reader can play as a quasi-gamebook.

• When creating a gamebook, do you begin with a map, narrative diagrams, or a linear story that you then break into branching paths?

I start by making lots of notes in my notebook, which I always do by land. Once I have a rough plan for the adventure, I will produce a very simple overview – quite often an uncomplicated flowchart drawn on a single piece of paper.

For example, RONIN 47, which has 600 sections in total, started out as just 15 linked boxes on a sheet of A4 paper. Each box was a major scene in the story, and the flowchart showed how these were connected.

When I actually start writing the adventure, I take each scene in turn and break it down, flowcharting each encounter before I write it. In general, I write the scenes in order, rather than writing the correct path and then adding on the wrong ones.

• Your writing often blends action, puzzles, multiple-choice decisions and immersive atmosphere. How do you find the right balance between literary storytelling and game mechanics?

To be honest, a lot of it is intuitive. But my experience of writing long-form fiction helps too. If you’ve had a devastating dramatic encounter, it’s nice to change the pace with the next one and maybe give it more of an investigative feel, rather than a big boss fight.

And variety is key too. When I am writing a pitch for an adventure, I will try to ensure a balance between exploration, puzzle-solving, and out-and-out combat.

I would say that the game mechanics are secondary to the storytelling, however. If you’re not telling a compelling story, people aren’t going to want to both with game mechanics. They’ll just stop reading.

• Among your many works—from steampunk to fantasy, via horror—which one posed the greatest writing challenge? And why?

Some of the hardest have been the novelisations I have written – for The Moshi Monster Movie and Robin of Sherwood. The trouble is, sometimes you are not working from the most up-to-date version of the script, and everyone gets to express an opinion – from the screenwriter to the producer, to the rights holder…

The Pax Britannia novels were quite a challenge too, as were my novels for the Black Library. The former because of the level of world-building they entailed, and the latter because I was having to write two 100,000-word books a year whilst holding down a full-time job as a teacher.

I think I would be a better novelist now than I was then, and I do toy with the idea of writing a contemporary novel. But at the moment I’m having too much fun writing adventure gamebooks!

• Your stated influences include authors such as Robert Holdstock, Terry Pratchett and Tim Powers. In what ways have these writers shaped your approach to speculative fiction?

Because I was blown away by particular novels of theirs. I love the quintessentially British archaic mysticism of Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock, and that fantasy novel has influenced the recently completed 100 Aker Wood (ACE Gamebook #9). Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides and The Anubis Gates made a big impact on me as a young writer. And I love almost anything by Terry Pratchett but must give a special mention to Small Gods and I Shall Wear Midnight.

• The Pax Britannia universe revisits an alternative Victorian England. How do you research and combine real history with steampunk imagination?

The Rule of Cool – if it’s cool, it goes in! Not the most rigorous approach to world-building, I know, but I had a lot of fun with it.

When I had a subject for an adventure, I would do a deep dive into that particular topic and absorb all sorts of relevant subject matter, from films to graphic novels. And then it would all get mushed together in my imagination and come out as something fun, I hope, if nothing else.

• What are your thoughts on the current evolution of gamebooks and interactive fiction? Are we witnessing a new “renaissance” of the genre?

Gamebooks have never really gone away, although they haven’t enjoyed the level of interest and success they did in the 1980s and early ’90s. However, I do feel we are enjoying something of a renaissance at present. That is partly because the children who loved those original gamebooks are now the adult game designers, editors, publishers and writers of the present. But I also feel the growth of self-publishing, social media, and crowdfunding has had an impact too – the fact that an individual can market a niche project to a niche audience and bring out a physical book without an established publishing house becoming involved at all!

• You continue to write for international licences such as Arkham Horror, notably The Darkness Over Arkham and The Tides of Innsmouth. What draws you to Lovecraftian mythology?

I love the existential horror of it all – the fact that the Great Old Ones aren’t evil, as such, it is just that our limited perception of them is enough to drive us mad, while they barely notice we even exist, and certainly do not care what becomes of us.

I think it harks back to people’s belief in folklore. People have believed in the supernatural for far longer than there have been scientific explanations for the things that used to be considered magical or otherworldly. And if you scratch away the veneer of civilization, those primitive beliefs are right there, still to this day.

It’s like people’s fear of the dark. Even though you know enough about the nature of the world to dispel such superstitious fears, if your torch battery dies when you are walking through some wood in the middle of the night, suddenly every sound becomes the threatening noise of something – some thing – stalking you through the darkness.

I love playing with that idea – where the strange noise in the wood can’t be dismissed in a rational way, but really is the monster lurking in the shadows instead.

• What new projects are you currently working on, and are there any new universes (literary, video‑game or television) that you would like to explore in the future?

I have just finished writing ACE Gamebook #9, 100 Aker Wood, which recently funded on Kickstarter, and I have also recently finished a second Valiant gamebook for Warcradle Studios, which has the working title Voyage of the Valiant. I am currently pitching ideas for a fourth gamebook for the Arkham Horror Investigators Gamebooks series, while working up my notes for ACE Gamebook #10.

I would love to write a Batman gamebook – if anyone with the rights to publishing interactive fiction within that setting it reading this – and I have written an outline for a gamebook based on a popular board game, but whether anything comes of that, we will have to wait and see.

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