Blackadder, for which Ben Elton was a co-writer, has been criticised by some British Conservative politicians as distorting the "real" history of World War I. Elton recalls, "I've been blamed for a lot in my life but not the First World War!". In 2024, Elton's main character Hugh Stanton, a disillusioned ex-SAS officer, is offered the chance, by a very improbable master of Trinity College, Cambridge, to travel back in time to 1914. Using an Isaac Newton time portal, Stanton's mission is to kill the Kaiser and thus change history. Elton's initially rollicking entertainment becomes much darker when changing time has unforeseen consequences.

THE GHOSTS OF HEAVEN
Marcus Sedgwick
Indigo, $22.99

Award-winning author Marcus Sedgwick's The Ghosts of Heaven has four distinct parts, all linked by a spiral symbol. Sedgwick cites Kubrick's 2001 as an influence, "Well, the fourth part especially but, really, all of the book, is a response." The first part, written in free verse, describes a prehistoric cave girl on the brink of inventing writing; the second follows a young woman accused of witchcraft in the early eighteenth century; the third is set in an insane asylum in Long Island in the 1920s, while the last is set on an interstellar spaceship where another Bowman confronts more issues of space and time.

PRINTER'S DEVIL COURT
Susan Hill
Profile, $24.95

Susan Hill, well known for her chilling ghost story The Woman in Black, covers similar ground in another gripping novella, Printer's Devil Court. Told through a dead man's memoir, it follows two young medical students in Edwardian London who believe they can extract "the spark of life" from an old man to restore a young girl from the dead. Hill envelops her story in the dark foggy gloom of London's streets, dank hospital mortuaries and deserted cemeteries. The young girl is no Frankenstein figure but rather a tragic phantom for whom life and death are not her own.