Destiny Can't Be Predicted
Starburst Magazine|January 2017

STARBURST looks at the origins of THE LAST DRAGONSLAYER, the latest novel to get the small screen Yuletide adaptation…

Ed Fortune
Destiny Can't Be Predicted

Sky 1 has always had a firm commitment to producing quirky genre TV, from their earliest attempts such as the forgettable Rob Grant effort The Strangerers to the more recent (and rather successful) Yonderland. Sky’s style seems to involve odd ideas, loud characters and very silly situations. So their latest offering, based on Jasper Fforde’s The Last Dragonslayer, looks to be a perfect match.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Jasper Fforde writes some very sharply witty books. He’s best known for his début novel The Eyre Affair, which is a comedy detective/ murder mystery that sends up Charlotte Brontë’s much loved work Jane Eyre. It mixed time travel and reality hopping with classic literature to create a very silly (and pun-laden) experience.

The Last Dragonslayer is the first of his series of Young Adult novels called The Chronicles of Kazam. It’s similar to his other work in that it sends up existing tropes in a genre, but it’s more generic than The Eyre Affair and its sequels. Rather than a direct attack at the clichés that fill the fantasy genre, Fforde has taken a more Pratchett-like approach, using the power of magical worlds to examine the human condition, whilst having a good laugh along the way.

This story is from the January 2017 edition of Starburst Magazine.

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This story is from the January 2017 edition of Starburst Magazine.

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