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This one is entirely my own work, although it does involve some of the offenders from the Novel experiment in an incidental way.

Al, Cam, Paul, Ross and I used to attend Role Playing conventions around the Sydney area, and became quite notorious after a few years for ”Demolishing” games. This involved us playing the story scenarios honestly – while genuinely sticking to our characters – but frankly with a fair bit of genre awareness. We would make jokes internally, that riffed on the common themes of the story world we were in.

We played so many games, and after a while had encountered so many of the common plots in those genres, that we started to joke that the next game we should just cut to the chase: When you are all invited to a spooky manor in the middle of nowhere – just burn the thing to the ground and walk away. Don’t look back, just burn it, and go to the pub. You know it’s not going to end well, anyway.

And so out of all those adventures that we had together, I began to form the idea of The Genre Tunnel. For those of you who remember their late ’60s television, this cover ought to bring back memories of Project Tic-Toc, and for readers with more contemporary Sci-Fi upbringings – just think of Sliders, or Stargate.

It comes in distinct short stories, one examining each Genre. There is an overarching story, of course, which slowly reveals itself throughout the episodes. So if you are going to read them, do it in order and you might get more out of it.

I’ll post them below, left to right in their order of precedence.