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Clearly the first part of a larger story because it's all setup and very little payoff. Unfortunately, what we get here wasn't enough to make me want to carry on and read the rest - it's really just a lot of talking about the Big Sci Fi Concept and not much else, until the last few chapters where they realise they need to finish with a climax of some kind and kick it up a notch.

Gave up on this a little way in. The central idea is decent enough but the execution wasn't working for me. Grant Morrisson covered similar ground much more deftly in We 3.

While the first book was largely Scarper's story, this time it's Vera's turn, and we learn where she came from, where she came from before that, and start to get some explanations as to why Scarper's world is the way it is. The story and the worldbuilding continue to fascinate but it's the characters and their growing friendship that really hooked me.

In the final book of this excellent trilogy, the surrealist world that Davis has dreamt up finally begins to make a kind of sense. This is thanks largely to excerpts from Castro's titular book, an encyclopaedia he's put together from his studies of dissected household gods. Events come to a head, things change, things carry on as they were, and maybe the future is a little brighter than it was. All in all a very satisfying end to the story.

Like Jan Svankmajer doing Grange Hill, this sets up a bizarre but kind of recognisable world that has its own internal logic and very little in the way of explanation. Scarper Lee is a schoolboy doing normal schoolboy things in a place where your dad might be a steam-powered boat on wheels and it rains knives on a regular basis. He's got three weeks to live and he knows this because everyone knows when their deathday is. Then things start to change when he meets new girl and agent of chaos Vera Pike. It's hard to explain where things go from here because it only makes sense if you read it (and you have to read all three books in the trilogy to get anything like a complete story), but the worldbuilding and character development are top notch.

Issue 12 features 12 stories by 12 new writers, a story by McSweeney regular Roddy Doyle and a selection of 20-minute flash fiction curated by Dave Eggers. As always with McSweeney's, it's a mixed bag and your enjoyment of it is going to depend to some extent on your tolerance for hipster literary showboating. Highlights for me were the Doyle story and the piece about growing up in Ceausescu's Romania by Andrea Dezso that reads like dystopian Elena Ferrante.

Cartmel writes up the diaries of his time as script editor on Sylvester McCoy's run of Doctor Who. He doesn't come across super well considering these are all his own words - it's always the production people who ruin the stories and never the guy who commissioned stuff they didn't have the budget for and who couldn't time a script to 25 minutes if his life depended on it, and he can't seem to resist dropping in references to the physical attractiveness of any woman he had to work with, which may have been how you did things in the 80s but comes across a bit creepy in the 21st century. Still, it's fascinating to see how the BBC was run in those days and go behind the scenes for the shooting of some of the stories. It's a wonder anything ever got made at all.