THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930–1980 by Rob Hansen #rednosereviews

I recently had the pleasure and the privilege of attending the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards for the first time, mere hours after having had the publisher of this book hold the door open for me as I left the hotel toilets. The ceremony itself was marvellous, despite the Powerpoint problems that so often beset these events, and despite only four awards being handed out (a mere amuse-bouche compared to the epic fourteen given out by the British Fantasy Awards during the period when it was my good fortune to run them). I had a marvellous time watching them. So full of good-humour, friendliness, and bonhomie.

What a tragedy it was, though, to see this astonishing, informative and amazing book lose out to Geoff Ryman's writing about one hundred African science fiction writers. Yes, Ryman made everyone laugh the instant he came to the stage by kneeling down to the low microphone, and yes, he provided a brilliant example of "paying it forward" by taking his moment in the sun to announce the nominees for best novel in the new Nommo award to celebrate African writers, but what does any of that matter when the victim was THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930–1980 by Rob Hansen, so cruelly deprived of that glorious transition from nominee to winner that is reserved for a fortunate few.

Perhaps I am to blame? I think I voted in the BSFA awards, being a member of that fine and august institution, but the screen went blank after I submitted the form so who can say? Surely, for all the wondrous writers covered in Geoff Ryman's articles, those articles were not the revised, expanded and corrected edition of a history that originally appeared in four fanzine-format volumes from 1988 to 1993. And surely, however popular the winner of the non-fiction award was, it did not include over three hundred photos of contemporary fans of all eras, nor dozens of scans of fanzine covers from each decade, nor an index of those photographs.

Did Ryman's work feature an introduction by Peter Weston, was it published by David Langford, and did it feature chapters enticingly entitled "Man and Supermancon", "Aardvarks, Wombats, Gannets and Rats" or "The Bastard Offspring of Science Fiction Monthly"? I think not. If it did, I apologise for my mistake. But I suspect that the only place you will find these things is in THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: 1930–1980 by Rob Hansen, which might not have won the award that night, but wins a place in all our hearts, just like the genre and the fans it chronicles. What else could it get but five red noses? So it does.

Buy the book here and count yourself lucky that you can! It's available in paperback, hardback and ebook.

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This is the last of our Red Nose Reviews, written for fun (about a month after the event) without reading the book.

Three books by Howard Phillips #rednosereviews #rednoseday

Just as time was about to run out on Red Nose Day, leaving us cruelly just short of our target of one hundred pounds, our frequent contributor Howard Phillips jumped in with a last-minute donation. So here is our last review of the day, of the three novels he has completed: His Nerves Extruded, The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta, and The Day the Moon Wept Blood. For boring business reasons (Howard lost all copyright in his work to me in a late-night game of Adventure Time Fluxx) these were all eventually published under my name, but they are all Howard's work, unmistakably so!

His Nerves Extruded is not the first book in the series. That was The Ghastly Mountain, which was never finished. But despite that this remains a brilliant introduction…

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No, I can't do this.

It's one thing to write fake reviews of books that I haven't read, but I have read these Howard Phillips books, and I know how ropey they are. Can I really pretend that they're any good? He did make his donation at the last minute, and so, as I write this, it's no longer Red Nose Day, so strictly speaking I'm no longer obliged to give everything a glowing review. In fact, I think you would be disappointed if I did. So let's get back to normal:

His Nerves Extruded is a book by Howard Phillips about his own adventures, which you may or may not choose to believe. Whether it really happened or not, the way in which he parades around England with a troupe of paid palanquinettes is undeniably sexist. That the writer includes a photographer in the group and promptly forgets about his presence says a lot about how much thought went into the book.

The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta sees Howard take his meandering adventures down into an undersea base, after a baffling interlude behind the scenes of Late Night with David Letterman. The book wants to be The Thing in an underwater base, but never rises to the level of Plan 9 from Outer Space in a bucket. There's an important chapter towards the end that Howard never got around to writing.

The Day the Moon Wept Blood is perhaps the most preposterous of them all. It's all about a terrible writer (it takes one to know one!) who steals a book from the British Library and plots the assassination of the central figure in English literature, whose surprising identity I will leave readers to discover for themselves. It's clear throughout that the author made no attempt to research the book's various settings.

All three books share a level of self-indulgence that is almost impossible to credit, a belief in the power of poetry that makes a mockery of that noble art, and a tendency to skip over events because the author doesn't feel like writing them. All pretend to be true, but all were written in less than a month and it shows. Do not read these books unless you are a glutton for punishment.

I give them all one red nose to share between them.

You can buy the books here: His Nerves Extruded, The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta, and The Day the Moon Wept Blood.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun for Red Nose Day. It's our last one. Thank you to everyone who donated, helping us reach our target of £100. Not bad for a niche fundraising concept that couldn't be explained in under twenty minutes and massively limited the number of people likely to sponsor us!

This is the Quickest Way Down by Charles Christian #rednosereviews #rednoseday

Charlie Christian was a swing and jazz guitarist who played an important role in bebop and cool jazz, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, 48 years after his death. There is a street named after him in Oklahoma City, and he played with Count Basie and Benny Goodman, among others. He is seen as an influence on everyone from Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry to Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.

But this book is not by Charlie Christian, it is by Charles Christian. Whether they are related or not we can't say, but it's not hard to imagine the author of this book tapping away at his keyboard while the electric guitar of his namesake works some cool moves in the background. A book of fiction is a lot like a piece of jazz music. You might start off with a plan, you might even know every event that is going to happen, but the only way to get there from here is by improvising every word as you go along.

You may have noticed the remarkably beautiful woman on the book's cover. I know this reviewer did. While I count myself lucky to have married a brown-skinned woman, and indeed would have counted myself lucky to have married a woman of any skin colour, I must confess to a particular fondness for blue and green-skinned ladies, such as the Asari from Mass Effect, and the Orions from Star Trek. In any video game where you can create your own character, my first impulse is always to recreate my wife, since who else would I want to spend forty hours staring at on screen? But there's a good chance her skin will turn blue given the opportunity.

So the book got off to a good start with me. Then, inside, it sprinted to an amazing finish, with stories like "The End of Flight Number 505", "Confessions of a Teenage Ghost-Hunter", "A Baretta for Azraella" and "By the Steps of Villefranche Station" showing just what a short story can do, and how it can do it! There are thirteen stories in this collection, but if that's unlucky for anyone it's not the reader. This book gets five red noses out of five from me. What's more, it's available for just 99p! Just make your next Amazon order a no-rush delivery and you'll get that much back in promotional vouchers to spend on this book!

If you've ever wondered what a book of short stories written by a former practising barrister and Reuters correspondent turned technology journalist and poet would be like, wait no longer. It's right here! And it can be read on an unlimited number of Kindle devices too, with text-to-speech enabled. What more could you ask for?

You can buy the book here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun without having read the book to raise money on Red Nose Day.

All Good Things: The Last SFX Visions by David Langford #rednosereviews

As every author secretly knows in their heart, the raison d’être of the reviewer is revenge. Each review is an opportunity to strike back against a literary overclass that refuses to accept us in its ranks, a blow against the publishers who rejected our carefully-crafted works of art, a signifier to our readers that although we are not yet famous for our own work, any book we wrote would of course be better than the book we are reviewing, because we are clever enough to see its flaws where its own author could not. We prove ourselves superior with every review, and what’s more our review takes mere hours if not minutes to write, while the slovenly author takes months if not years to produce the slabs of bookmeat poured into our grinders.

Sometimes, though, it’s more specific than that. More personal. The reviewer, happily working his way through the pile of to-be-reads and sorting them into the read-in-beds and the better-off-deads, comes across a book by an author who has earned his enmity, his anger, his wrath, his undying thirst for literary vengeance. Maybe this new book was written by someone who, a mere fifteen years before, described the reviewer’s second self-published book as “a Stainless Steel Rat adventure with important organs missing”. Or perhaps this new book was written by someone who said it was dire, “mercifully short”, or “memorably forgettable”, or at their kindest said it was “refreshingly pointless”.

Perhaps this crucifying review appeared in a nationally-published magazine by the name of SFX, and perhaps this new book is a collection of one hundred columns from that magazine. Perhaps. And perhaps then the reviewer begins to sharpen his hatchets, cleans off the blood, lays out the plastic sheeting, and prepares to go to work on the unwitting spawn of a mortal enemy.

But sadly for the bloodthirsty, for all those who like to think ill of reviewers, who don’t grant us the ability to put away our prejudices and give every book a fair chance, that’s where the story takes an unexpected turn, since the reviewer then finds the contents of this book to be as aggravatingly wise, funny and enlightening as all the other Langford columns he read, those that appeared in the first hundred issues of SFX (the issues he read before he let his subscription lapse, tired of learning the plots of television programmes two years before they appeared on British television).

And at that point the poor reviewer, frustrated in his desire to retaliate, his need to lash out, is forced to admit that the two stars he received from David Langford were at least double what his book deserved, while All Good Things: The Last SFX Visions deserves at least double the maximum five red noses he is allowed to award it, and the reviewer is forced to declare it essential reading for anyone who wants to know what’s what in the world of science fiction.

Available in paperback and in a limited edition signed hardback. Buy it here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun without having read the book to raise money for Comic Relief.

Clovenhoof and the Trump of Doom by Heide Goody and Iain Grant #rednosereviews #rednoseday

This is the latest in a series of hilarious short books about Jeremy Clovenhoof, the earthly incarnation of the devil himself, Satan! Now, you might be getting nervous, casting a concerned glance up at the crucifix hanging on your wall, worrying that this book is in some way blasphemous, but the bible doesn't mention the devil having any cloven hoofs so it's probably not the same guy. Or is it? What was the greatest trick he ever pulled, eh? We should be careful, lest we end up reading a book that leads us down the garden path. All that's waiting down there is the Cottingley fairies!

Back to the book. This is up to the minute hot off the presses satire: Nostradamus foretold the barmy presidency of Donald Trump and the barminess of Brexit. The Archangel Michael will try to undo Brexit through the power of song (though perhaps he would have been better off finding a decent candidate for leader of the Conservative party who was willing to oppose it) while Clovenhoof goes to the United States to stop Trump becoming president. You may watch the news and think, sorry, Clovenhoof, too late, but this book, published by Pigeon Park Press, gives us hope that it can still be stopped. If you believe Clovenhoof exists, it's not too hard to imagine he has time travel powers and can still undo all of this.

The book begins in Sutton Coldfield, which is a great place for a book to begin. When I was there I found the best ever discount book store, and spent about a hundred pounds buying virtually everything in the Virgin Doctor Who line that I didn't yet own, including several hardback non-fiction titles and paperbacks that have since become exceedingly rare. The shop shut down within a week or two, leaving me to wonder ever since whether it was really there. Back then the high street also had a McDonald's where I would have a cheeseburger and small fries while reading the Independent, before, in good weather, heading over to the bench by the church to read a book, or, in bad weather, going into the library to read a book.

It's terribly sad that the library is now closing, as I spent many happy pages there. If only Clovenhoof could have done something about that, as well as fixing Trump and Brexit, this superb book would have been even better, but it would be unfair to mark down an otherwise exceptional and hilarious book for something so far out of its control, so it gets a rollicking five red noses out of five from me.

You can buy the book here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun without having read the book on Red Nose Day.

Sea-Girt Jungles by Cyril Collenette #rednosereviews #rednoseday

This book, subtitled The Experiences of a Naturalist with the "St. George" Expedition, was written by Cyril Leslie Collenette, a naturalist (i.e. someone who studies nature, not someone who takes their clothes off in public) who lived from 1888 to 1959, and it was published in 1926 – the year my alma mater Reading University received its charter!

It describes the highlights of an 1924 expedition that went to Madeira and Trinidad, then through the Panama Canal to some islands in the Pacific that were at the time less frequently visited. After that came the famous Galapagos Islands, the Marquesas Islands, the Tuamata Atolls, Tahiti, the Austral Islands and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). On some of these islands were the jungles of the book's title, surrounded as they were by the ocean.

Collenette was a fellow of the Entomological Society, and so his professed interest was in finding examples of butterflies, moths and beetles, though rumour has it that he also took quite an interest in a rather more sophisticated lifeform: Cynthia Longfield! She went on to a glittering career of her own, becoming known as Madam Dragonfly for her research on that creature.

The book does not mention his reaction upon returning to the United Kingdom to discover that, during his absence from these shores, the Sunday Express had become the first newspaper to publish a crossword. One is left to wonder also how he felt about the news that Eric Liddell had won the four hundred metre gold at the Paris Olympics while setting a new world record, that fridges were now on sale, that fellow explorers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine had met their doom on Mount Everest, and that the first naturist (i.e. people who take their clothes off in public, not people who study nature) camp had been established in Wickford, Essex. We can only speculate.

Collenette was known for collecting pteridophytes and spermatophytes, and went on to publish books about the Ruwemzori expeditions of 1934-1935 and 1952 as well as the H.E.K. Jordan expedition to Angola. There had been hope that the 1924 expedition would discover buried treasure, which if it had happened would have made this already brilliant book even better. It did not, but Collenette was after all more interested in the bugs than the bounty, and so this book remains a fitting legacy. It gets five red noses out of five.

You can buy the book here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun on Red Nose Day, although the facts above are probably accurate. The actual book review from which many of them were taken can be read here.

There Will Be Walrus: First Volume V #rednosereviews #rednoseday

Military science fiction is a part of the genre that does not always get the attention it deserves, but thank goodness Cattimothy House is on the case, producing an anthology of stories and essays that ranks with the very best sf being produced in the world. Overrated social justice writerers such as John Scalesy and Jim B. Hinds might knock this kind of stuff and despise the fans who love it, but us real fans know the real deal when we see it, and here we do!

Like all the best books, this is edited by a gun-toting feline, in this case Timothy the Talking Cat, "one of America's foremost political philosophers and one of the aspiring leaders of the future". He has been assisted in bringing the book to publication by Camestros Felapton, and the contributors include such amazing stars in the science fiction sky as Timothy the Talking Cat, Straw Puppy, Mr Atomic, Flight Rear Admiral General Fortescue-Billinghman, Chilsed McEdifice, and the infamous Vax Doy, well known for his failed attempts to rig the Hogu Awards.

It includes five forewords, each better than the one that came before, a guide to surviving a squirrel attack, self-publishing advice for indie authors, stories with names like "Clean Up on Gamma-6-Gamma" and "Behold the Valiants" and "The Dead Tell No Secrets of the Dead", and an FAQ for those people who just stubbornly refuse to get with the program and need a handout! Online, I get the impression that some people haven't taken the book seriously, but I bet those are just omega males, or even more embarrassingly, people who aren't even male at all.

The book contains twenty-two thousand, one hundred and eighty words, which seems like just the right length. Not too short that it has finished before you get going, but not so long that you will wander off to read something less walrussy halfway through. And it's free, the best price of all, so I have no hesitation in awarding it the maximum five red noses out of five. If it doesn't win any awards that can only be down to the machinations of those evil social justice weirdo cat hating squirrel lovers.

You can get the book here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun on Red Nose Day. Book a fake internet review of your book.

These United States by Clive Tern #rednosereviews #rednoseday

I want to begin this review by telling you a story. When I was a young boy, our bedroom had a wide window, with a large fixed pane in the middle, and parts that opened on the left and on the right. I am not proud of what I am about to tell you, but I would exit on the left, walk across the exterior window sill to the right, then come back inside. It frightens me to think of it, now more than ever, as I think of all the joy that would have been lost if I had fallen to my death. No lovely wife, no beautiful children, and worst of all so many wonderful novels never written! Imagine if I had died then, never having seen Game of Thrones, never having used the internet, never having played an Elder Scrolls game!

It doesn't bear thinking about, so let's not, let's move on to another childhood memory. We lived near one of the (if not the) smallest train stations in Britain, Damems, on the Worth Valley Light Railway. We would walk down there to see the steam trains go by, and if that sounds like a scene from The Railway Children, well, parts of that film were indeed filmed there. I never took off my underwear and waved it at a train, but we did discover the ruins of an abandoned mill, with a huge enticing crack in one wall. The mystery of this entranced us for weeks, until we were able to take advantage of a Tandy special offer and get ourselves a torch.

I then led an expedition into the crack. This may all sound like an episode of Stranger Things, but let me assure you that this really happened. Following me into the crack were my little brother and a gaggle of other children, some of them probably as young as five or six. We shone the torch into the crack and made our way inside. It was terrifying, but we kept going, step by worrisome step, the light shining ahead of us into the darkness, but seeming to illuminate only more darkness. Before long the crack narrowed and I began to worry about being trapped in there.

I called a retreat, and had to wait, anxiously breathing as deeply as I could, while the youngest children at the back got the message and led us out. I think back to that often, and consider how easily we all could have died. No one knew we were there. No one would have looked for us there. If the walls of that crumbling mill had fallen, that would have been it for all of us. We would all have died, and it would have been my fault. I'd be famous for being the idiot that led a group of younger children into a hole in the wall of a abandoned mill.

All of which is by way of explaining how intensely you may be affected by the stories in These United States by Clive Tern. It's a collection that will make you gasp in horror at how easily you might have let it pass you by, changing your life forever, very much for the worse. He is not from the United States, but declares a strange love for them. He writes about a man who can't die, and another who is locked up all day, and aliens and sea-gods and dangerous cigarette lighters all while making you think and taking you to a different state of the union each time.

In thirty years time, do you really want to think back to this moment and rue the terrible mistake you made, or do you want to read this book right now? And it's only volume one! How many more can we look forward to?! I give it five red noses.

You can buy the book here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun on Red Nose Day. Book a fake internet review of your book.

Letters to Barack Obama from Handsworth #rednosereviews #rednoseday

Remember what it was like eight years ago? A new president was in the White House, but everything was so different. The mood was hopeful, we thought the future would be better than the past, and that is reflected in this book of letters and drawings that were sent from Handsworth, a gloriously multicultural part of Birmingham, to Barack Obama. The librarian who put the project together was nominated for the Chamberlain Award, and received a letter in reply from the White House (now framed and hanging on her wall), but the stars of the show are the local children, with their funny questions and quirky drawings.

"I wish I had all the power you have but I don't. That ain't fair!" said one. (Are we sure Donald Trump wasn't living in Handsworth back then?) "I wanted to tell you, you are a great man," said another in a matter-of-fact tone. "What is your favourite soccer team? I hope it's not a naff team like Wolves or Burnley," asked one pupil, with an admirable grasp of the most important issue of the day. "Was your name Barry when you were younger?" asked another, a question to which we now know the answer to be yes, thanks to the Netflix original movie of that name.

The project was inspired by the McSweeney's book Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country, in which the letters were by American children. Here the letters are by British children, a crucial difference that perhaps explains the greater interest in association football shown within its pages. One of the most charming parts of the book was how often the children drew pictures of themselves with the new president, as on the cover. They trusted him, could imagine him hanging out with the class, buying them an ice cream.

It's hard to imagine any British children wanting to spend time with the current president, though if they did I imagine they would put him to shame with their maturity and interest in the world and its future. This book reminds us that it doesn't have to be that way, that we can have leaders we believe in, that give us hope, and even if they don't deliver on every single one of those hopes, it's better than the alternative. I give this book five red noses.

You can buy the book here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun on Red Nose Day. Book a fake internet review of your book.

Children of Eden by Joey Graceffa #rednosereviews #rednoseday

Joey Graceffa is a very famous YouTuber, well known for his exceptional talent for playing video games without a shirt on and being very good-looking. Mysteriously, this is something that greatly appeals to young women, and after they bought his first book in droves – In Real Life, about his unreal life as a YouTube star, made the New York Times bestseller list – he has now written a novel.

And it must be his own work, because his is the only name on the cover. He really is very, very good-looking, you know.

As we can tell from the cover, the book contains male characters and female characters, and while sometimes their interests overlap, sometimes they don't, and so their pictures are not completely aligned. This is very subtle.

Rowan is the girl, the second child of her family in a world where families are only allowed one child. After being hidden away for sixteen years she escapes for a night of adventure, but it's dangerous, because she has special kaleidoscope eyes.

She is a child of Eden, but cannot live there, and so the book asks us all a profound question: can it really be Eden if its own children are not allowed to live there? The answer must be no, because Eden should be a perfect place to live, and who could be happy in a place where your children are hidden away?

Although, if Adam had been happy in the original Eden, would he have wanted an Eve? If Eve had been happy in the original Eden, would she have wanted an apple? So perhaps it makes perfect sense to call this unhappy place Eden.

Many adventures follow, and characters develop in interesting ways, some becoming happier, some becoming sadder, but always letting the reader see what is happening.

I would give this book five red noses.

You can buy the book here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun on Red Nose Day. Book a fake internet review of your book. (There will be a real review of this book by someone who actually read it – and loved it – in our next issue.)

Professor Challenger in Space by SW Theaker #rednosereviews #rednoseday

Review by Howard Phillips

Professor George Challenger is one of the classic characters of science fiction, although he has perhaps not outshone The Lost World to the extent that fellow Arthur Conan Doyle creation Sherlock Holmes has thrown all the books in which he appeared into the shadows. This novel is by a writer I definitely do not know personally, S.W. Theaker.

I am definitely not S.W. Theaker writing under a different name to trick you into buying his book, because that would be wrong. I read on his website that this book was originally written in the nineties, in the course of a couple of weeks. Whether that is true or not I can't say, since, as I previously explained, I do not know him personally and am definitely not him writing under a pseudonym, but it is difficult to believe given how extraordinarily good this book is.

Arthur Conan Doyle's belief in spiritualism is shown to be mistaken by sheer dint of the fact that his spectre has not emerged from the grave to shake this author by the hand and pat him on the back, in gratitude at having done so much with the character. Granted, descriptions of the lead characters' physical attributes are few and far between, the author possibly having got halfway through writing this novel before going back to look up their descriptions in the Conan Doyle stories.

But would the creator of Sherlock Holmes, that master investigator, who famously said that when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, would the creator of that character ever have considered removing Challenger's head and putting it onto a robot body? Of course not, because it takes the imagination of a true genius to think of something so radical, and that is what we have here.

Some reviewers, the kind to which you shouldn't pay attention, the haters, the slaters, the Johnny-come-laters, might complain that here Theaker just recycles Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol idea of the chief as a head on a plate, but pathetic literary trolls don't realise how ingeniously that allows the good professor to travel through the vacuum of space! Complainers and moaners might also wonder why everything in the book is so lightly described, as if it was written in a rush and the author just wanted to write the dialogue, but that's simply to miss the point of this novel's marvellously pulpy fun.

This book gets five red noses from me!

You can buy the book here.

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NB: this is a fake internet review, written for fun on Red Nose Day. Book a fake internet review of your book.

Happy Red Nose Day! #rednoseday #rednosereviews

It's going to be an unusual day here on the TQF blog. For those of you who don't live in the UK, Red Nose Day is an event organised every two years for Comic Relief, which involves people being "funny for money". Children dress in red clothes, adults sit in baths full of baked beans, and in the evening we all cry our eyes out watching heartbreaking stories of people doing everything they can to survive against the odds.

For this Red Nose Day, we decided to compromise our principles and write fake internet reviews of books we haven't read, in return for donations to Comic Relief. For a bit of background, read the guest post I wrote for the Ginger Nuts of Horror blog, where I talk a bit about the various varieties of fake review I have encountered over the last decade or two. I reckon it's quite the eye-opener!

I'm about to get started on writing the reviews, but it's still not too late to reserve a slot for your own book. Our fundraising goal is one hundred pounds, and at the time of writing we're three quarters of the way there. Even more would be amazing. I'll keep writing as long as you keep donating! If you want us to "review" your book(s), go to our JustGiving Comic Relief page and donate five pounds, euros or dollars and we'll add a book of your choice to the queue.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/corrupt-reviews-for-cash

Or feel free to make a donation without asking us to review anything! We've produced fifty-eight issues of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction to date, given them all away for free, and you don't owe us a thing for any of that – we do it because we love doing it! – but if you did want to show your appreciation for any of our work, whether it's here or on any other projects that you've enjoyed, a donation to Comic Relief today, however small, would be an amazing way to do it.

So: don't trust anything you read on our blog today. It'll all be flim-flam, trickery, bluff, dishonesty, padding, chicanery and fakery, but in a good cause. I don't know yet how funny it will be, but if it fails to raise a chuckle or two I hope at least it will help you to spot some of the telltale signs of a fake review. And where better to start than with a fake internet review of my own book, the first book we published, the first thing to appear in our magazine, by our very own fictional reviewer…

Pay £5 and we will give your book a glowing review! #rednosereviews

This Friday, Red Nose Day, we will be raising money for Comic Relief by casting aside our scruples, our principles, the very core of our being! That is to say, we will give your book (or any book you choose) a glowing review – without reading it, in the style of fake internet reviews! – if you donate five pounds to Comic Relief.

Click here to donate and book your slot:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/corrupt-reviews-for-cash

We will write and post the reviews in a marathon on Red Nose Day, and they will appear here on the TQF blog and in a subsequent issue of the magazine.

If you are an indie author or a small press publisher, this is a great way to publicise your projects and support a good cause. They will be clearly flagged as our joke Red Nose reviews, so don't worry about anyone thinking you have done anything shady…