Book Reviews

A Disturbance in the Force: How and Why the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened

Order this BookStory: First setting the stage by explaining the variety television ecosystem’s evolution into the 1970s, where it became a high profile vehicle that could make or break careers, the book then tracks the ascendancy of Star Wars as a burgeoning entertainment franchise and explains in detail how these two phenomena collided to produce two hours of TV that didn’t satisfy variety show viewing audiences…and didn’t cut it as a slice of Star Wars lore either.

Review: Initiated in 2020 as a potential companion to the long-gestating crowd-funded documentary of the same name, A Disturbance In The Force almost couldn’t be more different from the film. The film is full of irreverent laughs, pacey editing, and basically it’s ironic soundbite and clip clearance heaven. The book is a completely different animal. Though it does quote the very same on-camera interviews that were diced up for the movie, the book has a huge amount of context on its side, as well as the time to make sure the reader understands, in depth, the forces that had to collide for something like the Star Wars Holiday Special to be made. Though not humorless, the book is less concerned with providing the reader with an endless stream of chuckles…and it’s less interested in absolving all parties of blame.

Blake’s 7 Production Diary: Series A

Story: The early history of Terry Nation’s legendary dystopian British space opera Blake’s 7 is traced from the initial pitch meeting through the broadcast of the final episode of its first season in down-to-the-day detail, exhaustively researched from the BBC’s archives and accompanied by internal memos, relevant quotes from the cast and crew, and an overabundance of photos.

Review: Cult Edge – a fannish design duo consisting of Grahame Robertson and Carol Ramsay – has been taking a decisive lead in recent years, making up for the lack of published material centered on the late ’70s/early ’80s BBC space opera Blake’s 7. So far Cult Edge has published two short story compilations and two lovingly-illustrated hardback “annuals”, paying homage to the World Publishing kids’ annuals published during the show’s run and expanding on the scope of what would have been published on those annuals considerably. All of these are nonprofit ventures, benefiting various humanitarian charities. I’ll get around to reviewing all of these in due time, but I had a lot of thoughts after absorbing this book.

The Blake’s 7 Production Diary started out as a series of Twitter posts exhaustively researched and written by Helm, and timed to post automatically in a specific order on the corresponding dates, including photos and documentation where relevant. It was an amazing resource. And that account was torpedoed after Twitter became a staggeringly expensive monument to the hubris of an insecure man-child scarcely worth mentioning here, other than that he’d find himself right at home in the pantheon of Blake’s 7’s dystopian villains. So those timed, date-specific morsels of trivia and their accompanying visual documentation – scanned memos, photos, blueprints, and so on – became this book, with Robertson’s usual well-judged print design lending a unified design to all of the material Helm had gathered and written.

The good news is that it might actually find an audience in print that it didn’t find in social media – or, at the very least, a different audience (perhaps including people who weren’t on Twitter in the first place). And a lot of this stuff had never seen print before. That’s the good news. But there are downsides.

Throughout the text, snippets of past interviews with various members of the cast and crew are included, in fairly close proximity to the events described in the text. Some of the quotes are quite recognizable – but there’s no bibliography, which is the kind of thing that’d get a college research paper kicked back to you for revisions, if not summarily graded down as a result. An equal or even greater sin is the omission of any kind of index. A reference work, which this clearly is, should have an index. And as most reference works are built on a combination of original and prior research, a bibliography is, at the very least, a professional courtesy as well.

And space for these things could have been carved out if the text had more prominence than the vast number of pictures here. The issue isn’t with the lovingly reproduced production and publicity stills, or the marvelous happy snaps of sets, models, and props taken by their builders. But there are an awful lot of “filmstrips” consisting of screen grabs, often illustrating specific events being discussed by the text…which, on some pages, seems like it’s crammed into the margins to make room for the photos. It’s the one weakness of the layout of the book that really stuck with me (and usually Cult Edge’s publications are a feast for the eyes and an impeccable testament to long-standing print layout best practices). I was far more interested in the researched text than I was in tiny, postage-stamp-sized screen grabs.

The sheer amount of photography also makes this is a large-format coffee table book with a prohibitive price point (which I gritted my teeth and justified to myself in terms of the money going to good causes). I’m eager to see the other volumes in this series, but I’m hoping for a more balanced layout that favors the text, and perhaps, as a result, a price point that doesn’t feel quite so much like a bunch of screeching Decimas stomping on my wallet.

This is because the text, some of which is expanded considerably from its original Twitter posts, is lovely, painting a very detailed picture of the behind-the-scenes machinations of getting Blake’s 7 on the air and then trying desperately to keep it there. Some of the most tantalizing trivia is the could-have-beens – Martin Jarvis or Maurice Colbourne as Blake? Jane Asher as Cally? Brian Croucher as Vila? Also amazing is the BBC’s insistence on shooting itself in the foot by demanding that the show’s makers seek co-production money from outside the BBC, and then torpedoing the offers they did receive (from Time-Life Pictures in the U.S., which wanted a lock on worldwide rights, or from Mark Shermeldine of London Pictures, future producer of the 1980s Twilight Zone revival), leaving the show with a per-episode special effects budget of £50, befitting the cop show that Blake’s 7 replaced on the schedule. These and so many other details add up to the picture of a show that got made almost in spite of itself.

All of this information deserves a better layout, and it’s so close here, except for those pages where the text is squeezed into narrow columns. After the previous Cult Edge volumes, I was startled to find the layout to be the weak point. I love it, but I just expected to love it more than I did.

This book is available from Lulu.com.

Year: 2023
Author: Jonathan Helm
Publisher: Cult Edge
Pages: 274

Producers On Producing: The Making of Film and Television

Order this bookStory: Interviewer Irv Broughton conducts Q&A style interviews with a wide variety of television and television film producers from diverse corners of the medium, from documentarians to news producers to mainstream miniseries and series producers, trying to find out what made their biggest successes in the business work.

Review: A book of Q&A interviews with a various of interview subjects is a bit of an odd duck – did the credited author, who conducted the interviews, write the book, or did the people he interview do the majority of the writing with their answers? And yet it’s an interview format that leaves any editorialization or interpretation by the credited author off the table. The responses are what was said by the respondents, and the closest one gets to “slant” is the choice of the interviewer’s questions.

Pull To Open: 1962-1963 – The Inside Story of How the BBC Created and Launched Doctor Who

Order this bookStory: Attempting to track down anything that might bear the slightest resemblance to “definitive dates” on which Doctor Who, as a concept, was born, the book follows the careers of many key and ancillary players in the show’s gestation, combing through BBC paperwork, interviews both new and vintage, and focuses on the convergence of these talents as a vague push for more science fiction on the BBC becomes the more focused creation of one of the genre’s longest-lasting series.

Review: Well, this is a book whose subject matter is not only already fascinating, but it’s all gotten a bit more complicated since the book was released. This doesn’t mean that the book is outdated in anyway – it’s actually incredibly complete. But, as always where the TARDIS is involved, it keeps evolving.

Delete: A Design History of Computer Vapourware

Order this bookStory: The author traces a history of computer hardware that never happened, ranging from minicomputers that were promised but never mass-produced, to missteps and sidesteps early in the history of personal computing, to unproduced or seldom-circulated also-rans of the early smart phone era. If you love prototype computer hardware, this is an entire book devoted to that topic with a laser-like focus.

Review: Fear not – Delete does present the (intended) specs and the stories behind its unrealized hardware. But the introduction to the book lays out the criteria behind much of what was selected, and it’s really there that the reader is told what the book’s real mission is. It’s not to ruminate over capabilities we never got, product lines we should have had, or pieces of gear that could have changed the world. It’s more of a chronicle in retrofuturistic design that nearly made it to market – a travelogue of mid-century-modern design influence in computer hardware.

Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years, 1972-1986

Order this bookStory: Starting with the rationales and early studies leading up to the approval of the space shuttle program, the book then progresses through the vehicle’s lengthy development, the recruitment of the first astronaut class since the Apollo days, Frustrating setbacks, the triumphant and yet tentative first flights, and then the halcyon days of the early-to-mid ’80s when NASA began treating the shuttle as an airline that just happened to go into Earth orbit. The fateful final flight of Challenger, and the fallout from that, gives the book a bit of a downer ending.

Review: Have I been on a bit of a space shuttle bender lately? Yes. Yes I have. But each book I read on the subject has interesting things to say to shed light on the subject matter. Where I previously reviewed a coffee table book that covered a lot of the same span of time as Bold They Rise, this is a book that flips the ratio of text to illustrations heavily in favor of text. A later volume in the Outward Odyssey library covers every shuttle mission from 1988 through 2011, a 23-year span containing most of the actual flown missions in the program. You’d think that Bold They Rise, with only 25 missions to cover (one of which lasted 73 seconds), can proceed at a more leisurely pace.

To Everything That Might Have Been: The Lost Universe Of Space: 1999

Order this bookStory: Using production documentation, correspondence both formal and informal, never-filmed scripts (or summaries thereof), and other material – to say nothing of the memories of former story editor Christopher Penfold – the authors examine the many twists and turns that the sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 could have taken, but didn’t, from its origins as the second season of UFO to abandoned spinoff plans.

Review: You may or may not have noticed that I’m heavily involved with the writing and production of a daily sci-fi history podcast called Sci-Fi 5, now in its third year as I write this review. And even before that, I was doing my own sci-fi history thing here at theLogBook. Show me a book that has scads of exact dates (gleaned from correspondence) of things that happened in the history of a much-loved show, and that’s pretty much catnip to me.

Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story

Order this bookStory: Originally conceived as a major cornerstone of the more all-encompassing Apollo Applications Program that would have included a space station, a longer-term lunar presence, space science missions using existing Apollo hardware, and possibly even a crewed flight to Venus and back, Skylab ended up as a space station in which the space science missions would be carried out; the rest of AAP never happened due to government belt-tightening. The authors – most of whom were astronauts who stayed aboard Skylab in orbit – discuss the development twists and turns of the Skylab program, the three missions that were flown, and the station’s legacy to science and the American space program.

Review: It’s easy to find books on the history of the Apollo lunar missions, and fairly easy to find books covering the space shuttle program and even the international Apollo-Soyuz cooperative venture. But…Skylab? Does anyone remember Skylab for anything other than getting NASA a fine for littering when the station re-entered and scattered debris over the Australian outback in 1979?

Once Upon Atari: How I Made History By Killing An Industry

Order this bookStory: Howard Scott Warshaw, designer and programmer of such classic Atari 2600 games as Yars’ Revenge, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, looks back on his career and digs down into the claims that he’s responsible for one of the system’s best games ever (Yars’) and one of its worst (E.T.), the latter of which is credited with killing the American video game industry. But did E.T., or Warshaw, really do that?

Review: Howard Scott Warshaw is a really interesting guy. I say this having met him on a couple of occasions, but I also say it because I found it fascinating that someone who had to put up with years of being (unjustly) blamed for a game he created somehow single-handedly causing the fall of the early video game industry…would change careers and become a therapist, who counts other creatives in that industry among his clients. What better career trajectory could anyone embark on, if not that one? I was hoping that his memoir would cover that transition, and I was not disappointed in the slightest.

Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986–2011

Order this bookStory: Picking up the story in the wake of the 1986 Challenger tragedy, the author chronicles, through interviews with as many of the astronauts as possible who were flying the missions, every shuttle flight from 1989 through the end of the shuttle program in 2011. Though most of these flights are chronicled chronologically, there are special sections devoted to flights related to the Hubble Space Telescope, flights to the Russian space station Mir, and the flights that built Mir’s successor, the International Space Station.

Review: In this reviewer’s lifetime, we’ve gone from it not being an unreasonable prospect to have memorized the name of every astronaut who flew in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs (Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz included) to there having been more astronauts flown aboard the space shuttle than anyone could reasonably be expected to commit to memory. The shuttle flew over a hundred times, and in many cases engaged in research missions that didn’t get the public attention of a moonshot or a major first, but were of major importance in preparing for long-term human habitation in space. The sheer number of missions, and crew members, threatens to turn into indecipherable background noise. This book does a lot to fix that problem, introducing you to the astronauts who flew the missions and laying out the goals and the stakes of each mission.

Storytellers To The Nation: A History Of American Television Writing

Order this bookStory: From variety show joke writers to radio scribes who graduated to the screen to a generation of writers who grew up with television, the history of writing for TV in the United States is traced, with focus on particular program types, genres, and where merited, individual productions and writers. A consistent cast of characters in the writing trade begins to become apparent, shaping the medium in their own idiosyncratic ways. The book’s coverage ends in 1991.

Review: Once upon a time, back in the days of reading Cinefantastique articles about Ronald D. Moore managing to get an unsolicited spec script in the door at Star Trek: The Next Generation, I was dead set on becoming a television writer. Looking back now, it’s more like something I was really interested in doing for a hot second. Those of us who fixated on that same success story and that same goal at that same time – and we were legion – probably didn’t realize that it was more fun being Ronald D. Moore than it was being the average overworked, underpaid TV writer. This book is full of stories that are fun to read from a distance… and convince me that maybe, just maybe, I dodged a bullet. Just working in television production at a local level proved to be precarious enough.

Picturing The Space Shuttle: The Early Years

Order this bookStory: The authors – both journalists who covered NASA from the inception of the shuttle program to its completion – trace the history of the space shuttle from the earliest (and in some cases most fanciful) proposals through the first four test launches, in a huge number of often previously unpublished photos and accompanying text.

Review: If ever there was a coffee table book aimed squarely at this reviewer, Picturing The Space Shuttle: The Early Years is it. While it tells a story of which some of the broad strokes are already fairly well known, the granularity of detail combined with the spectacular photography is what sets this volume apart. It’s a vivid trip back to a point in history when we had sent astronauts to the moon and back, and the universe – or at least so the NASA promotional material said – was ours for the taking. All America had to do was build a next generation spacecraft of unprecedented complexity.

The Clone Masters: The Rule Of Death

Story: The Liberator receives a message directed specifically at Blake: the copy of him grown by the Clone Masters is in failing health, and needs his help. Despite Avon’s repeated warnings that this is almost certainly a trap, Blake insists on following the signal to its source, which means gaining an audience with the last survivinging Clone Master who remains after their order was destroyed, which involves a side trip to gather – or steal – the necessary funds to pay for that privilege. Even that task is costly, nearly costing Vila and Avon their lives. Nearly everything about visiting the Clone Master’s new inner sanctum involves being defenseless, which is, of course, when Avon’s warnings are proven to be correct.

Review: Oh, thank goodness, someone actually came up with a good reason to revisit the Clone Masters’ copy of Blake. Introduced in the 1979 Blake’s 7 TV episode Weapon, the Fake Blake has cropped up again and again in fan fiction, often as a way of circumventing the series finale (which was more final than most shows’ series finales). That episode also saw the only appearance of the Clone Masters (who seemed like they were being set up as a Big Deal, narratively speaking, only to disappear from the story thereafter), as well as the only appearance of Rashel, a freed slave who turns the table on virtually everyone in that story, winning her freedom and that of Blake’s copy. And of course, as far as the television series went, that was all we got of that story.

Creating Q*Bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games

Order this bookStory: The designer/programmer behind the 1982 arcade hit Q*Bert discusses how he got into computer programming and then into game design after being hired at the very young video game division of legendary Chicago pinball manufacturer Gottlieb. A free-wheeling work environment give him the freedom and time to develop the graphics and game play concepts that led to the highly marketable hit game, but massive changes in the industry meant that he didn’t always have that kind of environment.

Review: When I was a ten-year-old kid more in love with “cute” games than with shoot-’em-up games, the summer of Q*Bert’s arrival in the local arcades was practically a flashpoint memory. Even when I wasn’t playing the game, the character stuck with me enough that drawings of him started to fill up the margins of my school notebooks that fall. As much fun as the game was, I’m not sure anyone gives Q*Bert enough credit for scoring an important first: the appearance of the character was unified in just about all of its marketing, something that couldn’t be said of Pac-Man or even Mario at that stage. That a ten-year-old could draw him was a bonus.

The Odyssey File

Order this bookStory: Replicating a lengthy electronic correspondence, The Odyssey File recounts the collaboration between filmmaker Peter Hyams, who was not only slated to direct 2010: The Year We Make Contact, but to adapt it into screenplay form, and legendary sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, who had already published the hotly-anticipated literary sequel 2010: Odyssey Two. The two ruminate over their foray into an untested system for communicating across international distances, discuss the often large changes Hyams wished to make to Clarke’s story, and slowly but surely, get a movie made.

Review: As a long-time admirer of both filmed instances of Arthur C. Clarke’s genre-defining saga, I naturally already have a battered, not-getting-any-younger copy of Clarke’s The Lost Worlds Of 2001, a book that’s about as old as I am, and it’s fascinating stuff, mainly offering glimpses into roads not taken by Stanley Kubrick’s original 1968 film. The close collaboration between Kubrick and Clarke is very well documented. And so, it turns out, is the much more space-age collaboration between Clarke and 2010 director/screenwriter Peter Hyams.

Chasing New Horizons: Inside The Epic First Mission To Pluto

Order this bookStory: From the moment that Pluto fell off the itinerary of worlds to be visited by the Voyager spacecraft during that mission’s planning stages, scientists wanted to find a way back to what was then regarded as the outermost planet. Inspired by the outcome of the Voyager missions, Alan Stern takes on the task of heading up the “Pluto Underground” in the late 1980s to begin to build support for a robotic mission to Pluto, a goal that will encounter far more obstacles than he anticipates.

Review: A warts-and-all history of the mission that, after many permutations, false starts, and NASA cancellations, became known as New Horizons, this book does include the romance of discovery, but it also includes the political machinations that go into mission proposals and NASA’s competitive mission selection process. The mission doesn’t launch until around halfway through the book. What takes up the first half is startling, sobering, and maybe just a little bit unnerving.

The Long Game: 1996-2003 – The Inside Story of How the BBC Brought Back Doctor Who

Order this bookStory: From the immediate aftermath of the American/Canadian-made 1996 TV movie starring Paul McGann through the announcement in 2003 of the show’s imminent return under the creative guidance of Russell T. Davies, including a lengthy period of time during which no one at the BBC seemed to know the scope of what rights had been assigned, or for how long, in order to get the 1996 movie made, this book tracks the bizarrely meandering path from one Doctor Who comeback to another, more enduring one.

Review: The “wilderness years” of Doctor Who are a peculiar thing to track – because which “wilderness years” are we talking about? The seven years from the concluding chapters of the original BBC series in 1989 through the one-off 1996 revival movie, or the period from 1996 to 2003? This book covers the latter, which, in hindsight, is truly an underexamined epoch in Doctor Who history. There’s already an excellent book about how Big Finish Productions came to be, more or less, the de facto makers of Doctor Who in 1999 (and in fact, we’ve already reviewed it here). But what was going on at the BBC? That’s what Paul Hayes covers here.

Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series, Volume One

Order this bookStory: Didn’t hang on to all of your Topps Star Wars trading cards from the 1970s? Fear not, they’re all in this book – every last one of them, front and back – along with “director’s commentary” discussing image selection, the relationship between Topps and Lucasfilm, the occasional gaffe, and more. Really, the only thing missing is the smell of bubble gum.

Review: I have never really been a card collector, but once upon a time in the 1990s, I realized that I had an entire box of Topps Star Wars trading cards that had defied the odds, survived many a purge of childhood personal belongings, and had moved out of the house with me. I decided it was time to treat this seriously, and purchased many, many pages of those clear, semi-flexible card holder pages that would fit in a three-ring binder, and started organizing the cards, trying to put them more or less in numerical order, and trying to get my head around how complete a collection I had, and what the value of it might be. As it turns out, I had a nearly-complete collection – my greatest deficiency was in the second wave of cards with red borders – and in very good shape. The binder was put on a shelf and kept moving with me, from Arkansas to Wisconsin and back again, though when I had kids, I decided perhaps it was time to start parting with some of that collection, because kids always need to eat, and these cards… well, they were just taking up shelf space and not really being appreciated. And when I discovered this book, parting with the cards became a lot easier.

Script Doctor: The Inside Story of Doctor Who, 1986-1989

Order this bookStory: In the wake of the making of a troubled 1986 season that saw the show’s script editor quit abruptly, Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner hires a new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, after a job interview in which Cartmel states that his aim with Doctor Who’s future storytellign is “to topple the government.” Cartmel recounts that tale, as well as the dozen multi-part stories he helped usher to the screen – some admittedly better than others – in great detail, drawing from diaries he kept at the time of production, describing the events and personalities behind late ’80s Doctor Who in great detail.

Review: It’s become so accepted in Doctor Who fandom to praise the last season of Sylvester McCoy’s tenure in Doctor Who while simultaneously complaining about nearly everything in his first two seasons that it’s a bit tiring. (There is, of course, a subset of fandom that complains about this whole era, as well.) One thing that most everyone does seem to agree on is that there was an uptick in the quality of the scripts (if not necessarily the production itself) thanks to incoming script editor Andrew Cartmel, who had the thankless job of filling the void that had been left rather suddenly by the acrimonious departure of his predecessor. There was no handoff period, no pep talk, no wisdom imparted from Cartmel’s predecessor.

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty Year Voyager Mission

Order this bookStory: From its inception as a pie-in-the-sky mission to the planets beyond Mars, dreamed up when no such missions to these places had ever been attempted, to its resounding success in the face of technical, political and budgetary hurdles, the Voyager program’s history is retraced through interviews with those who devised and operated the two Voyager spacecraft and their onboard scientific instruments. The author also adds his own experiences as a student gofer, and later an undergrad student, during the later Voyager encounters.

Review: It’s taken a while to get here, but this is the kind of book I’ve been wanting about this mission for years. If you were roughly the same age as I was, and were so inclined, the pages of magazines like Astronomy and National Geographic were peppered with the names of Voyager project leads and scientists – Ed Stone, Rich Terrile, Carolyn Porco, Larry Soderblom, Torrence Johnson, to name but a few – and these people, in my mind, were rock stars. “The Interstellar Age” elevates them to that status again, and it’s long overdue.

Space: 1999 Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual

Order this bookStory: A thorough, beautifully illustrated guide to Moonbase Alpha for new recruits and existing crew members alike, detailing the history of the lunar base (including the moon’s catastrophic departure from Earth orbit in 1999, and events since), technical specifications of Alpha’s stun guns, spacesuits, and its fleet of support vehicles including Eagles, Hawks, and other variants, and a complete directory/biography of Alpha’s command staff. Wait, where does Moonbase Alpha get new recruits so far from home? Have you been through a security checkpoint?

Review: The 1970s were the heyday of fan-produced material based on presumably inert IPs – countless in-universe Star Trek manuals and reference texts, and similar projects covering elements of Irwin Allen’s numerous genre TV series, or Gerry Anderson’s. Often these would be advertised in the pages of Starlog Magazine, though the relationship between not-quite-licensed products and magazine was a bit more symbiotic than was let on in some cases. One product of this not-really-licensed-and-yet-not-completely-unauthorized pipeline was the Moonbase Alpha Technical Notebook, written primarily by David Hirsch with contributions from fellow Starlog staff writer David McConnell, and artwork by Geoffrey Mandel and Anthony Frederickson, both of whom had contributed to unofficial Star Trek technical manuals long before becoming contributors to studio-produced Star Trek. Hirsch had also, in his capacity as a Starlog staff writer, assisted ITC in preparing their late ’70s/early ’80s package of syndicated “movies” created by splicing together pairs of otherwise disparate episodes of Space: 1999 and UFO. The chances that Gerry Anderson and his production staff didn’t know about the Technical Notebook hover somewhere around zero, but it wasn’t an officially blessed and licensed product, either. The Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual, a lavish coffee table book in a “widescreen” format, is very much as official as one can get – and, as much love as I have for fannish endeavours like its predecessor, it’s a gigantic improvement.

Break Out: How The Apple II Launched The PC Gaming Revolution

Order this bookStory: Beginning with the development of the venerable Apple II computer itself and then examining the histories of several individual games (and, in some cases, starting points for franchises) and their creators, this book traces the history of home computer gaming on the Apple II from “programmed by hobbyists and sold on floppy disks in Ziploc bags” to a multi-million dollar industry whose past still informs its present.

Review: I’m always a sucker for the story of video game industry decision-making, and I’m always a sucker for biographies of video game developers, especially if they’re not among the A-list superstars of the field that everyone usually talks about. Break Out delivers both, and manages to balance well-known titles and their creators with those who have not gotten the exposure they deserved over the years.

Fallen Down: Heartache & Compassion in Undertale

Order this bookStory: Writer Joel Couture (whose work you may recognize from Siliconera, Gamasutra, and IndieGames.com) ventures into the world of the computer game Undertale, meeting its unique cast of characters under very different circumstances, as the game allows players to remain neutral, take a pacifist stance throughout the game, or go on a blood-soaked “Genocide Run”, killing everything and everyone in sight. It’s the last of these that affects him so profoundly that he admits he may not be able to play Undertale again, and explains why the game’s varying modes of play have had such a seismic effect on him.

Review: In the interests of full disclosure, a lot of Undertale goes on under my roof. My oldest is nearly obsessed with it, we’ve both played it, and I’ve given my stamp of approval by way of starting his collection of the Fangamer “Undertale little buddies” figures (of which more another time). So far down the Undertale rabbit hole has my son gone that he’s been working on his own version of the game – except with characters and scenarios of his own creation – programming it entirely in Scratch. We’ve watched YouTube videos that put forth outlandish theories on the origins of wisecracking skeletons Sans and Papyrus, postulating that Undertale may be an offshoot of Mother / Earthbound, and so on. What inspired me to give this game my wholehearted endorsement? The tagline that sells the game – “the RPG where you don’t have to kill anybody!” – scratches the surface: very much like an all-time favorite computer game of mine, Ultima IV, Undertale has a system of morality built into it, holding the player accountable for his actions.

Ambassadors From Earth: Pioneering Explorations With Unmanned Spacecraft

Order this bookStory: The history of outer solar system exploration is covered in depth, from the earliest notional studies of robotic exploration beyond Mars to the missions that actually made it off the drawing board and into space – Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, and their progeny such as Galileo and Cassini.

Review: This is the book I’ve been looking for and waiting for. There are books aplenty – both lovely and lacking – on the Voyager missions to the outer planets, but while JPL’s machine marvels continue functioning to this day, outlasting interplanetary missions launched both before and since 1977, they were not the first. This book covers the ambitious Pioneer missions to Jupiter and Saturn that preceeded (and, in many ways, paved the way for) the Voyagers, and revealed that there was much to be gained by going and – at least for a while – staying at Jupiter and Saturn.

The 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987

The 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987Order this bookStory: Video game scholar Brett Weiss nominates his picks for the hundred best console games from the heyday of the age of cartridges – from the earliest days of interchangeable cartridges in 1977 to the ascendancy of the Nintendo Entertainment System a decade later. Across a wide variety of game systems and genres, covering killer app originals and ports of popular arcade games alike, the picks represent a wide spectrum of both hardware and software. If that’s not enough for you, an appendix nominates a hundred additional contenders.

Review: In the interests of full disclosure (a dying art these days, isn’t it?), I’ll tell you that I’m quoted in several places in this book, though I didn’t know which quotes from past articles of mine would pop up, so The 100 Greatest Console Video Games was still a nice surprise for me.

The “Top [insert number here] List” format is a mainstay of pop culture retrospectives, but often falls victim to the “received wisdom” of a particular age group or other demographic. Weiss tries to touch on many genres and numerous systems here, encouraging his readers to discover gems that they may have overlooked in the past.

Stranger Than Fiction: The Life And Times Of Split Enz

Order this bookStory: Original Split Enz bassist Mike Chunn, who played with the New Zealand supergroup in its formative art-rock-turned-theatrical-extravaganza phase (1972-77) charts the formation, the heady rise and eventual success of the group, with comments from all of his bandmates and his own insider perspective.

Review: Can there ever really be enough books about the musical career of the Finn Brothers? (For this reader: no. As it so happens, the first book ever reviewed in this section was a book on this very topic.) And strangely enough, the aforementioned book about Crowded House quoted this book heavily: primary source material if ever there was some. And source material doesn’t get much more primary than the memoir of one of the founding members of Split Enz.

Warnings: The True Story Of How Science Tamed The Weather

Order this bookStory: Mike Smith, former TV meteorologist and founder of Weatherdata, Inc., recounts the formative events that inspired him to study weather – particularly severe weather – and take it up as a career. His involvement in forecasting such severe weather events as Hurricane Katrina and the devastating 2007 Greensburg, Kansas tornado (which destroyed that entire town), is covered in detail.

Review: A fascinating read for at least half of its page count, “Warnings” promises to be a history of forecasting severe weather in the United States. The first half of the book delivers on that admirably, taking us from the era when tornadoes just seemed to sneak up on (and kill) an unaware populace to modern times, when the debate usually isn’t “was there a warning?”, but rather “how much lead time did the warning give?”. From the fabled first (and quite unauthorized) tornado warning issued at, and for, Tinker Air Force Bace in Oklahoma City, the development of severe weather forecasting and warning is traced through the use of modified navigational radars from ships to the development of Doppler radar and computer modeling (and the very hands-on human data gathering that has to happen for the computer modeling to be even remotely useful or accurate).

Brighter Day: A Jellyfish Story

Order this bookStory: In tracing the family histories of the band members, charting their musical adventures before and after Jellyfish, and recounting conversations between the band themselves, their agents, label reps, producers, and occasional session players, the author is really trying to answer one question: why were there only two albums?

Review: Jellyfish is a band whose all-too-brief body of work has been dissected, repeatedly remastered, relentlessly reissued, and held up as the standard of an entire genre of music…which really isn’t bad when that body of work consists of the band’s two early ’90s albums, the demos for those albums, and a handful of demos – maybe half an extra album’s worth – of songs pitched to other artists during the band’s active years. None of the demos made it out until nearly a decade after Jellyfish disbanded, though, so we’re talking about two really influential albums.

Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB and UPN

Order this bookStory: Industry insiders trace the two rival attempts to create the “fifth network” of the 1990s – Warner Brothers’ WB network and the United Paramount Network, from the earliest discussions of starting them through their mutual decline and merger into the 21st century CW network. Spoiler: neither of the networks, only a handful of the networks’ shows, and only some of their executives’ careers, make it out of the story alive.

Review: As a promo writer/producer at two UPN stations in the 1990s – one in Arkansas, one in Wisconsin – it was my job to try to make all of the network’s shows look good to our audience, as best I could, with the material the network made available to us. It wasn’t easy. UPN was a schizophrenic beast: hip, urban humor one night, sci-fi the next night. And when the network suddenly claimed all five weeknights for its fall 1998 season, that wild spread of shows and genres got even wilder. I always wanted to know: how did those decisions get made, who made them, and why did the promotional push for that…diverse (trying to be charitable there)…1998 season seem to evaporate as soon as the shows premiered?

Written by WB programming executive Suzanne Daniels and Daily Variety reporter Cynthia Littleton (likely drawing from her own coverage of UPN), Season Finale answers that question and many more.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Space Between

Order this bookStory: A series of loosely connected adventures traces the Enterprise crew’s infrequent brushes with a slowly-unfolding mystery that points toward a shadow faction of Starfleet whose actions could endanger the Federation’s peaceful agenda.

Review: Published in six issues in 2007 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Space Between”‘s six discrete stories are so tenuously connected that one could be forgiven for not realizing that there’s connecting tissue at all. But that’s not really a problem, since “The Space Between” also happens to consist of some pretty good stand-alone stories that feel absolutely authentic to the “eras” of TNG that they portray.

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