The Apollo Adventure
Story: Jeffrey Kluger’s insightful volume on the Apollo program from inception right through to the end is another treasure trove of information on that most daring era of Ameircan space exploration, focusing on other aspects that just the flight of Apollo 13.
Review: When I saw the blurb in the back of Apollo 13 nee Lost Moon for a trade paperback companion book, I figured it would be a kiddie item that really ought to be given away with Hardee’s Apollo Burgers. Wrong again.
Creating Babylon 5
Story: This reprint of a book originally released in Britain the previous year is a fascinating look behind the scenes and between the lines of the premier science fiction series of the 1990s. The book includes brief interviews with each of the cast, including the unjustly oft-forgotten Michael O’Hare, as well as several key players behind the scenes. It looks at a day in the production life of Babylon 5, and examines in cursory detail many of the episodes. And there are a lot of colorful pictures.
Review: And that’s about it.
Not trying to get down on this book or its author – the comments from J. Michael Straczynski and the cast are very insightful (particularly one discussion with JMS on pages 27 and 28 in which B5’s creator encapsulates the entire meaning of the show), and the pictures are very nice…but there’s not much else. Perhaps, like Blake’s 7 or Doctor Who, Babylon 5 needed to make its exit before it could be analyzed properly.
Babylon 5: The Wheel of Fire
Story: In what is apparently the last of Jane Killick’s behind-the-scenes books about Babylon 5, the author examines the making of the show’s final season, beginning with The Deconstruction of Falling Stars, which technically capped off season four despite being produced by TNT. The guide then tackles everything from No Compromises through Sleeping In Light, though I admit to being very disappointed with the final episode’s coverage – it starts out with “What hasn’t already been said about this episode?” as an almost up-front announcement that you’re not going to get much out of this section. The Babylon 5 magazine coverage of Sleeping, and – quite frankly – Joe Nazarro’s liner note insert in the episode’s soundtrack CD, were more informative than this.
Review: What really makes Killick’s book isn’t necessarily her material, but the reminiscences of the actors, and some of season five’s key players – namely Tracy Scoggins and Robin Atkin Downes (Byron) – haven’t talked much about their B5 work in the past, so their comments here, though sparse, are refreshing. On the flipside, most of J. Michael Straczynski’s quotes are lifted from his Usenet postings – but unlike Hal Schuster (author of unauthorized – and, to be completely candid, unauthored – guides to nearly everything), I’m sure Killick had JMS’ permission to reprint these.
Babylon 5: Point Of No Return
Story: Leaning heavily on interviews with series creator J. Michael Straczynski and the main cast members, Jane Killick continues her analysis of Babylon 5, this time covering the show’s much-loved third season. Topics of interest include the tightening of the show’s story arc as the Shadow War looms, how the plot threads in War Without End might have been resolved if Bruce Boxleitner hadn’t taken over as the show’s leading actor the previous year, and the increasing reliance on computer generated visuals.
Review: If I wish one thing could’ve been different about Jane Killick’s excellent and informative series of Babylon 5: Season By Season books, it would’ve been devoting less space to episode guides (which can be found elsewhere) and more space to talking to the cast and crew.
Babylon 5: The Coming Of Shadows
Story: This book chronicles the making of the second season of J. Michael Straczynski’s groundbreaking SFTV series Babylon 5, which was also the last season to feature scripts written by anyone other than Straczynski for over two years. Interviews with actors, writers, directors and JMS himself run throughout the book, with a special section on how the show managed to stay on budget and a great deal of focus on the arrival of new leading man Bruce Boxleitner.
Review: One of the things I’ve always been curious about when it comes to Babylon 5 is: when did J. Michael Straczynski receive the divine inspiration (or head trauma) that told him that he needed to write damn near every episode for the rest of the show’s run? And whatever happened to story editor Larry DiTillio, who was Straczynski’s right-hand man in the Captain Power days but disappeared after B5’s second year on the air?
Babylon 5: Signs And Portents
Story: A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the pilot movie and first season of Babylon 5, with lengthy interviews with cast members, behind-the-scenes crew and series creator J. Michael Straczynski.
Review: This is the first volume of Del Rey’s series of books covering the making of Babylon 5, season by season. It’s a nice little series of brief pieces on the making of each episode, with lots of insight from the actors, JMS, and various directors, though much of this information can be found with a little bit of hunting on the Lurker’s Guide To Babylon 5 web site – and sooner or later, the book’s behind-the-scenes stories will probably wind up there anyway.
Babylon 5: To Dream In The City Of Sorrows
Story: This book tells the tale of a curiously hazy portion of the series’ history dealing with a very significant character – B5’s original commander, Jeffrey Sinclair, and the events that unfolded between his sudden assignment to Minbar (after actor Michael O’Hare departed from the show between the first and second seasons) and his reappearance and subsequent final departure in the show’s third season. The story also manages to fit in how Catherine Sakai – Sinclair’s fiancee – dealt with his sudden disappearance, as well as the origins of a character who has only recently become sorely missed in the B5 universe: Marcus Cole. There are guest appearances by Delenn, Kosh, Kosh’s successor, and Garibaldi, as well as the recurring Minbari Grey Council gadfly Neroon and – for good measure! – at least one or two characters from the comic books (remember, they’re official too, even if they weren’t exactly high art). You’ll find out where Sinclair got that great honking scar across his face, and discover that he can chew out a Vorlon just as well as Sheridan can.
Review: I remember being somewhat disappointed with the first Babylon 5 novel published in 1995, and also reining my funds in more tightly, I opted to pass on the latest line of licensed books, unless they branched into the area of behind- the-scenes expositions (which they later did, with mixed results – see above). But this latest entry in the Babylon 5 series of novels was different for many reasons.
Blake’s 7: Their First Adventure
Story: When his government-enforced brainwashing begins to wear off, former resistance leader Roj Blake is convicted for a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to life on a penal planet called Cygnus Alpha. During the prison ship voyage, Blake meets several other prisoners with no love for the totalitarian Federation: expert computer hacker Avon, hard-bitten smuggler Jenna, good-hearted (but, alas, also weak-hearted) thief Vila, and a gentle giant named Gan who is prevented from using deadly force by a violence-inhibiting brain implant (also courtesy of the Federation legal system). Combining their talents, Blake and the others turn the tables on their captors, seizing control of the prison ship, but their hijacking attempt doesn’t last long. Still en route to Cygnus Alpha, the ship encounters a larger craft of unknown alien origins, and the prison ship skipper loses several men trying to board and salvage the alien vessel. He then decides to use Blake and the other prisoners instead, but they survive the initial onslaught of the alien ship’s auto-defense systems, undock from the prison ship, and make a run for it. Though Avon and Jenna are skeptical, Blake insists on using their new vehicle – dubbed the Liberator – to go to Cygnus Alpha and free more of the prisoners.
Review: A light-speed adaptation of the first three episodes of the BBC’s cult TV classic Blake’s 7, “Blake’s 7: Their First Adventure” rockets through three hour-long scripts with all the literary verve of an early Doctor Who novelization by Terrance Dicks. (That is to say, little if anything is added to the existing text of the scripts.) In fact, the Doctor Who novelization comparison is apt since, for some baffling reason, the trio of Trevor Hoyle’s Blake’s 7 novelizations seem to have been aimed squarely at a younger audience.
The Making of Terry Nation’s Blake’s 7
Story: Noted SF historian (and Doctor Who scholar) Adrian Rigelsford traces the brief but eventful history of the BBC’s other serious SFTV staple, Blake’s 7, from Terry Nation’s original (and somewhat hastily-conceived) pitch for the show through the production of the final episode. Brief episode synopses and cast lists follow a detailed examination of each season’s most momentous production events, and a special section at the end of the book focuses on merchandise and fandom. Features a foreword by series creator Terry Nation, who died two years later.
Review: It’s hard to compare with Sheelagh Wells and Joe Nazarro’s “Blake’s 7: The Inside Story”, but Adrian Rigelsford manages to come up with a nice companion volume to that nearly-definitive book. Wells and Nazarro leaned heavily on interviews with cast and crew, and many an unpublished photograph; in Rigelsford’s case, he had access to the BBC’s archives, loaded with photos, filming and studio filming recording dates, and all sorts of obscure facts that only a fan could love. While most of the photos are those that have been seen many times before, they’re sometimes presented as a spot-color background to the text, and most of the time they don’t cause any legibility problems (most) of the time).
Liberation: Unofficial Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7
Story: The authors guide us through a fairly scholarly episode-by-episode analysis of the BBC science fiction series Blake’s 7 (1978-1981), examining the evolution of scripts, challenges encountered in the production process, and the copious subtext bestowed upon the show’s 52 episodes by the cast. Special attention is given to the show’s relevance to sociopolitical issues contemporary with the original broadcast dates, and re-examining those themes in a more current context.
Review: When I was in my senior year of high school, I had a lovely English/lit teacher who took us through a selection of terribly influential – and, for an American public school, terribly subversive and dark – 20th century literature: “1984”, “Lord Of The Flies”, “Brave New World”, Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead”…great stuff. And yet, God love her, she almost blew the whole thing by overanalyzing everything. I’m not saying that no author has ever referenced the Holy Trinity by invoking the number three in literature, but I’d argue that nobody bothered to deliberately reference that as often as my teacher talked about it.
Blake’s 7: The Programme Guide
Story: Tony Attwood provides a concise, episode-by-episode breakdown of the BBC’s most underrated (and underbudgeted) science fiction series, Blake’s 7 (1978-1981). In addition to the customary cast listings and plot synopses, there are also brief interviews with cast members Paul Darrow, Michael Keating and Peter Tuddenham, script editor Chris Boucher and producer Vere Lorrimer. The late Terry Nation, creator of the series, also wrote the book’s original 1982 foreword about the genesis of his ideas.
Review: Still the only BBC-endorsed official guide to Blake’s 7, The Programme Guide is handy not only for its chronicle of the show’s 52 produced episodes, but its very brief interviews with the show’s cast and crew.
Blake’s 7: The Inside Story
Story: Blake’s 7 has always been shrouded in mystery, and as with Star Trek, we no longer have access to the creator’s mind to find out what he was thinking – so the authors tracked down all of the actors, many of the directors, and many of the other creative personnel responsible for the show’s memorable stories and occasionally less than memorable special effects. Co-author Sheelagh Wells was Blake’s 7’s makeup designer for the second, third and fourth years of its four-year run, and also spent much of her off-screen time before and after the series with star Gareth (Blake) Thomas, so she has many personal insights to the show’s history.
Review: This long-overdue look behind the scenes of my favorite science fiction series was a must-buy item for me, and though the import price was a bit steep, it was a very worthwhile purchase.
Videogames: In The Beginning
Story: Inventor Ralph Baer, creator of the very first home video game system and the man who holds the patent on interactive games that can connect to an everyday TV (as well as literally dozens of other creations), lays out a detailed chronology of how and when he came up with the idea for “TV games.” Also covered is how he’s dealt with those who have tried to stake their own claims on authorship of the idea, and how he has remained involved with the industry since then.
Review: In this book, Raph Baer grabs the title of “father of video games,” and spends much of the book backing the claim up with ample evidence. It’s amusing and sometimes a bit enervating to see how many attempts have been made to unseat him from that throne, for a variety of reasons. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell seems to have tried staking his own claim for PR purposes, but that’s not as eyebrow-raising as, say, attempts by Nintendo attorneys in the late 1980s to challenge Baer and his authorship of numerous seminal video game patents so they wouldn’t have to pay hefty licensing fees on the NES. (In the end, Baer says Nintendo settled out of court for a cool $10 million.)
Supercade
Story: Through descriptive text, occasional product shots, and tons of emulator screen shots, formed Wired editor Van Burnham takes us on a journey from the days of the protozoan Pong prototype developed at M.I.T. in the late 1950s straight through to the Xbox, with a focus on the 1972-1984 epoch of the early video game era.
Review: “Supercade” was being hailed as the definitive, end-all and be-all of classic video game books…at least by some people. I’m not sure if Van Burnham ever made that claim, though she did come kinda close to saying so in her web site almost a year ahead of the book’s release.
Steve Jobs And The NeXT Big Thing
Story: Steve Jobs, once one of the wonder boys who created the now-fading legend of Apple Computer, later became more of a liability than a boon to the company with his unusual – and some would say ineffective or even counterproductive – management practices. Forced out of Apple in 1985 by John Sculley (the former Pepsi CEO who, ironically, Jobs had hired into the same position at Apple), Jobs convinced a small key group of Apple employees to follow him away from the company to start a new silicon valley venture, NeXT. Apple promptly sued, which gave the outgoing group a notoriety within the industry – maybe these people, with the legendary Jobs at the wheel, were a serious threat to Apple, and maybe NeXT would be a contender to be dealt with. With this kind of rumormongering working to his advantage, and with his own celebrity status also lending him credibility, Jobs sought investors with tons of money – including Ross Perot – and prompty proceeded to waste their money on such luxuries as a $100,000 corporate logo, a custom-designed headquarters building and manufacturing plant, and high-speed data lines running not only to the office but to his own home as well. NeXT did eventually turn out a computer, years late, millions over budget in R&D (not to mention more unnecessary expenses like those listed above), and thousands of dollars over the budgets of their target consumer demographic.
Review: Boy, I’d love for someone to update this volume…but perhaps not its original author. Published in 1993, it doesn’t cover such later developments as Jobs’ re-emergence as a savior of Apple, his humbling acceptance of investment money into Apple from the coffers of one Bill Gates, and the recent release of the Macintosh PowerCube – bearing a striking resemblence to NeXT’s flop of a computer, which also flopped on the market.
Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Video Games
Story: In the 1960s, a government contractor working with computer display systems figured out how to get a game of video tennis going on a television monitor. But that game, which would later be reproduced by an enterprising programmer named Nolan Bushnell at a young company called Atari, would give rise to one of the fastest-growing sectors of the entertainment industry. Companies such as Atari, Coleco, Mattel, Magnavox, and Bally would ride that wave into the first home video game console era. Fortunes were made and lost by gambling on licensed arcade and entertainment properties, and a flood of mediocre software brought the video game market to its knees. And then a relatively obscure Japanese company changed the rules forever. Originally planning to license its technology out to Atari, a legal misunderstanding convinced Nintendo to go it alone in an uncertain market that they would later dominate alongside Sega and Sony. This is the nuts-and-bolts story of the video game industry.
Review: A great, in-depth book about the history, the swells and ebbtides, the fortunes and failures, and the numerous litigious episodes of the video game industry is long overdue. And after reading Phoenix, I’m sad to say that the book I’ve been hoping to read is still overdue.
Leaving Reality Behind
Story: eToys.com was one of those great success stories of the late ’90s internet boom, a company whose IPO made almost everyone working there instantly rich – and then it faltered and crashed, taking that value with it. But was it the work of a group of art students from Europe – known collectively as etoy – who refused to admit defeat when eToys.com’s lawyers demanded that they surrender their internet presence for fear of hurting the online toy store’s trademarked name?
Review: This is a fairly well-written book, with lots of documented material to back it up. But “Leaving Reality Behind” quickly became a somewhat difficult read when I discovered that I couldn’t bring myself to root for Toby Lenk and eToys.com or his nemeses, referred to frequently in the book as the “etoy boys.” So much of what’s at the heart of this story is pure vanity and arrogance that it’s nigh-impossible to pick out an actual protagonist. I suppose the authors are to be commended for portraying both sides with all of their respective warts, and yet it seems clear that the authorial tone of the book favors the disharmonious group of self-styled artists from Germany and other countries, over the equally troubled would-be e-commerce giant.
Joystick Nation
Story: This fascinating, but painfully short, book provides a look into the history of video games in both the home and the arcade, and the various evolutionary steps that led from their creation to the present-day media marketing blitz that surrounds a form of entertainment most of us consider commonplace.
Review: Actually, that description barely does justice to “Joystick Nation”, which covers a lot of ground, and is certainly intended for that portion of the gaming population which was around for the early days of arcade video games, not for those who were young when the first NES hit American shores. The book spends a great deal of time discussing sociological issues, ranging from players’ basic mental, emotional and instictual reactions to video games, to the degree to which the iconography of video games (and game-related marketing) have entrenched themselves in our culture. There are also diversions into the moral ramifications of video game violence, the growing connection between animè, manga, comics and games, the military’s use of high-powered video game engines as training tools, and more.
High Score: The Illustrated History Of Electronic Games
Story: The authors guide us through a well-illustrated survey of the history of electronic gaming, from Spacewar through the Xbox, with a particular focus on the histories of specific game series, and the companies and personalities behind them. Abundant examples of rare packaging, prototypes and hard-to-find goodies are on display throughout.
Review: If you liked “Supercade”, you’re gonna love this one. “High Score!” is the closest I’ve seen to the “definitive text meets incredible variety of photos and visuals” mix that I’ve been hoping for someone to hit in the rarified genre of video game history tomes. And some of the stuff seen in here, I’ve never seen before – such as the cartridge-based Atari Video Brain that was scrapped to make way for the Atari VCS (a.k.a. the 2600), or the unused Centipede publicity poster and the rejected artwork for Atari’s Vortex, later reamed Tempest. Ample advertising material and box art are also reproduced here, a collector’s dream.
Game Over: Press Start To Continue
Story: An overview of the history of Nintendo, one of the most influential companies in the video game industry. Traces the company from its beginnings as a playing card manufacturer to the heights of its popularity, when its video game consoles were in practically every home across the world. New chapters continue the story into the PlayStation era, when Nintendo’s dominance was surpassed by the international conglomerate Sony.
Review: “Game Over” is the story of a company. If you have ever read a corporate history, you know that they generally do not make scintillating reading. But author David Sheff has done something impressive. He has taken the hard corporate world and put a human identity to it. While there is plenty of hard information: data, trial information, etc., it is the stories of the men and women behind Nintendo that makes the story real.
The First Quarter: A 25-Year History Of Video Games
Note: This book has since been reprinted under a different name, “The Ultimate History Of Video Games“.
Story: In the beginning, there was Spacewar, a game designed and played by college students, on college campuses, using lab time on college mainframe computers. And people took note. Though Spacewar got no commercial action, it was only a matter of time before others had the same idea, or created their own games after experiencing Spacewar for themselves. Thus was born the video game industry, now a hyper-competitive, multi-billion dollar industry dominated by Nintendo, Sony and Sega – built on the ashes of now-extinct outfits like Atari, who at one time could do no wrong. This book traces that history, referring frequently to interviews with designers, programmers, executives, and others whose actions shaped the industry.
Review: While I’m pining away for that Holy Grail known as The Ultimate Classic Game Book, I’m quickly discovering that existing tomes each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Leonard Herman’s “Phoenix” is a drier read than yesterday’s police blotter, yet it uncovers a wealth of forgotten hardware and software developments, information valuable to collectors. Many readers felt J.C. Herz’ “Joystick Nation” skimped on the history of those very same games, though it was meant to be less a history and more of an academic exercise. “The First Quarter”, then, reads like the Wall Street Journal version of “Phoenix”.
Fire In The Valley: The Making Of The Personal Computer
Story: An enthusiastic but fair retelling of the early days of the personal computer industry, ranging from the days when college geeks competed for mainframe time, to the birth of Microsoft, Sun, Compaq and Apple, to the modern-day internet browser wars (and the litigious atmosphere thereof).
Review: This book first came to my attention as the inspiration for the sometimes lamentably mixed-up TNT movie The Pirates Of Silicon Valley. If anything, Pirates merely served to drive the authors of “Fire In The Valley” to update and re-publish their book – and hopefully the movie drove curious viewers to delve into the whole story in print.
Extra Life: Coming Of Age In Cyberspace
Story: Programmer and Wired columnist David S. Bennahum recalls tales of a troubled youth – starting with his parents’ separation and leading to some juvenile delinquency – that was turned around when he was presented with the gift of an Atari 800 computer. Though he originally wanted to play games on it, Bennahum discovers a new love in the art of programming and hacking, and new ethical struggles in learning how to use that knowledge.
Review: I’ll come right out and say this upfront about “Extra Life” – it’s a great read (and I’m not alone in thinking that, as apparently the rights to the book have just recently been optioned for a movie), but whether or not you really “get” the book’s emotional core and its author’s struggles will depend on whether or not you were around and aware of the computer revolution as it was happening. If nothing else, Bennahum really latches on the sense of sheer wonder of growing up in that era.
Digital Retro
Story: The author traces the evolution of the personal computer, including several video game consoles along the way, in terms of both technical features and external appearance. Extensive notes are provided on the histories of the companies that made them, along with a brief esay that places the product in question within the context of that history. And, of course, there are lots of pictures.
Review: Far more than just a picture book, Digital Retro really takes me back to the early 80s, and the lovingly-photographed full-spread magazine ads for things like the Commodore 64 and the Apple Macintosh. This book takes me right back to those days of “hardware porn,” when young fellows like myself would see computer advertisements and tech specs and would respond with a bit of drool hanging from our chins that would’ve done Pavlov – and Apple’s marketing division – proud.
Confessions Of The Game Doctor
Story: Along with Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley, Bill Kunkel created the idea that an entertainment feature magazine could focus entirely on video games, and after a “trial run” column in Video Magazine, Electronic Games Magazine was born. Here Kunkel talks about the trials and tribulations of the magazine’s history, and how they paralleled the ups and downs of the video game industry itself. He also tells plenty of equally outrageous-but-true stories carrying the story forward from the end of Electronic Games’ publication to the present day, stopping along the way to comment on the state of the game industry as well as the game journalism industry that Kunkel helped to create.
Review: You’ll have to forgive me if I can’t be completely objective about Confessions Of The Game Doctor, when it’s written by one of a handful of folks whose writing I read in my idealistic youth and thought, “Hey, that looks like fun. I’m going to become a writer when I grow up.” To put it mildly, I was a faithful reader of Electronic Games magazine, and very probably owe a healthy amount of my knowledge on that topic to its articles and reviews. But how fun was it to be a writer for EG? To hear Bill Kunkel tell it, both nerve-wracking and an absolute blast.
Commodork: Sordid Tales From A BBS Junkie
Story: BBS veteran Rob O’Hara relives the pre-internet glory days of the bulletin board system, from his first computer and his first screamin’ fast 1200 baud modem (a luxury in those dial-up days) to the active Commodore 64 warez scene to the death of the BBS era, and how friendships and relationships from those days have stretched even into his life on the ‘net as we know it today.
Review: In the interests of disclosure, I’m going to point out up front that Rob has reviewed DVDs, books and Commodore 64 games aplenty for theLogBook.com. So if you love this book, and if you’re of a certain age, you will love this book, please remember that you can always come back here and soak up more of his fine writing.
I say with certainty that you’ll love “Commodork” because, having heard what some other folks are saying about this book, it’s quickly become clear that there’s a wealth of shared experience among those of us who were “online” back in the days when it was almost an elite thing, when only the technically adept could connect and configure a modem and even claim to be “online.”
Arcade Treasures with Price Guide
Story: A well-written history of pinball games unearths such little-known facts as when certain features were introduced, when certain manufacturers came into being, and so forth. And the photos and reprints of various games’ sales brochures are rather nice. Later in the book, a scant section devoted to arcade video games is included; some of the rarer items depicted in the book’s pages are a pristine specimen of a Dragon’s Lair arcade game, the original Pac-Man sales literature (before it was a runaway hit), a 1970s Star Trek arcade game (whose manufacturer was blasted to smithereens by a volley of Paramount copyright attorneys set to “kill”), and – something I’d never even heard of before – a Joust pinball game. Photos of such machines as the Pong coin-op are also included.
Review: Here we sit, divided amongst ourselves as to which book is best: “Phoenix” or “Joystick Nation”? (Okay, okay, so I admit, I’m the only one here facing that particular metaphysical dilemma.) And while we wait for Van Burnham’s “Supercade” (which looks like it’s going to meet or exceed national safety limits of coolness), there are other alternatives. Bill Kurtz’s “Arcade Treasures” is one of them.
Arcade Fever
Story: Originally titled Arcade Planet in early sales materials (compare the original and final covers), Arcade Fever is an irreverent, never-too-serious look back at the video game era’s greatest boom, the early 80s, fueled by the arcade game craze. Now, I know a thing or two about this subject myself, having written almost a book’s worth of material in the form of theLogBook.com’s own Phosphor Dot Fossils section, so I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to accuracy (even though I myself have gotten it wrong from time to time, sometimes spectacularly). And in Arcade Fever, ’80s trivia expert John Sellers, who has created questions for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as well as writing ’80s trivia books of a more general nature, proves that he’s got a good grasp of the quarter-munching hits (and misses) of old.
Review: Sellers’ text is amusing, observant, and conveys both the essence of the games and the author’s estimate of a given game’s place on the “cool” scale. Each article is accompanied by MAME screen shots aplenty, as well as some gorgeous photos taken by Steve Belkowitz at the well-stocked traveling Videotopia retro-gaming exhibit. The photos, which really bring out the long-forgotten beauty of many games’ controls, cabinet art and design work, put “Arcade Fever” on a plane above Van Burnham’s “Supercade”, a book that a lot of us assumed would be the definitive history work on classic arcade games.
The Age Of Spiritual Machines
Story: In his controversial follow-up to The Age Of Intelligent Machines, Ray Kurzweil – inventor of not only numerous music synthesizers but pioneering speech recognition, speech synthesis and optical character recognition technologies – postulates how artificial intelligences might come to possess a soul, and as it turns out in his theoretical projections, the computer might just merge with humanity and borrow our souls.
Review: I’d had this book for quite a while before realizing how controversial it was in some circles (indeed, a whole other book has been published to refute Kurzweil’s futuristic projections). After reading it, though, I think I can understand at least where the naysayers are coming from – in this book, which is part forward-looking-statement about technology and society, part speculative fiction, Kurzweil makes an awful lot of broad assumptions.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Story: Determined to destroy Lord Voldemort’s horcruxes, the keys to his immortality, Harry and his friends Ron Weasely and Hermione Granger forgo returning to Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft and set out on a quest to bring an end to the horror once and for all.
Review: Quick Note: I could go on endlessly about this books, but I’ll try not to. Unfortunately, due to its nature, it is unlikely that I will be able to avoid the occasional spoiler (though I will keep away from the major ones). If you haven’t read the book and want to know nothing, don’t continue.
It’s important when discussing “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” to recall something author J.K. Rowling said concerning its predecessor, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”. She said that “Half-Blood Prince” was really only half a book, the other half of which is “Deathly Hallows”. She said that it would not work completely without its other half. That was certainly true and is, perhaps, even more true when it comes to the second part of the story.