Category: Prose Nonfiction

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Book Reviews History Prose Nonfiction Science / Technology

Picturing The Space Shuttle: The Early Years

1 min read

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(and in some cases most fanciful) proposals through the first four test launches, in a huge number of often previously unpublished photos and accompanying text.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. … Read more

Categories
Biography Book Reviews Computers / Video Games Prose Nonfiction

Creating Q*Bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games

1 min read

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. … Read more

Categories
Behind The Scenes Book Reviews Media Prose Nonfiction

The Odyssey File

1 min read

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. … Read more

Categories
Book Reviews Prose Nonfiction Science / Technology

Chasing New Horizons: Inside The Epic First Mission To Pluto

1 min read

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. … Read more

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Behind The Scenes Book Reviews Doctor Who Prose Nonfiction Series

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

1 min read

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. … Read more

Categories
Behind The Scenes Book Reviews Doctor Who Prose Nonfiction Series

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

2 min read

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. … Read more

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Book Reviews Prose Nonfiction

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty Year Voyager Mission

1 min read

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. … Read more

Categories
Book Reviews Computers / Video Games Prose Nonfiction

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

1 min read

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. … Read more

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Computers / Video Games Media Prose Nonfiction

Fallen Down: Heartache & Compassion in Undertale

2 min read

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. … Read more

Categories
Prose Nonfiction Science / Technology

Ambassadors From Earth: Pioneering Explorations With Unmanned Spacecraft

1 min read

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. … Read more