The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a single-player RPG “choose your own adventure”-style gamebook recently released for the Amazon Kindle. More game than book, the reader controls an adventurer who descends into the dungeon beneath Firetop Mountain to loot the famed treasure of the titular Warlock. While a faithful recreation of the original, the implementation of the combat mechanics on the Kindle has introduced some problems.
NPR is running a poll to nominate the 100 best Science Fiction and Fantasy titles of all time. I decided to go through the finalist list and see how I stack up.
The trouble with all anthologies is uneven quality. Even in a well-edited selection of stories such as Songs of the Dying Earth, featuring a line-up of triple-A talent, including stories by Neil Gaiman, Dan Simmons, Glen Cook, Tad Williams, and Jeff VanderMeer, the stories can be hit and miss. That the anthology is a tribute Read more…
By allowing readers to publish their marginalia, Amazon’s Kindle is building a platform and social network for reading, which could drastically change education, scholarship, and how we read for pleasure.
The Victorian Internet is a short, accessible history of the invention and worldwide adoption of the telegraph. Starting with the first visual telegraphs, which relied on signaling arms, rotating panels, and line of sight, the book follows the inventors who attempted to build the first electric telegraph during the early 1800s, and the final success Read more…
Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart is best known as the novel that was adapted into the movie Hellraiser, which follows the book closely. Seeking otherworldly pleasures, Frank Cotton performs a gruesome ritual and solves a puzzle box, which opens a doorway to another world. Cenobites, scarred and mutilated creatures, appear and drag Frank into their Read more…
Starting in Aristotelian fashion, Barton first defines his topic, identifying the attributes that distinguish computer role-playing games (CRPGs) from other game genres. In a CRPG, the player controls an individual or small party of characters, who grow in strength through a leveling system and by purchasing or discovering increasingly powerful equipment. The player leads these Read more…
Coders at Work contains a series of interviews with fifteen famous programmers and computer scientists. The interviewees represent a who’s who of the technology field and include such names as Ken Thompson, the inventor of the Unix operating system; Donald Knuth, the author of The Art of Computer Programming; and Brendan Eich, the language designer Read more…
The first Pynchon novel I read was The Crying of Lot 49, which I enjoyed tremendously. However, my relationship with Pynchon quickly turned sour with Gravity’s Rainbow, a book that I made several forays against before giving up. I decided to try again and picked up V. Having read it, I’m not sure what I Read more…
I picked up Richard Price’s Clockers because of my love for HBO’s The Wire, for which Price writes. The drug dealers of The Wire are clearly influenced by the characters in Clockers, just like the show’s police officers borrow from David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Strike, Price’s drug-dealing protagonist, spends his Read more…
