Infocom was of course the developer and publisher of the quintessential text-based adventure games (or Interactive Fiction), all descendants of the original mainframe Zork (or Dungeon), which was the result of four guys from MIT (Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Tim Anderson) seeing the original "Adventure" (aka "Colossal Cave"), and deciding they could do better. Back in 1979, when they ported it to the existing desktop platforms, it had to be split up into three parts in order to fit. Infocom games were known for their rich text, creative puzzles, exceptionally good parsers, availability for nearly every platform that could use floppy disks, and steadfast refusal to incorporate graphics until the company's very last releases. The "scavenger hunt" thread of No Time Like the Past (with Seven being sent to historically significant places, and finding herself thrown back to focal points in time) especially reminds me of the Infocom H2G2 game because in the latter, one has to regularly activate the Infinite Improbability Drive in order to send oneself to various locations in order to retrieve objects. And initially, you have no control over where you're sent, because you don't have the requisite cup of tea, just a cup of "Advanced Tea Substitute." These days, about the only computer game I play with any regularity is the chess program that comes with Mac OS.
Finished Mere Anarchy this morning - while I enjoyed some parts more than others it was enjoyable overall and really did feel like one big story - it’s evident throughout how much the team of writers enjoyed putting it together. Moving into the Motion Picture Era next with Ex Machina which I’m really looking forward too… Comics - Fantastic Four Vol 1. #3-#4
"My Heart is a Chainsaw" by Stephen Graham Jones. Acclaimed new novel about, apparently, a troubled teenage girl who is obsessed with slasher movies. Just started it.
The latest episode of the Positively Trek Book Club is up, and we're talking about a favorite of mine: TNG: The Buried Age by Christopher L. Bennett, continuing our exploration of The Lost Era. Check it out and let us know your thoughts! Currently reading Coda, Book II: The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow.
Started on Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow (Good so far). I did enjoy the Weber/Flint novel, To End in Fire too.
I'm re-reading Star Trek Tos Memory Prime by Judith and Garfield Reeves Stevens.I'm really enjoying reading this story again.
I'm really enjoying it so far. It's a fascinating book in that it's very hard to pigeonhole. Is it actually a horror novel, or a literary novel about a character who copes with her traumas by seeing everything through the prism of slasher movies? Is there really an old-school slasher at work in her impoverished little small town, as she comes to believe, or is it all in her head, which is very much a possibility? It's a clever balancing act, which is keeping me guessing not just about what's going to happen next, but what genre this book will end up landing in. Reminds me a bit of NIGHT FILM by Marisha Pessl a few years back, which played a similar game.
I just finished (inspired by a discussion with CLB in another thread) re-reading Joe Haldeman's Planet of Judgment. I'd forgotten just how much of my best memories of the early Bantam era came straight out of that opus. Like the scene of a groggy McCoy muttering mangled med-school mnemonics (specifically, the one involving a "fat-assed German" with a taste for hops). And I could have sworn that the whole comic relief bit about Ensign Bill Johnson having an alien grandparent, and a metabolism such that he drinks high-proof ethanol for sustenance, and gets drunk off of orange juice, came from one of ADF's Star Trek Logs. And back circa 1980, when I was into D&D, I remember attempting to adapt the "battles of pure will" between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and three Irapina scouts from the climax of the book into a combat mode for D&D.
I’ve just finished Star of the Sea, the second of Una McCormack’s two novels in the Weird Space setting. They’re excellent science fiction stories about the quiet, sometimes ruthless heroism of ordinary people and the power of constructed families, with a lot of great female characters, and I’d definitely recommend them to anyone who likes Una’s Trek novels. I’m still plugging away at Rogue Elements, which I keep interrupting to read installments of Coda, and I’m also reading E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and Marilynne Robinson’s Home.
Out of morbid (literally, in this case) curiosity, how was Chainsaw? For my own part, I'm finishing a recent issue of NMRA Magazine. With a record number of new Master Model Railroaders (TM) telling their stories (the editor allows them all the column-inches they want for this), and a very long locomotive kitbash article.
I found CHAINSAW really engaging, enough so that I'm probably going to check out Jones' previous novel, THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS, which is winning all sorts of awards and acclaim.
Some years ago, I read Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (which also won lots of awards and acclaim). The whole concept of an alternate reality in which the pre-Civil-War Underground Railroad included a literal railroad that literally ran underground (on steam, no less!) intrigued me when I first heard of it, and it didn't disappoint.
Are you going to watch the Amazon Prime series? I think it was supposed to be really good. It's on my watchlist, but I haven't gotten around to checking it out yet.