Secret of the Lost Race, by Andre Norton. Normally I like how rapidly Norton novels move, but this one was absurd. We go from the mean streets of Terran slums, to surviving an ice planet, to conducting raids against a corporation, to escaping from the grasp of a governmental agency, all within the span of 150 pages. The secret, by the way, is that aliens are down to fuck.
Pet Sematary, by Stephen King. There's a hidden cemetery the locals know about, which can bring back pets... and more. I found this to be one of his more brutal novels, even though nothing supernatural happens for the first half of the book. Rather, the first half makes you care about the characters, without providing any cushioning for the horrendous final third. "There are only thirty pages left, it can't get much worse," I told myself. It got much worse.
Ah, poor Gage. I thought Sematary was an interesting genre exercise, but really King's gift is his ability to make characters feel real, which Sematary was more successful in. The horror trappings are an extension of his ability to illustrate what ordinary people do when terrible or extraordinary things happen to them, and that's why he can craft stories just as good even without anything particularly malefic happening - he's a great observer of life simply being lived.
Yeah, you're right. King's eye for detail is on par with Dickens'. In the back half of the novel, where Louis goes gravedigging, King still provides such convincing detail that you wonder he went climbing fences, carrying tools and digging holes as research for his novel.
There do seem to be two broad archetypes for his novels, though. One (which includes Pet Sematary, The Shining, Carrie, Thinner, Gerald's Game) is a character study. The other (Needful Things, The Stand, Under the Dome, It) is a petri dish; instead of a person, it's an entire community subjected to this detail. The petri dish tends to catch fire two-thirds of the way through the book. I find the former category much more harrowing, despite the lower body count, because I care about the characters that much more.
True. I liked The Stand as well as anyone could, but it's still Carrie that hefts itself with more weight inside my head. Part of that is at least because we're built to feel empathy more strongly for individuals than groups of people, I'd think.
I'm not sure about that... tribalism is a known human attribute. I think it's that King has more insight into individuals than communities. Something like "Lord of the Flies" or "The Grapes of Wrath" shows the opposite strength.
I'm just finishing up two books and starting a third: The Secret Archives of the Vatican and Red Star Rogue.
The Secret Archives of the Vatican was in interesting read and it's one of a stack of books I bought from an estate that was primarily made up of biographies. The previous owner of the book(s) had placed a return address label in all of her books so it's easy to segregate those books on my shelves. But anyway, it's an interesting, albeit fragmented, tale of the Vatican archive history over the centuries from it's beginnings to the current state. I wouldn't recommend it as a beginner book with the subject because it was slow going for me as I only have a basic working knowledge of the Vatican, Rome, Italian politics, Catholicism, etc, but it wasn't bad for $3.
Red Star Rogue was fairly interesting due it direct connection to the Cold War and naval history. I've seen a documentary about the K-129 sinking off the coast of Hawaii but didn't remember why it sunk and in this book the author, a former US Navy submariner, uses his knowledge of submarines along with official and off the record accounts and documents to piece together what actually sunk the submarine. The results were disturbing even though it's been many decades since it sunk in 1968. Definitely a page turner.
Now I'm onto something more mundane: The English Pub by the well known beer hunter writer Michael Jackson.
Murders according to the alphabet Agatha Christie
Wonder Boys - A story about a writer trying to wrap up his latest book (which has spiraled out of control into a 2000+ page mess) and also taking a troubled young writer under his wing. I like stories about struggling creative types so no wonder the film version of this is one of my most re-watched movies. Finally getting to the book version, I'm kinda surprised to find that basically the whole middle-bit of the story had been chopped out of the movie script. I do think the movie works great as it is, but there's a few great scenes in the middle which could've been fun to see. Oh well. Good book.
Doom Guy (John Romero's autobiography) - Speaking of struggling creatives... I'd already read Masters of Doom so while parts of this feels like a rethread, I don't mind at all hearing again about the early days of iD Software again. It's inspiring stuff. Just finished this and it was overall a great listen. Romero's harrowing childhood, the early iD days, and the Ion Storm chapter are the most interesting bits. When it comes to designing Doom, Quake and Sigil, Romero goes into a lot of detail about how different levels were made and I'm not a big enough fan of any of these to actually remember the levels he's talking about.
Ion Storm was a real fascinating mess. One of the founders was Todd Porter, who was in charge of developing the RTS Dominion, and was apparently a really abusive asshole who soured the mood for everyone in the office. People kept complaining about him but Romero didn't take it too seriously and just hoped everything would work out. It didnt. Eventually the entire Daikatana team quit because of Porter. He only eventually got ousted when his meddling screwed up the performance of a Daikatana demo at a big press event. Daikatana went through 5 lead programmers in its development, which Romero quips might be an industry-record. Switching engines from Quake to Quake 2, in a futile attempt to keep up with iD, was also a big disaster. And then there was the increasingly unhinged PR machinery trying to turn these guys into rockstars, culminating in the Bitch ad. Romero swears he'd never say something like that, but went along with it because he trusted that the PR folks knew what gamers would respond to. In the end, Romero takes responsibility for all of it, and recognizes a big flaw in himself: being too conflict averse. When Carmack was getting more and more dictatorial at iD, he never spoke up, and when trouble brewed at Ion Storm, he didn't take charge. A childhood growing up with an abusive father had thaught him the defense strategy that when there's trouble: you get quiet, don't draw attention to yourself, and try to ride it out. Of course that's not gonna work when you're the one who's supposed to be in charge and take care of everyone else. But Romero just wanted to be a game designer, not a manager. I can relate to all of this. I don't wanna run a business. I don't wanna be in charge. I just wanna make games. It's probably the reason I work alone, and if I ever tried forming a team and being the boss, it'd be an Ion Storm-like disaster.
It wasn't a total distaster of course. In the midst of all the chaos and wild swings, he did give Warren Spector and Tom Hall blank cheques to make their dream games, and those turned out pretty good!
edit: hey folks, I've got 1 Credit burning a hole in my Audible wallet. What should I listen to next?
Last edited by henke; 1st Sep 2024 at 07:35.
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders.
In the first chapter alone one could find ideas for writing readables in a Thief FM.
I was thinking about Ion Storm & Romero just today too.
Somebody was doing a retrospective on Doom3 and I gave my own input on the iD & Ion Storm story.
Even before we knew what was going on I was thinking Daikatana had been in development hell -- because 95% or whatever of the time, a bad game never has as simple a problem as most fans think, and it's usually due to interpersonal, institutional, & tech issues that would take a while to even explain what the problem is, much less why it tanked a project.
But more than that it struck me as unfair that so much of their legacy had to be pinned to that one game. Hardly anybody talks about Anachronox & that was one of my favorite games of the decade (I know Romero wasn't on that team). But Daikatana was the one that ended up tanking the whole studio & LGS along with it anyway, sadly. It'd be interesting to read his side of the story. I liked the book Masters of Doom a lot as well.
What's wrong with Daikatana?
I actually haven't played it yet, and I've always thought the concept sounded cool.
So I still expect it should be a good game and am only wary because of bad reviews it got, so will go in with lowish expectations that I hope put it in a good light.
I think of it in the same vein as HL2 and Bioshock, part of that second generation of post-90s FPS / immersive sims that didn't have the same magic anymore and were more explicitly out for bling and sales. I used to date that shift to HL2, but have wondered if the line is better drawn at Daikatana (and for that matter Star Wars: Episode I). But since I haven't played it yet, I really don't have an informed opinion yet. I suppose I really have to play it sooner or later.
Edit: The only, well it's not a red flag but a flag or data point on it anyway that I know is that it builds off the D&D campaign the iD guys were playing mentioned in Masters of Doom. That's a flag just because it builds off something so personal to those guys and their experience with that game, it risks making it hard for them to cut or reshape things for the betterment of the game at the cost of their personal connection to it.
Nothing is supposed to be sacred when it comes to good game development, and you gotta be ready for the game to tell you what it is and not dictate to it what doesn't survive playtesting. Well as just mentioned above, though, over all of that was the interpersonal crisis with that manager that made the whole project toxic, so it's bigger than just that issue. Again, I shouldn't be saying anything about it until after I've played it though.
Last edited by demagogue; 2nd Sep 2024 at 17:45.
I really wanted to like Anachronox. It had a cool story and fun characters, but the combat was tedious and it came out right after a series of games that redefined the CRPG for me.
I didn't play Daikatana. I looked forward to it, hoping it would turn out to be a flawed masterpiece with some ambitious ideas that they couldn't quite pull off, rushed to completion but where you could see the potential. But the reviews turned me off, making it sound very average. The concept just wasn't that compelling, and everyone was complaining about the bad friendly AI. By the time it finally hit shelves, it just seemed like a game that would have been worth playing if it was still 1998. But the goal posts had moved a long, long way in the three years between Daikatana's announcement and its release.
And yeah, I think most gamers my age remember Daikatana and Romero but don't remember that Anachronox and Deus Ex came from Ion Storm too. Outside of places like TTLG that is. The press was treating Romero like a rock star in the late 90s. After leaving id, the fans split and there were plenty who wrote him off and enjoyed the schadenfreude when stories of largess and mismanagement started to leak out.
I played it top to bottom, sure I used cheats to bring along the two useless helpers, but its not a bad game after all.Originally Posted by demagogue
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes,Social Contract by Rousseau, and Discworld by Terry Pratchett looks like a great book to dawdle over, i am bent on buying those books
Currently reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by J Weatherford. Very interesting. Especially the parts dealing with his early life and Mongol army tactics.
Last week I finished reading an autobiography: It Doesn't Take a Hero : The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. It'd been sitting there on my shelves for a few years and I got tired of the general staring at me. Anyone who served under him during Desert Storm, or watched a lot of CNN back then, wouldn't be surprised that the book had the same tone and tempo as the general did when speaking publicly. There were parts of it that were kind of annoying but overall it was in interesting view of the world from his point of view, from living in Iran with his dad as a child, to his combat service in Vietnam, to Desert Shield/Desert Storm. It was a long book at 503 pages but it went by surprisingly fast.
Currently I'm reading a Amelia Earhart biography that's lukewarm enough for me to keep turning the pages. I'm 1/3 in and hopefully it gets better. Maybe it's not as exciting as it should be because I've already learned so much about her over the years.s
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