Twisty Little Passages

Twisty Little Passages, by Nick Montfort, addresses a much needed gap in gaming analysis and history: that of interactive fiction. The precursor to Multi-User Dungeons, interactive fiction was a form of text-based interactive game that sprang to life in tandem with the rise of the personal computer. Single player in scope but capable of taking its players anywhere the programmers could imagine, it relied primarily on the written word to share its world. Although the games initially started with VERB NOUN responses (e.g., "get book", "read book", etc.), they eventually advanced to natural language parsers.

Throughout the book is a history of interactive fiction and its development through the eighties and nineties. It also analyzes the comparisons between hypertext fiction and interactive fiction and the inequalities in how the two or treated. If you can't guess, interactive fiction isn't treated very well.

Montfort seems to have an axe to grind, citing shoddy research that conflates certain interactive fiction as being fantasy adventure games and confuses the origins of Adventure (or ADVENT). Montfort corrects all these misperceptions and more through personal interviews with Will Crowther, creator of Adventure, and Dave Lebling, one of the creators of Zork.

Twisty Little Passages seeks to redress these inconsistencies, positing that interactive fiction is more than just a game but a form of literature in its own right. Montfort makes a convincing argument, but then as an administrator of RetroMUD for over a decade, I'm one of the converted. It's unlikely that literature snobs are reading his book.

Although occasionally defensive in tone, Montfort's retrospect and analysis of interactive fiction is a welcome addition to any game developer's library. It's important to know what went before, and this book addresses an important part of gaming history that has been all but forgotten.

Titus Crow, Volume 2: The Clock of Dreams; Spawn of the Winds

After having slogged through Volume One of the Titus Crow series, complete with lisping dragons, green haired space princesses, and a narrative riddled with ellipses, I steeled myself for Volume Two. With the prototypical pulp hero Titus Crow and his trusty sidekick Henri de Marginy cleaning the clocks (pun intended) of the Cthulhu Cycle Deities (CCD, ugh), there wasn't much left for them to do. But like every good epic series, when the heroes become gods among men in the mortal realm…they leave the mortal realm behind to find adventure.

The Clock of Dreams begins with a rather peculiar scenario: Crow and Tiania have been captured in the Dreamlands. How this happened is hand waved; basically, Crow and Tiana are drugged and enslaved by the Men of Leng. Given that Crow is a cyborg that is highly resistant to damage, it seems unlikely that poisoning him would work…but perhaps that's because this is the Dreamlands and not Earth's reality.

The first half of the novel involves de Marginy's quest to find Crow in the Dreamlands. Once there, Crow takes up the second half as he seeks to rescue Tiania. What's interesting is that Clock of Dreams is one of the first to posit that Cthulhu's dream sendings actually infect the Dreamlands. Here, great nightmarish factories corrupt the land, guarded by three foul guardians: the worm-like Flyer, its tentacle-armed Rider, and a three-legged Runner. Overseeing the entire operation is a deathly titanic Keeper, who in turn servers Nyarlathotep.

Overall, this is book is an improvement over the first volume, if only because there's more for Titus to do. Unlike the previous books, it's told in the present tense, which lends much urgency to the narrative. There's plenty of combat, skullduggery, and a hilarious moment where the only way de Marginy can return to the Dreamlands is to get roaring drunk. With guest appearances by Randolph Carter and King Kuranes, flying airships, and shields that shoot laser beams, this is pulp Cthulhu at its wackiest. But it's juicy and satisfying, especially when Nyarlathotep shows up at the end to put our heroes in their place.

Spawn of the Winds, on the other hand, is a different breed of pulp. Crow and de Marginy are nowhere to be found in this book; its inclusion is primarily because of Ithaqua, who is assigned a peculiar set of personality traits here. Ithaqua, you see, lusts after human women (as all pulp villains inevitably do) because he seeks to spawn terrible progeny who will walk among the winds with him. The winds, as defined by Lumley, are the spaces between worlds, and occasionally Ithaqua kidnaps people and carries them across dimensions to the world of Borea.

Borea is a wind-swept frozen world filled with every snow land cliché imaginable: Vikings, Eskimos, white wolves, polar bears, ski-boats, and lots and lots of snow. I kept waiting for Santa Claus to show up. Ithaqua's penchant for turning people into wendigos is turned on its ear here – instead, Ithaqua alters the physiology of those whom he traps on Borea so that they are immune to the cold.

The protagonist is an American named Hank Silberhutte, a member of the Wilmarth Foundation out to avenge his cousin, whom he believes was killed by Ithaqua. Silberhutte is a Texan, which of course means he can punch anybody's lights out who dares mess with him. He is also a powerful psychic, capable of linking with Juanita Alvarez, a telepathic receiver and our narrator, across the gulfs of space.

Tagging along is Silberhutte's companions, Paul White (an oracle known as "hunchman"), Dick Selway, Jimmy Franklin, and Silberhutte's hot little sister Tracy. A fateful encounter with Ithaqua ends with Selway dead and the others changed. Only Tracy, holding onto her star stones, remains unaffected.

Awakening on Borea, a brutal war of attrition ensues between worshippers of the Wind Walker who want nothing more than to sacrifice Tracy to Ithaqua (she's a "damned good-looking girl" says Silberhutte). Leading the opposition is Armandra, Woman of the Winds and daughter of Ithaqua. She's basically Storm with wind powers. She flies about the wastes, her flame-red hair whipping behind her, with skin as pale as snow and eyes as stormy as a winter…you get the idea.

Silberhutte falls madly in love with her, both physically and psychically, and their escalating relationship only complicates the war between the two factions. If Armandra dares intervene directly with her wind powers, Ithaqua joins the fray as well. And yet Armandra refuses to let any harm come to Silberhutte, who also wants to join the fight as the macho leader of his Eskimo warriors. It's all very primal.

Unlike the other books in the Crow series, this is a lusty, gun-toting, fist-swinging, princess rescuing, rip-roaring yarn that chews up scenery like a bad actor in a Shakespearean play. It doesn't always make sense, but it's a heck of a lot of fun to read.

Titus Crow, Volume 1: The Burrowers Beneath; The Transition of Titus Crow

Titus Crow's adventures are a lot like the role-playing game exploits of player characters: they start out believable enough, but as the power creep and leveling sets in, the character's achievements and enemies seem to grow exponentially.

There are a few things that modern Cthulhu fans should be wary of when reading Lumley's foray into the Cthulhu Mythos. According to Lumley:

* Mythos beings can be repelled quite handily with "star stones." These are made with tiny chips of the original soap stone elder signs. That's right, they're mass-produced "extract of Elder Sign." And they work against shoggoths.

* The Tikkoun Elixir is actually holy water, which also works against the Mythos.

* There is a globe-spanning organization of psychics known as the Wilmarth Foundation. This Foundation has men in every level of government and business, and marshals their resources in times of great need, like when battling the Mythos. They also keep the Mythos hidden to prevent worldwide panic.

All of this is told to the reader after the fact in The Burrowers Beneath. In the tradition of Lovecraft, the stories are all from journals and letters of those who were there, shifting from character to character to build a story around giant psychic killer worms known as Chthonians. Mind you, they're just minions of the larger Cthulhu Cycle Deities (who are, irritatingly, referred to as the CCD).

Lumley seems intent on explaining everything in Lovecraft's fiction and providing a logical framework behind it all. This is great for a role-playing game but makes for boring reading. But when Lumley writes an action scene, such as when DeMarginy (the Watson to Crow's Holmes) is attacked directly by a Chthonian, it's absorbing. Unfortunately, there's so little action that the rest of the tale becomes a dry retelling, sometimes bordering on parody.

Did you know that there are dinosaurs swimming in Loch Ness? Lumley drops that and other nuggets matter-of-factly throughout the narrative – and it has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than to perhaps explain that the Wilmarth Foundation, with its uber-psychics, knows everything there is to know about the world.

By the time we get to the second part of the book, The Transition of Titus Crow, Lumley just gives up. Crow experiences every pulp trope, from the love of a green-haired "girl-goddess" to riding a lisping dragon, to replacing his shattered body with cybernetics manufactured by robots, to time traveling in an extradimensional clock. Crow, it turns out, is both the descendant of the Elder Gods and a cyborg. It's like a Rifts game in prose.

But the most unforgivable of all is that Transition is told in fragments. A terrible attack on the Wilmarth Foundation means its records have been lost, so we are left with a story that has been pieced together. Where the pieces are missing, Lumley uses ellipses. A lot. Reading the book becomes painful… whenever Lumley doesn’t feel like filling in the blanks…he uses ellipses…until you get just fragments like…ENERGY RAY…INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVEL…OH MY GOD MY EYES ARE BLEEDING…

There's a particular standout scene where Crow, confused and lost in a prehistoric era, engages in a battle of survival with a pterosaur and a giant crab. It's good stuff, but doesn't make up for the sheer insanity of what can only be described as lazy writing. We get it: the fragments of what happened to Crow are hard to piece together. But since this is, ya know, a WORK OF FICTION, it would be nice if the narrator made a token effort to craft a full story for the reader rather than transcribe the bits and pieces literally. And for that only Lumley can be held accountable.

In terms of characterization, Crow is a bit of a cipher. De Marigny has most of the personality, and even he tends to bluster through the book with very British exclamations of surprise and horror. The characters are rarely in actual danger and their stiff upper lip attitude becomes so overbearing that they begin to feel invincible even in the face of the mind-blasting insanity that is the *cough* CCD.

Worth reading to provide a foundation for Titus Crow and as a template for a role-playing game universe where the player characters actually have a chance against a Lovecraftian menace. If you can stick with it, the next book in the series gets much better.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

This book isn't funny.

Mind you, Ronson knows exactly what he's doing by presenting the book as "hilarious" – it starts out completely absurd, with the high-minded hippy ideals of a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran presented to a beleaguered military under siege. Jim Channon, seeking solace in the emerging human potential movement in California, struck a chord with the top brass, and the repercussions are still felt today.

But instead of being used as a positive force for peace, the military twisted it into a force of evil. Ronson ties it all together: September 11, Heaven's Gate, sticky foam, Abu-Grahib, Waco, Art Bell, Projects STARGATE, MKULTRA, and ARTICHOKE, and yes, Barney. Goat-staring is the least of our worries.

The thread running throughout all these seemingly disconnected blips in history is that they are a new form of psychological warfare that is innocuous, ruthless, and entirely effective. The Men Who Stare at Goats would be just another conspiracy-laden anti-government diatribe if it wasn't for the fact that Ronson always takes the next step as an investigative reporter. He finds people to back up the wild claims, interviews them, and often challenges their wild theories.

The sad thing is, very few of these shadowy contacts hide their past. Almost unilaterally, Ronson calls them all out by name and they step forward, sharing a story that sheds a disconcerting light on America's human rights record. Where is the vigorous conversation, the protests, the discord over these revelations? The facts are right here before us – even photographic evidence -- but we laugh about Barney being used to torture prisoners and we shake our heads at the poor, misguided psychics. But outrage? There's no outrage. We save our vitriol for partisan debates in our own government.

Eric Olson, son of Frank Olson, a military scientist who died under mysterious circumstances while working on MKULTRA, sums it up best:

"The old story is so much fun, why would anyone want to replace it with a story that's not fun. You see…this is no longer a happy, feel-good story…People have been brainwashed by fiction…so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, 'We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.' Actually, we know nothing of this. There's no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don't know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they're not cynical at all."

Have you heard? There's a movie based on this book coming out starring George Clooney.

It's a comedy.

Unholy Dimensions

There's no flowery introduction by anyone to Unholy Dimensions explaining what a major contributing force Jeffrey Thomas is to the Cthulhu Mythos. It just starts immediately with a short story set in Punktown, a seething planet of decay and corruption in a sci-fi universe where there are holograms, ray guns, and aliens. This review contains spoilers!

Thomas' science fiction tales are not his strongest. My reaction to this sudden and jarring juxtaposition in THE BONES OF THE OLD ONES wasn't favorable. It features Hound of Tindalos, a private eye who dabbles in sorcery, a creepy kid, and Yog-Sothoth. Although Thomas deftly handled the tension between the protagonist and his former friend, I wasn't impressed with the setting because I hadn't yet bought into the idea of sci-fi Cthulhu. By the second story, with the same protagonist in the same universe, I was hooked. John Bell, a Mythos hunter archetype that would make any Delta Green gamer proud, takes on a weird conglomerate being led by Nyarlathotep in THE AVATARS OF THE OLD ONES. This story is told from the view of a third party and love interest, H'anna, which helps preserve the sense of horror when a conglomerate of deformed Mythos minions are activated. THE YOUNG OF THE OLD ONES is the last of the Punktown trilogy in this volume. It features an Elder Thing and Horrors from Beyond. It is also something of a tragic love story, a theme that will continue throughout Thomas' work.

Thomas returns to the science fiction genre with THE SERVITORS, a star-crossed tale of two beings who really, really hate their bosses. When they finally meet, it turns out their worlds are far more different than either might have dreamed. THE HOUSE ON THE PLAIN reads like the trailer to a science fiction horror movie…because the perfectly preserved house is on an otherwise barren and inhospitable planet.

I'm not a fan of Thomas' poetry. THE ICE SHIP, ASCENDING TO HELL, and YOO HOO, CTHULHU are clever enough but relatively uninspired.

Thomas enjoys dabbling in the relationships between his characters, building on romantic tension to further accentuate the horror. I MARRIED A SHOGGOTH is both the most disturbing of the lovelorn tales, despite the clever name. Thomas plays on the Lovecraft-style of the narrator narrating something he obviously survived. Here, he sets out to show that there are some fates worse than death. It's a parable about getting exactly what you want, even when what you want involves turning a Shoggoth into your own personal plaything. In SERVILE Thomas deftly interweaves romantic tension in a love triangle that features the Dreamlands and a Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua. You'll never look at a pair of dentures the same way again. THROUGH OBSCURE GLASS is another love story about a man tasked with guarding against a Dreamlands' intrusion by Gugs and the woman who loves him. CELLS is another sad love story between a mad scientist and his wife as they desperately try to cheat death through misbegotten science. In LOST SOUL, Thomas shows that there are worse things than a Mythos sorcerer as he explores an obsessive, incestuous love triangle. The ickiest story of the bunch. The collection ends with another love story, THE CELLAR GOD, combining Tcho-Tchos with Moonbeasts in a tragic tale of secret romance. THE FOURTH UTTERANCE is perhaps the best story of the lot. It features an exchange between a lonely woman, a sorcerer who summoned something terrible, and the answering machine between them. The Mythos is only hinted at, but that makes the story all the more disturbing.

In THE DOOM IN THE ROOM, Thomas parodies Lovecraft's writing style by filling the three pages with flower text and a narrator who madly types the story even while a Mythos beast advances on him. He must type very, very fast… Lovecraft is parodied again in the super short WRITING ON THE WALL, a cartoon-like representation of the typical Lovecraft explorer deciphering his own doom.

RED GLASS establishes another theme: that when you look into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back. Narrating in first person, the protagonist is drawn to a house full of mental illness and secret portal behind its peeling walls. Thomas is also an expert at prolonged suffering. BOOKWORM is a short tale but the ending sticks with you as we glimpse the last desperate moments of a too-curious thief succumbing to the Mythos. THE BOARDED WINDOW builds slowly, exploring parallel dimensions and how each side views the other as strange and horrible. THE FACE OF BAPHOMET provides an alternative twist to the Templars, Baphomet, and Shub-Niggurath. The initiation ritual and main character would complement the Templars as described in Unseen Masters nicely. WHAT WASHES ASHORE follows a conflicted female protagonist who is fond of seashells, a hobby that will ultimately consume her in the outskirts of a forgotten town.

Thomas enjoys spotlighting the war against the Mythos, including the terrible cost it exacts on the mortals who dare fight back. OUT OF THE BELLY OF SHEOL is told like a biblical tale, featuring a prophet, the insides of Cthulhu, and a war between the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones. CONGLOMERATE, told from the perspective of a security guard working at Monumental Life Insurance Corporation, features Nyarlathotep in one of his many guises as the CEO of a massive, sinister corporate entity. Good stuff for Keepers looking to expand Stephen Alzis' holdings. Two sorcerers and brothers of Cthugha and Cthulhu go to war in CORPSE CANDLES, baffling the police. Building on the war between Mythos and Man, THE THIRD EYE is a sad little tale of a broken detective, his frightened son, and the burden of occult knowledge of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. PAZUZU'S CHILDREN takes place during the first Iraq War. It ends with a fitting Twilight Zone-esque scream.

There are a few layout problems. Pages 193 and 248 feature just a few words and a whole lot of blank space. The artwork is blurry, abstract, and not particularly scary, serving only to interrupt the story. Thomas' text is evocative enough without these distractions.

But overall Unholy Dimensions demonstrates Jeffrey Thomas' amazing talent to tell an approachable Mythos tale that is both entertaining and creepy. A must read for Delta Green and Cthulhutech gamers.

Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds

Gary Alan Fine's book, Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds, provides an enlightening overview of the state of gaming in the early eighties. Fine, a sociologist, inhabits the gaming cultures he reviews, reporting on Dungeons & Dragons, Chivalry & Sorcery, and Empire of the Petal Throne as a player and game master. He also interviews many of the leading lights of the industry at the time, including M.A.R. Barker, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax.

What's revealed by Fine's studies is that issues many gamers face today have remained largely unchanged over the course of thirty years. "Roll-" vs. "role-" playing figures prominently. Game masters who are unprepared or capricious, players who are petty and competitive, groups that exclude other groups…they're all here in vivid detail. What sets Fine's work apart is that he provides sociological constructs to discuss the gaming hobby, a hobby he treats with respect.

On the other hand, there are several issues that are clearly tied to the nascent gaming culture. Rampant sexism and violence towards women disturbs Fine; things have definitely changed for the better. The other major concern of most of Fine's subjects is the invasion of youngsters to the hobby who are too immature to fully grasp its rules. Nowadays we have the opposite problem – there aren't enough young players attracted to the game.

Throughout, Fine interviews his subjects and quotes their experiences as well as his own. These quotes are illustrative of the little challenges gaming groups regularly encounter, from intergroup rivalry to players having their characters to commit mass suicide as a form of protest against a particularly unfair game master. Any gamer will recognize himself and his players in Fine's work.

Chivalry & Sorcery and Empire of the Petal Throne (Tekumel) are not as well known today, but at the time they were a game designer's response to the flaws in Dungeons & Dragons. In the case of Chivalry & Sorcery, it was a more feudal feel to fantasy. In the case of Tekumel, it was the distinct European emphasis that colored all of Dungeons & Dragons. Barker's direct involvement in the Tekumel game universe as a game master provides an immersive contrast to the typical hack-and-slash dungeon games that were popular at the time.

Fine's work isn't flashy, but it's a critical piece of gaming history and a must-read for gaming scholars everywhere.

Galatea in 2-D

My mom told me about "Galatea in 2-D" around 1993, when it first came out. 12 years, two states, and several relocations later, I finally cracked the book open to see what all the fuss was about.

The title evokes images of a creator in love with his creation, and in that regard Galatea in 2-D is faithful: Illustrator Roger Simons discovers that his painting of a magical nymph comes to life in full, three dimensional form. Poor Roger is down on his luck after being slandered by an incident in which he supposedly sent cardboard blanks to Nonesuch Books. As a freelancer, he barely scrapes by, and Roger figures hallucinations are part of his downward spiral into homelessness.

Believing things can't get possibly worse, Roger has the misfortune of bumping into his old rival, Kevin Matthews. Kevin's got everything: the money, the fame, and a hot new wife named Julia. What he doesn't have is talent. But how?

Kevin's success is not without its victims. Kevin's ex-wife, Donna, was once a fellow artist, but now she's a shell of her beautiful former self. Eventually, Roger and Donna discover the common link to their misfortune is actually Kevin.

After Roger confesses to Kevin that he thought his pictures started coming to life, two people show up with the intent of killing him. As a last desperate measure, Kevin and Elsie end up in one of his paintings. And then things get really wacky…

Aaron Allston perfectly nails both the fiscal uncertainty and thrilling creativity of a freelancer, and he takes both to new extremes. What if an artist could create life just by thinking of it? And what if the better the artist, the better the life?

What ensues is essentially a war of wizards, as Kevin and Roger begin a magical duel to the death that spans cities and paintings. Roger and Donna's paintings consist of futuristic science fiction tropes (flying spy drones, robot clones, and laser rifles) while Kevin's paintings are something out of a Harryhausen flick (ancient Greek heroes, gargoyles, and stone Cyclopes). Along the way, Roger discovers his 30-something lust for a perfect dream girl looks a lot like a fellow mature artist than a clueless nymph.

With such limitless possibilities, Allston struggles to contain the plot. Roger decides to paint an incredibly powerful superhero, only to discover that there's a limit to what he can pull into the real world. And yet Kevin has crystal balls that record the goings on of "important people," but not his arch nemesis. When the final battle comes, Kevin seems a little too easily tricked. The conflict is inspired, especially because it takes place at a science fiction convention, but I saw the twist coming a mile away.

All in all, Galatea in 2-D is less about Galatea and more about the artist. For anyone who has ever been a freelancer, his frustration and aspirations make for entertaining (and sometimes painfully accurate) reading. If only we could all blame a Kevin Matthews for whenever a contract goes bad.

The Eyes of the Dragon

I've never liked Stephen King very much. The only story I liked of his (and I didn't know he was the author) was Hellcat, which was made into a pitifully moronic movie. And yet, while Stephen King is out of his element here, it's not a bad novel.
The appealing aspect of the story isn't the story line itself, which is rather straightforward, but the manner in which King approaches his subjects. The villain doubts himself at times - when the prince doesn't fall for his story at first, he begins frantically making other plans. Likewise, because the prince shows tears when accused of a crime, he is assumed guilty - an interesting and rare statement in a genre normally confined to the "heroic" part of heroic-fantasy.

And while we are reminded that King knows his horror element well, as his villains shine, it's also painfully obvious that he can't help but resort to being just plain gross to "enhance the atmosphere." I've always had this problem with all of King's books - he seems to lose interest in the plot and begins being disgusting, the difference between hack-and-slash horror and a truly terrifying presentation. Do we really need to read, in detail, a soldier picking his nose? Do we REALLY need to hear how much the prince's father farts? King is fixated on the "make them unlikeable so you don't feel bad when I kill them" method, which works fine in formulaic horror movies but is awkward and obvious here. Nevertheless, despite the occasional rude distraction, The Eyes of the Dragon is an entertaining read.

I've enjoyed many of Stephen Kings novels a great deal. Others I couldn't wait to finish (I always finish a book I've started, no matter how bad it gets!). He is either on his game or off it. In The Eyes of the Dragon, he is very much on his game. It is a departure from his normal fare of vampires, undead, aliens, and serial killers. His brings us into a world of fantasy complete with kings, dragons, heroes, and the inevitable Bad Guy™. The villain is one us SK fans have seen before in such incarnations as 'The Walkin' Dude' from The Stand. Yes, it's Flagg, playing the part of the evil sorcerer. Quite effectively, I might add.

I was delighted to pick up this book and find SK taking a wild gamble into a new genre. Yes, there are the obligatory graphic scenes Talien referred to, but I've read worse (Clive Barker, anyone?). I expect it and, yes, I take a sick fascination in some grotesque descriptions. I love to REACT to my reading, even if it is only to say "EEW!" and grimace. The Eyes of the Dragon is a wonderful tale of castle intrigue and heroism that has you rooting for the good guys and loving to hate the seemingly immortal Flagg.

The Discovery of Dragons

I stumbled upon this book when I was looking around in the Children's Section (yes, I do that), for the role-playing books. Terribly annoying that they put role-playing in that same category, but oh well, I'm not so proud that I won't go there. And I found, much to my surprise, a similar outcast - Base's books are written with amusement and sophistication, and while they could be entertaining if read to a child, they are not children's books. This one is gorgeous, with the dragons fully rendered, amusing (and fictional) notes in reference to them from various explorers, tiny cartoons in the framing illustrating the stories involving the dragons, and maps of the world which show where the dragon comes from. Also, the dragons have a size comparison, from a man (who happens to be running away in the silhouette comparison), to an elephant. The only flaw? A jungle dragon described as a "massive beast" in the text and shown to be much larger than a man in the cartoon frame, is shown as the size of a cat on the size-comparison silhouettes. An impressive side note: Base did the artwork too!

What Ifs? Of American History

As a gamer, I have a special fondness for the What If series. Many gaming scenarios have been built around the different realities occuring from alternate history - heck, anyone can speculate on a different outcome of the Civil War, World War II, or the possibility of World War III. What If brings a level of expertise to the table, "preeminent historians" according to the back cover.

An important staple of an alternative history series is education, demonstrating how things could be different if a particular event or choice wasn't made. I learned a lot more about World War II from this book by what didn't happen, which helped reinforce why events unfolded as they did. In that regard, alternate history scenarios are a great teaching tool.

Unfortunately, the editor (and I blame the editor, Robert Cowley) doesn't seem to be able to rein in his writers. With this many essays, there's bound to be some differences in quality. But the writers never agree on the RULES of the essays themselves.

Not all the essays actually lay out alternate history. Some of the essays are essentially summed up as "WHEW! Boy are we lucky things turned out the way they did!" Which isn't nearly as educational as showing what could have happened. There are plenty of other experts that can simply tell us about the near misses of history.

Not all of the essays are grounded in actual history. It's fine to lay out alternate history, but for a neophyte who isn't familiar with the timeline of events, speculation without a comparison to the actual events just muddles the waters. When the writers use active voice, you have no idea if our guide to history is in fact speculating or retelling actual events as they happened. Opinion? Fact? Hypothesis? It's never clear.

Finally, some of the essays are outright fiction, Joe McCarthy's Secret Life being the most egregious example. So what, exactly, is this essay trying to prove? How easy it would be for McCarthy to actually be a member of the communists he was rooting out? What's the lesson here?

Some of these essays have been reprinted from the What If series before, which is odd - I imagine the group interested in this series already read the first volume and their inclusion "as a bonus" seems a little disingenuous. If the plan was to have this volume be a reference, it falls short of its goals.

That said, What Ifs? of American History is an interesting if uneven collection of opinions, predictions, and history lessons about America. Worth reading, but you might want to keep a history textbook nearby.

My Tank is Fight

I bought My Tank is Fight at World Fantasy Con when I was looking for something to buy in the dealer's room. It appealed to my peculiar tastes: weird history, alternate history fiction, technical details of weapons and armor, and a good dose of humor. In other words, the same stuff you find in most role-playing game books these days (if you can find them). So in a rare move, I bought myself a brand-new book.

As weird history, My Tank is Fight does an admirable job of spotlighting the various weapons conceived for World War II that were impractical from the start. Divided into land, sea, and air, these devices are mostly from the Germans (with one Canadian/American exception), spawned from sheer desperation as the war waned. They can be categorized as two different types:

Bigger is Better: The same old boring weapon, only GINORMOUS. Beyond the cost of creating these monstrosities, they were too heavy to actually use (giant tanks can't cross bridges) or too obvious a target for the Allied bombers.

Combine This With That: Combining a tank with a plane, or a submarine with a tank. Yes, technically these devices could conquer two types of terrain, but they ended up being pretty terrible at traversing both.

As if all these historical details are too boring to keep an adult's attention span focused, the book has frequent jokes - some funny, some just plain sophomoric - wherein the author slips into first person. It's a little jarring, when the rest of the book is relatively somber.

Additionally, there are fiction vignettes highlighting Nazis, Russians, and an American reporter's experiences with these superweapons in an alternate history where they're actually created and used. The Russian sniper's story is interesting but too brief, with no satisfying resolution. The Nazi tank commander's story isn't really wrapped up, while the Nazi pilot's story is wrapped up but out of sequence, which muddles the narrative. Finally there's the American reporter, who is by far the most fun.

Spoiler alert as I dive into the conclusion of the book here...

Nazi Germany explodes a nuclear bomb over New York City. This seems to be taken very lightly in the fictional narrative, with the author indicating that "although the Americans wanted to immediately bomb Germany, cooler heads prevailed and they bombed Japan instead."

Sorry, I don't buy it. After America's experience with 9/11 and Iraq, a Nazi atom bomb detonating over New York seems like it would garner a much more ferocious reaction. Unfortunately, there's really not room for My Tank is Fight to explore the implications of this hugely history-altering event. The bigger news seems to be the cover-up of Nazi space exploration. In comparison to the massacre of thousands of Americans, giving a fig about a single Nazi still stuck on a German space station seems a bit trite.

Ultimately, My Tank is Fight is a breezy, entertaining read. I kept thinking, "this would be fantastic for a game!" - be it a role-playing game or a first-person shooter set in World War II, wherein the boss battles feature these preposterous super weapons. If you have an interest in alternate history or World War II history, but are too lazy to do any actual research, this is the book for you.

How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion

When I was in second grade, I was asked to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote "Robot Maker." That was before I discovered that robot making wasn't about design so much as it was about programming. And programming meant math. I'm an English major.

Decades later, I finally got the chance to purchase my very own robot: a Roomba. I fell in love with my little Roomba, Red, until it died on me and started backing up in circles. After months of tinkering with it, where I imagined myself to be the Robot Maker I always dreamed I could become, I gave up and threw Red in the garbage.

I feel guilty about that. I know, deep down, that the other Roombas are watching. They are planning their revenge. So I turned to How to Survive a Robot Uprising for the inevitable Roomba retaliation.

HTSARU is a handsomely crafted book, with bright pages and reddish-gold trim. It also has some huge pages of blank space in which there is neither text nor graphic, and in some cases the text seems to be awkwardly laid out.

This book isn't as polished Where's My Jetpack?. It veers from lecturing on the feasibility of robots doing particular ominous tasks (nanobots, robot swarms, giant robots) to how to survive the attack. The problem is that a lot of the advice is pretty standard stuff - I don't need a book to tell me to run away, hide behind objects, and listen for robot noises when the Roombas come looking for me.

There are two chief problems with this kind of humor: whereas say, a zombie guide wholeheartedly embraces the notion of zombies and what to do about them, HTSARU sticks to reality. And you know what? Reality's pretty boring. About the scariest robot out there are the ones currently used by the military to take out targets from a distance, and those aren't really robots at all but remote controlled drones. So no, the robot uprising isn't going to happen any time soon. Unless you count the Roombas.

The other problem is that the book tries to dispense advice on how to deal with robots. But if a robot uprising happened, which comes with quite a few assumptions (that we have that many robots, that we use them in everyday life, that they could actually pose a physical threat to us as opposed to say just not cleaning our rugs), then we'd probably be screwed within the first hour. It becomes sadly apparent that we DON'T have the ability to beat a robot. The best advice is to wait until the robots run out of power, unless they're solar-powered, in which case you have the Matrix-solution of nuking the sky. And if you go down that path, now we're back into the world of Make Believe, where we consider humanoid robots (Terminator) or squid robots (Matrix) or robot servants (I, Robot) taking over the world. Where is the plan to deal with a million carpet cleaning deathbots?

HTSARU awkwardly straddles the real and imaginary worlds of robots and tries to be humorous to boot. Because it never focuses on a particular kind of robot uprising, HTSARU has difficulty explaining what to do except in the most general terms. This makes the book only kinda-useful as a survival guide and only kinda-amusing as a humorous flight of fancy. I am still woefully unprepared for when Red enacts his revenge.

So if you see a little Roomba puttering down the street (or puttering in circles), think of me. Then run in the other direction.

Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide

Pokemon. Collectible toy monsters. Godzilla and his ilk. The bizarre popularity of the monstrous in Japanese culture finally has an explanation in Yokai Attack.

The act of classifying monsters harkens back to the late 1800s, when several authors attempted to catalogue the wildly colorful and imaginative yokai. Amidst the usual menagerie of demons and ghosts are eyeballs sticking out of screen doors (Mokumoku Ren), monsters that lick bathtubs clean (Akaname), and inanimate objects that, having been around for over 99 years, eventually take on a life of their own.

The usefulness of these kinds of guides is best reflected in whether or not you can find the same information online. Fortunately, Yokai Attack brings a refreshing level of detail and charming artwork to a subject that could easily be a retread of obakemono.com, a great resource in its own right.

Each creature is sorted into one of five self-explanatory categories: Ferocious Fiends, Gruesome Gourmets, Annoying Neighbors, The Sexy and Slimy, and the Wimps. The creatures are then described, in true Japanese style, by their Pronunciation, English name, Gender, Height, Weight, Locomotion, Distinctive Features, Offensive Weapons, Abundance, Habitat, Claim to Fame, a description of how it attacks, how to survive an encounter, and comments by scholars. Peppered throughout are pictures and material that represent the yokai along with occasionally amusing commentary.

There are modern monsters too: the Kuchisake Onna looks like a normal woman wearing a surgical mask (common in Japan) but removing the mask reveals a huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth. The Nopperabo appears to be a friend or relative, only to reveal a completely faceless head at a terrifying moment. It was sighted as recently as 1959.

The yokai themselves are a combination of folklore, myth, fairy tales, ghost stories, and puns. Mixed in with the serious hauntings are creatures that are simply too ludicrous to be believed. To Yokai Attack's credit, the utter preposterousness of some monsters is never questioned; they are all treated as authentic creatures to be respected.

The artwork is bright and colorful, if a little cartoonish, but that too is keeping in the Japanese style of popular fiction. The descriptions aren't always uniform. Sometimes the authors tweak how they describe the creature, especially those that are less likely to attack (the Wimps section is rife with monsters that basically just scare people). And yet, other Yokai are listed as being relatively harmless (the Mokumoku Ren) and then the entry describes a tale where a victim lost his eyes. Not so harmless after all!

Ever since the Worst-Case Survival Guide came out, there has been a series of "pocket guides" of every sort, from detailing how to hunt vampires to surviving a zombie attack to how to be a superhero. There are very few worthy of more than a single read. In Yokai Attack's case, it's an excellent combination of graphic presentation and gentle humor that makes the book a worthy reference. For monster-philes tired of the same old ghosts and ghouls, Yokai Attack is a refreshingly accessible look at Japanese monsters.

The Government Manual for New Superheroes

Have you heard? The 1950s are a hilarious means of satirizing popular genres! One of the funniest means of lampooning these genres is to create a survival guide for them, in the style of well, Survival Guides, which are the spawn of Idiot's Guides. We've got books on surviving day-to-day challenges like the office, the workplace, and life in general...why not one on superheroes?

No seriously, why not? It's not like this has ever been done before. This clever 1950s guide, aimed presumably at superhero fans, lampoons precisely these four superheroes: Batman (he's smart and rich but a kook), Superman (he's not a U.S. citizen, he's an alien!), Spider-Man (he's got a very old aunt and a crazy symbiotic suit--comedy gold!), and Thor...who is technically a god and probably could found his own religion. Does anyone who isn't a comic book fan know who Thor is? Anyone?

Are you laughing yet? Come on, superheroes are funny!

How about not one but TWO jokes about how superheroes fighting in a library would be utterly silent (cause libraries are FUNNY)?

Okay, how about this: how about if we come up with some really clever jokes about superheroes by using the superhero's name as a joke. The formula's simple: insert superhero name of topic #1 which ironically describes the exact opposite of what you mean, and then insert supervillain name of topic #2 which also ironically describes the exact opposite of what you mean. For good measure, you can throw in a third super-name, although that would probably be just hitting the reader over the head with your joke and surely you wouldn't want to do that.

Let's try it, shall we?

THE TIRED JOKE and his sidekick MARKETING BOY faces down their arch-nemesis, WIT. During the battle, WIT calls upon his comrades from the LEAGUE OF BETTER READS, including MR. HUMOR, CAPTAIN SUBTLETY, and the ever-popular BOOK THAT'S ACTUALLY FUNNY. Our dynamic duo is well prepared though, because they haven't read this guide and thus have no idea that they're ironically hilarious, reading their 1950s newspapers, smoking their 1950s pipe, and watching their 1950s wives cook them dinner.

If you find recycled 1950s illustrations, large font type, or a huge index (that's more pages than some of the chapters) funny, then this book is for you!

Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived

When I was little, my uncle collected newspaper clippings of various articles about the American foray into space. Like my father, he was a big fan of science fiction, so it was only natural that he bequeathed his collection to me. And for a little while, I kept it up.

But eventually I got bored with it. For one, there wasn't anything new happening in space--certainly nothing on the scale of a lunar landing. For another, a lot of the optimistic predictions about space development weren't coming true and in fact were becoming something of a cliché. Where's My Jetpack? seemed like a response to that disillusionment, so I was glad I picked it up.

The book is well-illustrated with blue and white line art of various subjects. The cover is reflective, and the pages are trimmed with shiny blue material so that it sparkles when you look at the book from the side. It looks like a gimmicky-type of book, the kind that has no useful information in it but that you put on your bookshelf to make everyone think you're smart.

I'm pleased to report that Where's My Jetpack? actually has content in it worth reading. When it comes to science fiction and fact, I'm pretty well read. While I'm no engineer, I knew all about jetpacks, zeppelins, moving sidewalks, self-steering cars, flying cars, hoverboards, and teleportation. Fortunately, the author does too - and he nails each subject with just the right combination of humor and relevant information. Some of these topics are pretty esoteric -- for example, few people realize that we technically achieved teleportation years ago - but it's all here.

There's other stuff I didn't know about. Anti-sleeping pills are a new one. I haven't kept up on universal translators or food pills, and I didn't know the status of space elevators. I'm also mildly creeped out by a section on dolphin guides, wherein a woman built a house for her "dolphin companion" and the dolphin started exhibiting "courting behavior." Ick.

The fact that there's something in here for everyone makes the book worth the price. Although it's technically classified as humor, Where's My Jetpack? sometimes comes off as a little too eager to please, with jokes that are so topical the book will be horribly dated a decade out. Then again, the nature of the book probably guarantees it will be outdated anyway.

Although the jokes sometimes fall flat, Where's My Jetpack? is a breezy, educational read. If you're still wondering why there's no robots serving you, why you can't fly to your neighbor's house in style, or why you still have to sleep a few hours each night, Where's My Jetpack will gleefully tell you why.

Author Unknown: Tales of a Literary Detective

I've been on the Internet before there was a Web, met my wife over a Multi-User Dungeon, and wrote my master's thesis on how anonymity on the Internet makes people act out. The notion of determining the true identity of anonymous sources really appealed to me, especially since I've been the victim of more than one anonymous attack on the Internet.

And thus we have Author Unknown. My version is titled "On the Trail of Anonymous" as opposed to "Tales of a Literary Detective" - near as I can tell, it's the same book with different packaging. Which is good, because my version's cover is of a book with glasses resting on it--not very interesting. That cover exemplifies some of the problems with Author Unknown.

Don Foster is an English professor. He works in an English professor's office, he writes like an English professor, and he stumbles around in bewilderment in the "real world," solving crimes and battling other evil skeptics. He seems to have a magical ability to determine authorship through contextual cues, an ability he never explains in detail. Armed with his trusty sidekick SHAXICON (a mysterious search program that's never mentioned once in the book), the hapless Dr. Foster wages a one-man-and-computer war against those who would cloak themselves in anonymity.

The delicious revenge such a skill can bring about is especially evident when Foster tracks down his anonymous peer reviewers. Foster slices right through it all. And what anonymous villains does our hero vanquish? The author of Primary Colors! The Unabomber! Wand Tinasky! Monica Lewinsky! Clement Clarke Moore! Shakespeare himself!

In between all this detective work is a lot of inside baseball. Foster has all the insufferable qualities of an academic, including the habit of quoting everyone and everything else even marginally relevant to the subject at hand, a lot of self-pitying "but I'm just a poor English professor!", and certain assumptions that the reader knows every detail of say, the famed Talking Points or even Primary Colors. Author Unknown has aged poorly.

You won't find much detail on how Foster actually gets to the bottom of his mysteries. SHAXICON seems to do a lot of the work and Foster pieces together the rest. Sometimes Foster leads up to the Big Reveal, and other times he simply tells the reader who the culprit is and then backs into his argument. This makes the book wildly uneven, interesting in one chapter and very boring in the next.

What's shocking is how unscientific the literary world really is. Foster's work is the analysis of text in a scientific way, a way that is now accessible to everyone on the planet in a little tool you might have heard of called Google. Back then, this was big news. Now, a man who knows how to use a specialized search engine? Not so much.

If you're looking for guidance on how to track down your anonymous detractors, this book will not help you. If you're looking for a mildly interesting tale about the evolution of scientific inquiry applied to literature and search tools, then Author Unknown will be enlightening. And if you want to know the true origins of Santa's reindeer, it's a must read.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

You ever have one of those crazy bosses?

She would blast ecological sounds so loudly we had to ask her to turn it down (our jobs included listening to actors read lines). Another time, she called in sick because she was "wafting vapors." She always brought up her education in conversation. She never seemed to actually do any work, but instead worked on her novel, using company resources to write it. And she was strangely preoccupied with "ganja" to the point that she used it as her password, a fact she was only too happy to share. "Wafting vapors" indeed.

After I finished reading Nickel and Dimed, I was convinced Ehrenreich was my former boss. A highly-educated journalist with an arch tone, she blesses us all with her insights by going undercover as a poor person and trying to get by. Which is a bit like the scene from Aladdin when the princess slips out into the real world.

You see, Ehrenreich wants to help people. She really does, and she views things in a sort of black and white, my way or the highway sort of charitable aggressiveness. She's an ideological bully, the kind that is impossible to argue with because she cloaks herself with the cause of the underdog.

And that's a shame, because Ehrenreich's absolutely right in what she uncovers: that the poor can't get by on minimum wage salaries in the year 2000. The only way to survive is to have a partner, she concludes, but with that comes the baggage of living with another person, possibly children, and all that entails. And yet, Ehrenreich's experiment lacks precisely that - when she is given the opportunity o move in with a friend, she turns it down.

Ehrenreich isn't a poor person. In fact, she is so NOT poor that she secretly feels she should be treated differently because she's better educated, or because she's a journalist, or because she's trying to help people when clearly bosses are greedy and poor people are too weak to fend for themselves.

In my first job, I worked in a factory. I've come a long way from that factory job, but it taught me a lot as a high school student. And what's missing most from Ehrenreich's tour in Poor People Land is that these people aren't characters in her book; they're real people. Ehrenreich never seems to detach herself from her upbringing, although she would have us believe otherwise. The signs, if you read carefully, are there.

The one that really turned me off was the fact that Ehrenreich, due to an "indiscretion," smokes pot when she knows she'll be going on job interviews. Now either Ehrenreich didn't know job interviews required drug testing, which speaks poorly to her journalistic abilities, or she has a fondness for pot she fails to disclose as part of who she is. From there it's railing against the system of drug testing, a charge that becomes shrill when she beats the test and sees that as further evidence that drug testing is dumb. There are lots of hard working poor folks who aren't smoking pot before job interviews, and Ehrenreich isn't doing the underrepresented poor any favors by succumbing to the stereotype.

The other hypocrisy is that Ehrenreich bristles at psychological tests. I agree with her, I hated those tests too. She objects to the tone of the questions and their underlying agenda, but the back of the book contains a "reader's guide" that asks such loaded questions as, "have you ever been homeless, unemployed, without health insurance, or held down two jobs? What is the lowest-paying job you ever held and what kind of help--if any--did you need to improve your situation?" The lack of self-awareness rife throughout the book is breathtaking.

The final indignity is when Ehrenreich, the educated white woman who knows better, decides on a lark to start a union at Wal-Mart. Heedless of what the consequences might be, she just skips right out of that final job into her conclusions. Never mind that Ehrenreich was intentionally rabble-rousing workers who, if they had decided to try to form a union, could have all lost their jobs. And where would that leave them, while Ehrenreich went back to her comfortable house?

But if you can look past that, and I'm sure a lot of people can't, the book's messages are sound. The end result of a capitalist system in America is ultimately hostile to itself. The rich need the poor to work as cheaply and inexpensively as possible, and this form of human labor market ultimately degrades the bottom ranks until they rebel. Ehrenreich doesn't have any answers as to why the poor haven't rebelled already and instead concludes with navel-gazing reader's guide.

Nickel and Dimed should be required reading for CEOs everywhere who are often responsible for the fates of thousands of peoples' livelihoods. I just wish Ehrenreich hadn't written it.

Swan Song

I read McCammon's "The Wolf's Hour" when I was a teenager and was amazed by the author's daring: who would have thought to combine werewolves with the spy genre? In the intervening years I forgot the name of the book as well as the author. When I finally remembered the author's name and discovered McCammon wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, I just had to pick it up.

I was not prepared for Swan Song. This review contains spoilers, so if you want to be as unprepared I was read no further.

Steeped in 1980s Cold War paranoia, Swan Song is an end-of-the-world parable about good and evil. There are multiple protagonists, including Sister the formerly crazy homeless woman, Swan the girl who can make plants grow, Josh the giant black wrestler, and a whole pile of supporting characters that are too numerous to list here. On the bad guy side we have Colonel Macklin, a former military officer holed up in a mountain fortress, Roland Croninger, a psychotic gamer and Friend, who might just be the Devil incarnate. There are occasional nods to mysticism, including a glass ring/crown, a magic mirror, a dowsing stick named Crybaby, and a bit of fortunetelling. Indeed, much of the book's plot involves tarot mysticism, a point I gradually lost track of throughout the book's nearly thousand pages.

It's a tribute to McCammon's writing that World War III is every bit as horrible as we fear. The sight of a bus hurled high into the air, flaming bodies falling out of it like burnt embers, stuck with me long after I finished the book. And the fear and hope of the survivors holed up in the mountain fortress as they watch the missiles pass overhead is palpable. His text often verges on the poetic, and McCammon's is careful to realistically portray the effects of radiation and conflict: shock, blisters, and bruises are a common occurrence. I never realized how rarely you hear about shock in fiction until I read Swan Song.

On the other hand, McCammon occasionally veers off into crazy mutant-land with two headed mountain lions, another doomsday device, and another mountain fortress. And that's where Swan Song breaks down a bit. Midway through the book, the plot advances by seven years. The purpose of the time shift seems primarily to move Swan's age forward so she can have a romantic interest, but it's a bit much to swallow--McCammon works so hard to make the world feel real, and then doesn't do enough to make it feel aged by seven years. Relationships seem frozen in time and characters rarely reference the intervening years.

Swan Song is also relentlessly grim: sodomy, rape, infanticide, patricide, matricide, disease, torture, suicide, drug use...it's all on ugly display here. After awhile, it gets so bad it's difficult to stick with the book. When McCammon skips forward in time, I had difficulty believing the characters survived in such a depressing land. But it does get better, eventually, and that's where the biggest problem lies...

There's no real climax between good and evil. The crown/ring of jewels that Sister spends her whole life protecting is hinted at being even more powerful in Swan's hands. And that's it. Friend, the shapeshifting demonic presence, is clearly constrained by limits of the flesh...until it's inconvenient to the plot.

After a thousand pages, you better believe I expect the book to culminate in a holy war. I'm glad McCammon finally gives his poor characters a break (the few he leaves alive, that is), but I'm less pleased by the failure to really settle things once and for all. It's like reading only the first two books of Lord of the Rings. I wanted closure, dammit!

Still, Swan Song is a triumph of writing and definitely worth reading. McCammon provides a tantalizing glimpse of a world that we all secretly know and fear. And he writes with the deft vision of a movie director, creating moments (a race to the death in a mall filled with psychopaths, a showdown with hungry wolves, the aforementioned nuclear war) that haunt your dreams long after you've finished Swan Song.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I first heard of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion from a graduate school professor. He declared that reading it changed his life and that it would change mine as well. I didn't believe him. It took me seven years before I finally picked up the book. And now I'm sorry I waited so long.

Influence explains the underpinnings of how the American marketing machine works. Cialdini explains that modern humanity has developed shortcuts to decision-making in order to deal with information overload. As a result, we have a reflex of sorts that kicks in for certain situations, such as the need to reciprocate favors, the desire for rare goods, following likable leaders, determining whom we should listen to, following the rest of the crowd, and maintaining consistency in our public persona.

As a teenager, these pressures to conform are front and center, but as adults we forget the compromises we made in the transition. "Are you a follower or a leader?" Cialdini explains that there are good reasons to be a follower and that, in most situations, it's perfectly acceptable to do what the rest of the crowd is doing. But there are situations in which our natural inclinations can be exploited, and there are scenarios where following the herd can lead to catastrophic consequences. Recognizing these behaviors in ourselves is an important part of survival, so that when modern life throws something at us unexpected, like an accident or a door-to-door salesman, we know how to react.

I mentioned that reading this book filled me with rage. I'm not angry at the author, but at all the people who now, with the gift of hindsight and Cialdini's guidance, I realized manipulated me.

I'm mad at the magazine salesman. He got me to buy two years worth of a magazine I didn't want by relying on my desire for consistency after I provisionally agreed to buy a subscription for what I thought was one year.

I'm mad at the Saturn dealer. Despite the "no haggle rule," he used the trick of authority where he "checked with his boss" for a better deal and then pressured me into buying it.

I'm mad at the real estate agent. He used the trick of scarcity to show me terrible, run-down houses to make me feel better about the house I ultimately picked.

And that's what's so interesting about this book. Cialdini wrote this book for US. Not for managers, salesmen, or non-profit volunteers. He wrote it as a defense! And yet everything from reviews on the book's cover to reviews right here on Amazon tout this book as a must for marketers. That's completely against the spirit of what Cialdini wrote - each chapter ends with "how to say no" and while the advice isn't always sound (he essentially tells you to, ya know, not fall for the tricks) it's certainly welcome.

It's a bitter irony that marketers have turned a book about resisting marketing into yet another marketing tool. Now that I've read this book, there won't be another magazine subscription, car, or house I buy without a fight. Buy it today so you can start fighting back too.

Eye in the Sky: A Novel

Eye in the Sky was written by the eponymous Philip K. Dick, he of Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") and The Running Man, among other seemingly made for the big screen novels. Dick's meditations on consciousness are a running theme throughout all of his works, and Eye in the Sky is no different. In this tale, our hero Jack Hamilton and has just been given a choice at his military contractor job, where he works at a facility that contains the particle accelerator known as the Bevatron. Jack's wife, Marsha, is suspected of being a Communist sympathizer, and as a result Jack's job is at risk. Adding to the betrayal, Jack's friend Charles McFeyffe is head of security and leads the prosecution against them.

With Jack questioning his own wife's loyalty and choosing between his marriage and his career, Jack, Marsha, Charles, and a few other folks take a tour of the newly operating Bevatron. Then disaster strikes.

The Bevatron's particle beam tears through the visitor catwalk above, dumping eight people into it, including Jack, Marsha, and Charles, along with Bill Laws, an African-American scientist reduced to giving tours of the Bevatron; Arthur Silvester, a fundamentalist World War II veteran; Joan Reiss, a neurotic secretary; and Edith Pritchert and her son, a prim-and-proper patron of the arts. While their bodies lay crumpled on rubble of the broken Bevatron, their consciousnesses are whisked away to alternate universes created by each of the visitors.

In some ways, Dick was light years ahead of his time. Although the novel is obviously dated by references to McCarthyism, the challenges posed by each world couldn't be more apt for our modern times. The first world, created by Silvester, is a fundamentalist's dream, combining geocentric Christian and Islamic beliefs. Dick skewers both religions with one deft chapter, and the reference to Eye in the Sky has (among other parallels) a literal manifestation in Silvester's God. That's right, he's a big Eye of Sauron, so big that it looks like a gigantic lake.

Silvestri's world is either terrifying or hilarious, depending on your perspective. With the divine so intimately real, prayers manifest (one simply prays for money), God's wrath is always around the corner (transforming straying believers into hunchbacked damned souls), and science is a cult that nobody seriously practices. Dick shows just how capricious and dangerous an old Testament God would be, and the difficulty of navigating a modern world with such an omniscient presence.

And yet, Silvester's world has laws. Subsequent worlds range from the bizarre to the outright terrifying. Pritchet's world is one of absolute tranquility, a super-filter that causes anything offending Edith to disappear from existence. Again, Dick hits the mark: in the world of Tivo, the Internet, and politicized news channels, the ability to filter out dissenting opinions has become all too common. If it were literally true, Dick demonstrates how what might on the surface seem ideal rapidly descends into a very personal hell.

The next world is by far the most terrifying; If Mrs. Pritchet found everything offensive, Reiss is afraid of it all. The water is poisoned, houses literally try to eat you, and lurking inside every one of us is a cold, calculating insect just dying to burst free...

The final world brings us back to the crux of the conflict for Jack and Marsha - a Communist's view of what America must be like. The identity of the creator will ultimately determine if Marsha is guilty of being a Communist.

The book is not without its flaws. Dick comes off very much a political author who doesn't necessarily know the targets he skewers. A fight with angels devolves into a peculiar human-like brawl, with angels being kicked in the groin, skewered in the spleen with a hatpin (seriously), and otherwise being beaten up as if they were common thugs. No fundamentalist worth his bible would ever believe angels could be so easily defeated, much less beaten up.

Bill Laws, the African-American, is cast in a sympathetic light, but he has little to do. Laws never gets his own world and thus he seems more of a caricature, content only to chastise Jack on his own hypocrisy. Marsha comes off as whiny and self-centered, and her supposed interest in political causes makes her seem more like a suburban socialite with too much time on her hands than a believable advocate of human rights. And then there's Jack, who just comes off as an arrogant jerk most of the time.

And yet, Eye in the Sky is so far ahead of its time. Dick has set up a perfect series of foibles to demonstrate his own beliefs, and in doing so shows how we all barter our individual freedoms for religion (Silvester), peace (Pritchet), security (Reiss), and democracy.

Lovecraft

I was hooked on Lovecraft comics after picking up Fall of Cthulhu on a whim. I loved every frame.

That prompted me to hunt down other Cthulhu comics that, rather than retelling the same stories (which I'd much rather read in text form), added to the canon with their own bizarre tales. I discovered Yuggoth Cultures by Alan Moore; still reading through it, but really enjoying the stories.

So it was with no small measure of glee when I picked up Lovecraft, the Vertigo comic. Lovecraft details the life story of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a sad tale of a child prodigy who struggled with his potential. The comic merely adds a layer of the supernatural and bizarre over Lovecraft's own, which is a lot easier to do than one might think given that Lovecraft's father and mother were both committed and died in mental hospitals. By giving Lovecraft a dual life in the Dreamlands as Randolph Carter (a fact, as Lovecraft's "The Statement of Randolph Carter" was based on a transcription of one of his vivid dreams) and possession of the Necronomicon, we have a tale of one man against the unknown. Poor Lovecraft transforms from a struggling, brilliant author to a lone hero against the dark.

There are two components that are critical in bringing any Lovecraftian work to life. The first is, obviously, the depiction of the horrible things that gibber and meep in the darkness. Lovecraft's descriptions were always vague and alien, bordering on the indescribable, so artists must be willing to exercise their imaginations in what despicable things lurk beyond our perception. Artist Enrique Breccia does an admirable job with his watercolor-type panels. When grotesque monstrosities appear, they are blurry and smeared, as if difficult to perceive even by the reader. They are also suitably disturbing - tentacles appear from nether-regions, monsters violate Lovecraft's family in horrible ways, and overall one gets the sense that the gloves are off - in this modern day, it's possible to depict horror in all its ugly details in a fashion Lovecraft never dared.

The other important part of a Lovecraft comic is the depiction of terror. Lovecraft's stories are as much about contact with the alien as they are about the inability for the human mind to cope. Depicting madness and shrieking horror can be challenging for artists. Again, Breccia is more than capable, with grinning, vacant stares, bloody mouths, and lips peeled back in sheer revulsion.

There are elements that don't always work. I've been spoiled by Fall of Cthulhu, which uses vivid colors for the Dreamlands and cleaner artwork for the waking world. In Lovecraft, with Breccia's style throughout, the transition is sometimes unclear. And because all the artwork blurs, male characters sometimes look alike, making it difficult to distinguish who is who.

But those are minor quibbles. As a horrific retelling of Lovecraft's life, the graphic novel does an excellent job. Unfortunately, reality made it all too easy: insanity, depression, and death haunted the Lovecraft family.

And so the circle is complete; Lovecraft has become the horror he created. It makes for an entertaining and tragic read. Now that I know Lovecraft's background (both faux and real), all his stories are tinged with a bit of sadness.

Dragonfly

I met Fred Durbin at last year's World Fantasy Convention. I had the pleasure of hanging out with him for most of the con. He and I had never been to the convention before and didn't know anybody else. Fred's a great guy. I liked him so much that when he gave me a review copy of his book, I was terrified that I might not enjoy it.

I needn't have worried. Not only did I greatly enjoy Dragonfly, I'm in awe of Fred's writing ability. The novel is not merely an author coming up with a neat twist on an old idea. It's a literary piece of art, and it's clear that Fred is in love with the English language. He creates metaphors and weaves adjectives in such a beautiful fashion that it's almost distracting, as someone who respects the English language, to read Fred in action. He spins gold out every sentence...he's that good.

Dragonfly is about the encroachment of a Halloween town of nightmare-eaters on the real world. These beings, led by Sam Hain (look closely, you'll get it), include vampires, werewolves, witches and the walking dead. They're everything a child worries lurks under the bed or in the closet or behind a mirror. And truth be told, the bad guys really are that bad; child snatching, soul-stealing monsters who are unabashedly evil.

Our heroine, ten-year-old Dragonfly, visits her Uncle Henry's house only to discover that there's someone digging their way up from the basement. Henry summons an old ally named Mothkin and before long all three are embroiled in a struggle of live, love, death, and dreams.

Make no mistake: Fred's not pulling any punches. The bad guys do horrible things. People die. Our ten-year-old heroine suffers love and loss. Most refreshingly, Fred never portrays adults as complete morons who turn up their noses at superstitions. Every character has a life of his or her own and they fight to defend it, good and bad, with every breath.

It's a wonder that the book isn't more successful. Dragonfly is a novel waiting to be turned into a movie in this day and age of tween stories that are read by adults. My suspicion is there are two problems hindering the book: 1) The cover. The cover, while evocative, is busy. The owl in the top left seems more important than the two tiny figures in the middle, and the crazy plants to either side are a distraction. While this is technically an accurate depiction of the novel (the moon is especially important), it's simply not very enticing to a reader looking for spooky thrills. 2) I have no idea why this book is titled Dragonfly. When I think of dragonflies, I do not think of little girls battling the forces of nightmare. And truth be told, I never quite got why the main character is named Dragonfly. Perhaps it's just me and I missed why the protagonist is named Dragonfly...but nevertheless, the title of the book should never have been "Dragonfly." How about "Night of the Harvest Moon" with a scarier cover?

Don't let the title or the cover turn you off to this magnificent work. Fred's writing is on the level of Mervyn Peake's, only more approachable and less depressing. Any self-respecting fan of Halloween should give Dragonfly a chance.

Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

I bought Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, for research purposes. I'm writing a book about playing the "good guys" who hunt typical movie slashers, and this book seemed like a good introduction into how the ESCU works to catch the bad guys. What I got was something else entirely.

John Douglas is a very scary man. He's someone who has seen far too many horrific crimes, such that they affect him personally-when his kids scrape their knees, Douglas recounts tales of children torn in half by a murderer. When his wife cuts her finger with a kitchen knife, he points out how the spatter pattern would tell a story about what happened. Ultimately, this sort of exposure leads to a divorce and Douglas is upfront about the damage his profession did to his job.

The book starts out with Douglas in the hospital, the victim of being overworked and without enough manpower to help him. Near death, he recounts the creation of the ESCU and his struggles in making the profiling of serial killers (he invented the term) a legitimate profession. But it does not go into much detail as to how the ESCU works. In fact, it's more about Douglas and about the murderers themselves.

And what a ghastly rogues gallery it is! We have serial killers who invent vigilante groups to cover their tracks, we have killers who like to fly prostitutes out to woodlands and then hunt them down like deer, killers who believe God is telling them to kill people, and killers who strangle, rape, drown, and stab.

I read "Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies" at the same time and found an odd juxtaposition between the two books. Legacy of Blood states that the comfort of slasher flicks is that the bad guy is easily recognized by his disgusting appearance and his sudden attacks, when in reality serial killers often look like normal people and torture their victims for hours.

Not true, according to Mindhunter. Indeed, many of the killers are degenerate slimeballs, incapable of social contact and forced to use blitz-style attacks against the weak and helpless because of their inadequacies. Many have severe stutters, bad acne, or some other disfigurement. Nearly all have been abused in some fashion by their parents.

By now, the serial killer traits are well known: bed wetting, fire starting, and torturing small animals. But Douglas makes it clear that in every case, it's the child's upbringing that so horribly warps them to a life of murder. There are no strong role models to stop these children from turning into monsters; indeed, when children fall into the cracks, serial killers are what sometimes crawl out of them.

Unfortunately, exactly how Douglas comes to his conclusions is a lot like magic. Despite all of his attempts to legitimize what he does, his efforts amount to "and then magic happens!" Then Douglas comes up with a startling accurate profile. He never lets us know when he's wrong. That's a minor quibble with a book that I couldn't put down.

Mindhunter is as much a cautionary tale as it is a woeful biography of Douglas' life. Only one of the victims actually manages to turn the tables on their assailant. And in just about every other case, the killers were on murder sprees that lasted years with dozens of victims. As Douglas puts it, "sometimes the dragon wins."

As an author, this book gave me a host of ideas on how the good guys and the bad guys work. As a citizen of the United States, it gave me a new appreciation for the FBI. As a husband, it gave me a healthy regard for the mentally disturbed. A must read for anyone who wants to understand how to spot the dragons before they hatch.

Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

Tuxedo Park is a factual history lesson, in a vein similar to The Devil in the White City, only without the serial killer.

Tuxedo Park takes place a bit later, pre-World War II. It starts with the death of one of the scientists who used to visit Tuxedo Park, a veritable fortress of technology and leisure. The suicidal scientist posthumously published a fictionalized book about the goings on there and sold it as science fiction. It was so bizarre that of course, nobody suspected, although the primary subject of the novel, Alfred Loomis, knew better.

Alfred Loomis is the star of the story, a rich entrepreneur with an all-consuming, frightening intellect. He applies his own cold, nearly inhuman methodology to business and science and excels at both. Loomis is also charismatic and connects with people in a way that makes him irresistible. A veritable human whirlwind, he swept people up and sometimes left them broken and lost behind him, most notably his wife whom he tried to have committed and left for a younger woman.

Loomis invented electrocardiograms (those brainwave doohickeys that draw jagged lines as a patient sleeps) and radar and made fantastic leaps in refining the science of sonics and magnetics. If the book has a moral, it's that money brings freedom, and Loomis was the freest man on Earth. He developed what he wanted, hosted who he wanted, encouraged projects he felt had vision, and had enough influence to determine the course of events in World War II.

What's so striking is that the world needed Loomis. The author, Jennet Connant, makes striking connections that identify just how significant Loomis' contributions (and machinations) were in ensuring victory over the Axis powers. From the atom bomb to the British radar systems, Loomis' fingerprints are on them all. And it was through sheer force of will, coupled with his massive wealth that made things happen.

The book suffers from the same problems as Devil in the White City - some parts are more boring than others. It's entertaining to read about Loomis' inventions, but I had difficulty distinguishing between the various scientists. There are so many intellects that are hosted by Loomis that they start to run together; on the other hand, the book features a lot of familiar faces like Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and others. Still, the physics and complexities of the inventions, along with the internecine squabbling drag in some places.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the book is when one British physicist embarks on a journey to bring all the technological advances of Britain to America with just himself and a trunk full of highly classified documents and devices. The thought of what could happen to that trunk (and how it nearly gets lost a few times) is nerve wracking and the makings of an excellent short story or role-playing adventure. It's the kind of scenario that is usually considered to be bad form by a writer - but it really happened.

Fortunately for us, the trunk made its way safely to America. The book really picks up as the devices Loomis raced to invent are finally implemented in the war. And then, when the action finally gets going, the book is over. There is definitely a feeling of the passing of something great that people could only look at indirectly and never touch - just like the intentional destruction of the Chicago World's Fair, Loomis Tuxedo Park is abandoned, his "rad lab" of scientists disbanded, only to backstab each other during McCarthy's "Un-American" committees. Worse, Loomis' divorce left his family sharply divided - like all things, Loomis treated his relationships with an intellectual clarity that was less a romance and more calculated odds. When Loomis felt his wife was not measuring up, she was discarded along with his other failed experiments. It dims, but cannot diminish completely, Loomis' personality.

Tuxedo Park is an impressive achievement. It manages to record the origin of the American scientist, the belief that technology is inherently good, and sharply frames the slow, lumbering bureaucracies that run everything from medical achievements to military advancements. In comparison, Loomis and his teams are breathtakingly nimble at a time when the world needed speed and decisive action most. It is an important part of history and a sharp reminder that rich men, should they choose, could do great good or terrible harm. Loomis was that rare combination of brilliance and wealth that creates freedom - an aberration not likely to be seen again in my lifetime.

If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor

Just in case my biases weren't clear up front, I'm a big fan of the Evil Dead series (Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness) and by proxy, the gents who worked on it (the Raimi brothers and Bruce Campbell). Bruce is known as THE MAN by fans. Watch Evil Dead 2 and you'll understand.

This is not to say that everything Bruce produces is gold. Indeed, he's slogged through a lot of crap to get where he is. Unfortunately, where Bruce is at this time does not involved huge piles of money, and if the returns on Bubba Ho-Tep are any indication, it's not going to happen any time soon.

But as Bruce would say - so what? If Chins Could Kill gives us an insight into Bruce's philosophy on life and his long, hard struggle from Michigan to Hollywood and back again. I was able to identify with much of Bruce's childhood because my wife grew up in the same area and I lived there for three years. Heck, I went to Michigan State University too (where Sam and Bruce first aired "The Happy Valley Kid").

That said, this book is a breezy read, chopped into chapters only as long as they need to be. Bruce talks about his life in such a way that you suspect he's not telling you everything - certainly, most of the personal stuff is left out except for the divorce from his wife. Even that is vague. Bruce wants us to think he's a well-meaning doofus, but he seems too shrewd and committed to his craft to have just stumbled into his career.

Fans who are familiar with the Evil Dead commentaries will find some of the recollections repetitive. Yeah, we all know about the locals who stole the power saw but not the thousand-dollar camera, or the Ram-O-Cam, or the reaction fans had to Evil Dead. On the other hand, there are little gems hidden here and there, most specifically when Bruce encounters a fox (the animal) and plays with it in the afternoon sun for a few hours. That chapter seems to sum up Bruce: a good-natured fellow who is nevertheless capable of taking advantage of the right situations at the right time.

Bruce's voice comes through in the narration, sometimes so informally that it's difficult to follow. He will often reference an acquaintance without any backstory and then talk about someone else in the next sentence. There's also a lot of pictures with supposedly funny captions - they're not that funny and since they're all in black-and-white, they're all very fuzzy. On the other hand, the (we can only presume) actual emails of various fans that start of each chapter are hysterical.

When Bruce isn't talking about his life (and some of the book does talk about his life, despite Bruce's disclaimer), he talks about the movie industry in a way that's valuable and informative. Here, we learn about movie etiquette, about movie stars who suck (hint: Tom Arnold) and just how capricious the casting process is.

Finally, the book has an addendum covering Bruce's "Chins Across America" tour. As a regular convention attendee myself, this part of the book was by far the most entertaining. It's also the least edited. Still, the fans are at least as entertaining as Bruce himself, and given that Bruce has worked in a variety of genres (fantasy, horror, westerns) his fan base is quite diverse.

Ultimately, Bruce's book is like his movies - it's a little rough around the edges but charming because of it.

The Thing: A Novel

The Thing has gone through some interesting evolution from its original story, "Who Goes There?" In Who Goes There?, 30+ men working at a Cosmic Ray facility in the Antarctic discover, well, a thing. And that thing is part disease, part animal, part predator. It's a mimic that can replicate any form. And it has a desire to propagate. If it escapes from the facilities in the frozen wasteland, it will spread to humanity and ultimately take over every living thing in the world, all of them part of the original creature.

I had the privilege of reading the short story, the novelization, and watching the movie all within the span of a few days, so the differences and similarities were fresh in my mind. There are quite a few significant changes between the book and the movie, and the short story and the book.

Did I mention the men have cattle down in some weird storage facility? Cattle? I get the impression the original author never visited an Antarctic facility -- but hey, that's why it's called science fiction.

The short story is much more about the paranoia of men cooped up in close quarters, than about the alien itself. Everyone's too damn jovial -- they smirk and grin about everything even in the face of danger. It's all very pulpy too -- McReady is a "bronze god." He's strong, he's smart, and gosh darn it, everybody likes him!

In the short story, combat is so brief that in one case, it took several readings to recognize the men had attacked another transformed Thing. They "do their work" -- that sums up over a dozen men hacking a Thing to bits.

On the other hand, a lot of questions that I've seen on web sites dedicated to The Thing are explained. Do you know if you're a Thing? Yes, according to the short story. In fact, The Thing is telepathic -- that's how it can gain instant knowledge of everything about a person and imitate them so well. It also explains how the Thing is always one step ahead of the men in the movie.

I like to think of the short story as a summary of what happened to the Norwegians.

The novelization, extrapolated from the original script of the film, is one of those rare books that's better than the movie. There are less characters than the short story, but they react much more realistically. They are all seriously flawed (far more than the morons from Who Goes There?). Most importantly, the presence of guns heighten the tension.

The novelization makes the movie make more sense. Most specifically, the dogs don't run away from the Thing -- they attack it. This changes everything. The dogs become infected and run off, only to be chased by McReady and Childs. It's a shame the scene wasn't included -- it gives a hint of just what the Thing can do. It also explains how the Thing can be so large (another FAQ about Things).

One character (was it Saunders?) uses his roller skates to race for his life against the Thing as it plows behind him, only to get trapped in the bathroom and ultimately kill himself with a sharpened piece of wood.

There's a lot more discussion, but I understand why much of it was cut down. There's also better emphasis in the movie than in the book -- HOW the actors say their lines changes everything.

The most important discovery is that the Thing takes ONE HOUR to change into something else. This simple number changes the entire tone of the book. With a hard and fast rule, the character's paranoia and reactions are tempered by the knowledge that they have time on their side. Very different from the movie.

If you're a fan of the movie, buy the book.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

I originally learned about Guns, Germs, and Steel on the RPG.net forums. It sounded like an excellent book to ground a Game Master or an author on world-building. So I put it on my wish list and last Christmas I received it as a gift. It took me this long to finish reading it, and I'm the better for it.

But I put it down after reading one chapter into it. The author, Jared Diamond, explains on page 19 that racist explanations are "loathsome, but also...wrong. Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking." Then he turns around and states, "...modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples. Displaying his bias up front, Diamond states on page 21, "in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up."

There's a few problems with Diamond's arguments, not the least of which is that he spends two pages arguing a point that he has no means of scientifically proving. This is ironic, given his last chapter that talks about a scientific approach to history. It's also telling that Diamond has but one source mentioned in his notes for his argument that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners.

On its surface, I don't object to Diamond's bias. It does however, taint his entire argument. It's difficult to take Diamond seriously when he devotes an entire book proving that one society's domination of another is not inherently racist but determined by a wide variety of other factors - but oh yeah, New Guineans are genetically superior. It's like listening to a priest and a die-hard atheist argue - the two are so diametrically polarized, it's difficult to consider either argument as objective.

So I put the book down and it sat on my shelf for two months. Then I decided to give Diamond another chance, because some of what he said was intriguing. To whit, Diamond provides evidence that societies excel because of a combination of geographic and societal factors.

For example, farming societies can produce more food per square foot than hunting societies. Hunters have to expend energy to carry their children, so too many hinders the tribe. Farmers can stay put and reproduce as well as feed more mouths. As time goes on, farming societies can support politicians. Politicians are better at waging war and organizing peoples than hunters, who will often leave the area and move on to a less dangerous location.

Farmers also coexist with domesticated animals. Of particular relevant for world builders are the attributes that make an animal useful for domestication, including diet (food must be easily available), growth rate (they must grow quickly enough to be productive), breed in captivity, benign disposition, not prone to panic, and social structure (herd or pack mentalities allow humans to take roles in the domesticated animals' structure). Animals are important for another reason - by coexisting with them, humans are exposed to a wider variety of diseases earlier than hunters. This is how Europeans ended up plaguing North and South Americans.

Geographically, he east-west axis of a continent allows cultures to travel easier across similar terrain as opposed to a north-south continent, which will have a wider variety of climates. This in turn makes it easier to carry foodstuffs and farming.

On the opposite extreme, unified societies can be a hindrance. China fell behind modern societies even though it led the world in chemistry, clockworks, exploration, and warfare - all because the ruling classes passed laws to prohibit their development. Conversely, Europe's fragmentation was ripe enough in its diversity to allow good ideas to eventually flourish.

Diamond's overview is breathtaking in its breadth and a critical part of our education system. It should be in every child's school texts. It helps dispel, once and for all, the racist notions that pervade common views of history - if only Diamond could keep his own biases out of the book.