Month: November 2024

I don’t know where I came up with this book–I have three such titles in the Red Gloves series, which is not a series with the same characters but rather different Christmas-themed books which Kingsbury wrote to raise money for some charitable organization. After a Christmas-themed trivia night where we led all night only to lose in the final round to a team using “mulligans” for free points (which we do not as we are trivia night purists), I thought I would pick this book up for my Christmas novel this year since I knew where it was–atop the bookshelves in the office.

So: Earl was a family man who enjoyed Christmas with his wife and daughter and his parents and siblings, but he was not a believer. His wife and daughter are killed on their way to or from church, and Earl goes into a downward spiral until he’s homeless for five years when the book begins. He’s trying to be heartless, and the only things he cares about are the red gloves his wife made him (I get the sense red gloves are a motif that all the books will share). When they’re stolen, Earl starts thinking about ending it all.

Meanwhile, Gideon is an eight-year-old girl living with leukemia whose parents are living hand-to-mouth. The mother is working two jobs, and the father is only getting 12 hours a week at “the mill,” but that allows him to take his daughter to the doctor and whatnot. Gideon goes into remission long enough to move the plot forward, which is that she wants to help serve at “the mission” (her parents volunteer a lot even though they’re poor). Where she meets Earl and wants to make him believe again, so she gives him a present which he eventually opens–and it’s the red gloves! Which she bought at a second hand shop since the thief sold them or something?

At any rate, she gets sick again, and it’s dire, but Earl believes now, and it turns out he’s a rich homeless man who pays for her bone marrow transplant and reconciles with his family. And finis!

Oh, and the book has a wrapper story thirteen years later at Gideon’s wedding, so a lot of possible suspense is lost. But I guess you’re not reading this for suspense.

So it was a quick read–I ploughed through the 146 pages in an evening–but.

I mean, it’s not my first Christmas novel, so I know to expect a bit of unreality, some magic or divine intervention, but this book, this short story or novella, really, made me raise my eyebrow. I mean, the experience of the homeless guy–let’s be honest, I can too easily picture myself in that situation, as the whole year I have known my job situation was tenuous and my continued employability questionable and knowledge of the cash flow situation led me to conclude that if I lost my wife and kids and job, I would be in a perilous situation indeed–but this homeless guy has both his parents alive in a single household and one or more siblings, and he has a big payout from the accident that claimed his wife and kid, and he lived with his parents for a while after, but then he gave that all up to just live on the streets in a different city. I mean, that seems…. contrived. I don’t know. Perhaps I was just disappointed in the character whose path to homelessness did not involve having no money and no family.

Also, the father is only working 12 hours a week at “the mill”? What is he doing there, and what kind of shift or shifts is that? A single twelve hour shift? Two sixes? Is he a part time janitor or food service worker? It just clangs.

And the remission of the little girl lasting just long enough to make the events of the book happen…. Eh.

I get the sense that I am going to be harsher on these books than others–I’ve already started the next one I have of the series, and I’ve already encountered my first Oh, really? in the first chapter. But my beautiful wife, who has read many Karen Kingsbury books, asked me if this was the one with the homeless guy and said it was not one of her better books. So after ploughing through these three Christmas novellas, I won’t necessarily shun any other Kingsbury books I find on my to-read shelves. Unless the next two are also rather Oh, really?

I guess it has been seven years that this book has floated near the top of the paperbacks stacked horizontally on the broken bookshelves as I bought it and some others in Branson in 2017. What, I have not repaired or replaced those bookshelves which broke ten years ago? Ah, gentle reader, no. And probably not soon given our current lack of means of visible support.

So this book is a bit of pure rocket-jockey stuff like you would get out of vintage Heinlein. Pournelle extrapolated a world from the middle 1970s which is strangely not so hard to extrapolate from ours: The government has become paternalistically totalitarian, but it lets juveniles commit crimes without consequences. Universities are overbooked and overadministrated into Kafkaesque hellscapes. The best the students can hope for is a union job that will get them out of the squalid megacities. Meanwhile, a couple of entrepreneurs and corporations fancy themselves the saviors of humanity want to mine asteroids. In this world, Kevin, a university engineering student accidentally kills a juvie gang member as they plan to rob him and/or torture him to death. As the gang’s attacks escalate and police are powerless, Kevin discovers some of his credits won’t transfer, so he would have to attend two extra years of college if he survived.

But he’s put in touch with an outfit that can employ him on Ceres, the asteroid, so he heads out with an attractive young woman, and adventures ensue including intrigue as to who might be trying to keep them from reaching Ceres and why and what to do when they get there.

I flagged a couple of things: In one spot, a computer nerd pets a simple computer and says he’ll teach it to play Star Trek–which is fresh in mind because I read about it in 50 Years of Text Games (and I remember playing the Commodore 64 port back in the 1980s). I also flagged a spot where a man in his fifties was described as elderly; clearly, that’s from the perspective of a college student–Pournelle himself could not have held that view as he was 45 when the book came out.

I also noted that the last page was an ad for a play-by-mail game called StarWeb; 50 Years of Text Games also mentioned play-by-mail games, so I was familiar with it. Apparently, StarWeb lived on until 2021 at least (its Web site looks like it might now be defunct, but the page for StarWeb says it was updated in 2004 and probably didn’t need updating after that). Still, it intersects with what I’ve been reading, partly because I’m elderly and because I read old books and books about old things.

At any rate, a nice little read amidst all the other things I’m reading. You know, I did not really read much Pournelle when I was younger. I guess when I went through science fiction phases, I was getting Del Rey paperbacks-in-library-binding and then the big names. And Pournelle wasn’t really on the pantheon. Which is unfortunate, as I think I would have enjoyed them. I’ll pick them up as I come across them, though.

Ah, gentle reader, this certainly might be the most I’ve paid for a reading book so far. I mean, maybe I spent a similar amount on Homage to Catalonia when I bought it last year or The Gallic and Civil Wars when I bought it in 2014. But since I didn’t write down the exact price I paid for the books (and I’m too lazy to dig out the receipts because of course I still have them), I will just say that this is the most expensive set of books I’ve ever bought for reading since I backed the publication on Kickstarter for $125 (back in the days when I had a job and spent money on things like this and CDs by bands I’d only seen in a single YouTube video). To date, this is the only Kickstarter project I’ve backed. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

So, you say, “What is it?” Well, it is a long (623 pages including index) semi-scholarly look at the history of text-based games. It has a bit of a roll-up chapter leading to 1971, and then it has a chapter that gives a summary of the history of each decade (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s). It then selects a single game from each year in each decade and gives a well-researched and written essay on that game not unlike you’d find on a Substack like The Lake of Lerna or The Librarian of Calaeno when they delve into popular culture or something you might have found on DamnInteresting.com back in the day (it looks like that site is still around, albeit more into podcasting these days–as you might remember, gentle reader, I tried out for that site in 2006). The essays touch upon the history of companies working in the space (Infocom, natch, but a couple of others), the technologies behind them (not only in discussing at a high level the parsers and whatnot but also including some sample code or data file extracts), and some of the people behind the games.

So, heck, yeah, it was quite a nostalgia kick. For a while. Because I played a number of the games listed in the first two or three decades if you include things ported to the Commodore 64 (I had a Commodore 128, gentle reader, but I downloaded a lot of things from BBSes for the Commodore 64).

I mean, I played Eliza. I played Super Star Trek. I played many Infocom titles–I still have Zork, Zork II, Suspended, and Deadline not in the original packaging but later folder packages. I played TradeWars 2001 on several WWIV BBSes (and I actually have downloaded the source code for TradeWars 2002 and have it somewhere around here). The latest of the games listed by name (but not covered in depth) that I played would have been Gemstone Warrior 3 around 1997–I remember introducing it to a friend from the print shop at the time, and he got into it, but his dialup access was long distance, so it amongst other things led to his declaring bankruptcy sometime shortly thereafter. After that, I didn’t really play games but the Civilization series past that (and up to now, as you know).

But:

One, as text games faded from the forefront, it seems to have become more of a community, with its proponents, academics, and development of games to satisfy the community more than the public. Many of the selections in this book are explicated more because they’re interesting to someone steeped in the culture of text games. Kind of like how art criticism and art itself in many cases has turned inward, pleasing artists and critics more than the public at large. It doesn’t make the essays about the games less interesting per se but it does make one wonder. Often, I read two or three chapters/years of essays in this vein and then got a chapter about an interesting game that was interesting to read about in itself.

Second, well, the book does have its political moments. I mean, it does talk a lot and choose several queer games (his word as he is academically minded), and it does celebrate/elevate trans and nonbinary representation. It made me muse about the nature of outsider community–in my day (sonny), playing on computers and reading comic books and science fiction and fantasy were an outsider community, whereas today, that is mainstream pop culture–so do people who consider themselves outsiders gravitate toward the current self-reinforcing outsider communities that trans and nonbinary life (and, somehow, certain political viewpoints which are almost 50% of the electorate apparently)? That’s outside the scope of this book and this blog. But back to the actual political elements: It gets all the way to 1985’s chapter on Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging before slagging on Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump (president when the book was written, and soon to be president again). And not just slagging, but vituperating. And we get more sucker punch vituperation in the chapter on AI Dungeon because Trump is a lying liar who lies!!!!! (my words, but the spirit is there). For the most part, the book is even-tempered in its disposition, but the little political slaps are there, unfortunately. Also, GamerGate gets a couple of relitigations from the defense of the gamewriter who slept with game reviewers (or something), although that’s not the crux of the matter as it’s presented: it’s mouthbreathers who buy games versus the community (of text game writers and perhaps only those who think correctly).

One does wonder, though, if the author was just too darn young to realize how much Hitler George W. Bush was, too. Is it just me, or does he get overlooked in the pantheon of the worst presidents EVAR!!!!? Millenials filling the Internet are too young to remember, I guess.

Overall, though, those two bits only slightly diminished my enjoyment of the book, although I have to admit that I really got more out of the earlier years where I had first hand experience of the games. Heck, I can even see in my mind’s eye the advertisements for some of them. I could probably re-read the ads and the reviews in my stash of mid-to-late 1980s Commodore magazines (Run and Power Play which would become Commodore Magazine and Ahoy! and maybe Compute’s Gazette). I flagged a sidebar note about Little Computer People–I still have a copy with Bradley, my Little Computer Person, on it. I flagged his mention of a book called Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow, a book about a guy who got obsessed with the Atari game Breakout!. Man, I picked that up used or remaindered around 1990 and read it. When the book was less than 10 years old (I was there, Gandalf). But it seemed twee to me at the time because technology had changed so much in that decade.

As I got in on a mid or upper tier of the Kickstarter, I got a shorter companion volume entitled 50 Years of Text Games: Further Explorations which has another couple of games called out and brief essays on some text-adjacent game genres. It’s only 57 pages including a timeline of text adventure games at the end, but it’s a nice contiuation of the book. And I counted it as a whole book in my annual total (82 so far, and I’m feeling good–I might make it all the way if I start ripping through some poetry collections).

At any rate, a nice nostalgia trip despite clear signs that the author would vigorously and probably unkindly disagree with my political views.

And it really makes me want to unbox one of my Commodore 64s and run through some of these games that I was not patient enough to appreciate when I was fourteen. Only to discover that I am probably still not patient enough for Suspended.

I bought this book in Davenport, Iowa, last month, and the author signed it for me. He was the only author at a cybersecurity convention, and his table took the whole end of the single cul-de-sac of the vendor area. He has a lot of books available, including three in this series, and several other multi-volume series to choose from and a couple of one-offs. That many quells my temptation to buy one of each, so I bought the first two in a couple of series and a one-off Western. I was tempted to buy a children’s book, briefly, but I remembered then with a start that my children are too old for children’s books. As they’re old enough to carry phones to high school and college now (what?), they’re too old for books as all their handheld entertainment comes from what tech companies feed them.

So: I picked this book up first because it has a mystery element to it. A mining company re-opens a mine three years after an accident claimed the lives of all the miners in a particular sector. Because it’s a profitable mine, they reopen it with some questions in place and with maybe a ghost in the old sector. The book starts with a new miner, Justin, coming to the planet with his friend Keontae. Justin vomits on re-entry, embarrassing himself in front of an attractive woman and the mine’s bully and his buddies.

Meanwhile, strange things are afoot at the Circle K. A hacker is lured into the mine and disappears. When Justin is out of his quarters at night, a mysterious green light leads him into the mines and the mysterious Sector 6 which is still closed. And the cold, half-cyborg (can one be half-cyborg? One is either a cyborg or not, I guess) a FULL cyborg scientist who was the only survivor three years ago brings Justin into a conspiracy. And Justin cannot keep from running afoul of security for the mining corporation and the bullies at the mine.

So the book has a lot of interesting plot getting set up, and then….

Well, I won’t be ordering the next two in the series.

The writing is a bit…. sterile, I guess. It’s not bad writing. It’s not full of grammar errors or misspellings or anything, but it lacks depth and soul.

I had been reading a book about text games for a while when I started this book, so I perhaps too easily compared the first part of the book to a text adventure, with the way it mapped out the mining complex and described entrances and exits and things that might be useful (the last is probably more in how I was reading the book after weeks of reading about text adventures). The main character, Justin, is a bit of a cipher–we don’t know from where he’s coming and going, and the plot carries him along as he mostly follows the mysterious light or follows the actions or guidance of others (NPCs) in the book. About half way through the book, though, it turns from slow text adventure mapping and buildup to watching someone else’s Twitch stream of a Doom knock-off. We have a party led by space marines but which includes the main character (now with a cybernetic arm), a few of the named miners with a couple sentences’ of characterization, the CEO of the corporation who was compelled to come in person to the mine, a couple members of corporate security, and the CEO’s body guard go marching through ranks of bloodthirsty mutated corporate minions and murderous androids. A couple, and that is more than one twists of family melodrama, too, amidst all the gore and finis via a deus ex machina whose twist I’d spotted early on. And beyond the finis a bit of a…. well, not cliffhanger, but a tip to the mystery and the twist that might come in the next book.

The author signed it “Read this with the lights on!” along with Joshua 1: 5-9 (in which God tells Joshua to be courageous). To be honest, it was not that suspenseful. Oh, and the last line is:

And Justin never saw her again.

Easy, son. You’re not Raymond Chandler. None of us is.

So: I mean, it’s okay. But too much influenced by video games and related cinema. The third person narration doesn’t give us a lot of depth to any of the characters.

The book is seven years old; I’m not sure where it came in this writer’s cannon-like canon (best I can tell from his bio is that he started around 2009 and by 2019 had about ten books, so it’s not that early). Still, he’s clearly comfortable in writing and his output, so who am I to criticize? Given that he looks to work the con circuit in the Midwest, I might run into him again sometime. And perhaps I’ll pick up the next book in the series.