Arrol Gellner and Douglas Keister
This is a nicely illustrated book about the history of travel trailers from their birth in the teens and twenties up through the early sixties. The text isn’t, frankly, all that absorbing, but the lush color photographs - which owe as much to dedicated restorers as they do to the photographer - more than make up for it.
Harry Turtledove
Turtledove once again rises above his usual level in this sequel to “Days of Infamy“. In his Japanese-occupied Hawaii, civilians are hungry and brutalized, while POWs are worked to death or killed outright. The novel concentrates on the American attempt to retake the islands. It suffers from the author’s inability to give the reader the big picture while he’s writing about a military campaign but the reader does care about the characters - something that can’t be said of many of Turtledove’s books.
Economist Edward Castronova “was, by his own account, an academic failure” when he made a career-changing observation: the synthetic worlds of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) might be imaginary, but their economies are real. Moreover, those worlds interact with the real world, both economically and in other ways. The paper that resulted from his observation, “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier” made a huge splash.
The paper also changed Castronova’s life. He’s now Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Telecommunications of Indiana University. From that post he continues researching and writing about synthetic worlds. This book is the result.
“Synthetic Worlds” is an academic work. In other words, it’s a bit dry, though Castronova does manage to give it the personal touch. It will interest the reader who is interested in MMORPGs as businesses, markets, or social “places”. In addition to observations on the games themselves, he talks about how they interact - and might interact - with the real world. For example: people buy and sell game goods in the real world, does this mean that a theft in the synthetic world is a real-world crime?
Castronova writes about who plays the games and why, a more diverse crowd with more varied motivations than you might suspect. People who respond to the very idea of MMORPGs with “get a life!” might be surprised that the unspoken response from their players is “we did, and it’s more fun than yours”.
Not only is this an interesting book, it may prove to be an important book about the worlds where more and more people are spending more and more of their time.
John Birmingham
In this, the second novel a series about a 21st century fleet dumped into the 1940s, we learn that the Axis powers have obtained a few modern weapons, that technology alone isn’t enough to win wars, and that the protagonists have almost as much to fear from J. Edgar Hoover as they do from the Germans and Japanese. Brimingham continues to deliver on the promise of his strong start (the first volume, “Weapons of Choice“); I’m looking forward the next book in the series.
