The Last Batch of 2022 Books
Dec. 30th, 2022 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroSuper Power, Spoony Bards and Silverware by Dominic Arsenault - Are you expecting a fond nostalgic look at the SNES Era? Too bad, because Nintendo's policies were bad and the technological improvements were lies and Sega won the console wars really after all. If you're a business school student who wants to become an executive at Sony, this is a good academic examination and explanation of what Nintendo did during the SNES Era. If you're a fan? Oh, it's not for you. I ended up skimming most of it.
Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson – Amusingly, I got a physical copy of this, and then it ended up in a Humble Bundle I otherwise wanted before I’d even had a chance to read it. For someone who is clearly on the side of “Arneson was robbed,” Peterson doesn’t actually make Arneson look particularly good. The man apparently couldn’t finish a project to save his life and seems to have spent the majority of his time railing against Gygax and ignoring deadlines for his big-dream projects. Meanwhile, this book builds Gygax up as the evil genius at financial engineering and greedy profiteering (who gets brilliantly out-maneuvered in the end), when it’s clear from what’s presented that Gygax was a mediocre businessman at best and just managed to get (and take) good short-term advice for profiting off his business…and then his luck ran out.
The “steam tunnels” episode does manage to present the most important factor that the popular media at the time ignored: The police didn’t know shit and were grasping at straws. I’m reminded of a story my dad told about the “Son of Sam” killer who used block capital lettering in his missives. The police thought he might have been a comic book letterer because they knew literally nothing about comic book lettering (and one look at the handwriting by professionals shut down that avenue of investigation). The D&D “connection” to the steam tunnels story made for great headlines, but its entire basis was idiot police speculating about something they knew nothing about.
Anyway, this book is clearly deeply-researched (and heavily cited) and it’s as detailed a play-by-play as there could be given that the principal actors are all dead. It was an interesting historical record to me, especially as it ends in 1984 when Gygax was forced out of TSR, and I didn’t get into D&D until the early 90s. Frank Mentzer (who I met at a con years ago and was very impressed by) and Zeb Cook (who wrote the majority of the material that really got me into the hobby) both come off well, so that’s nice.
The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian ed. Michael A. Ventrella - This is a paperback celebration of one of the most widely-renowned terrible fantasy stories of all time, including some history, a reprinting of the original, an annotated retyping of the original, and a half-dozen sequel stories by other authors. Annoyingly, they republished the original Eye of Argon scans in a small, almost unreadable format given the form-factor of the book. The retyped story faithfully reproduces the various spelling, grammar and typographical errors, though the commentary and corrections on the facing pages is a little lighter than I would have hoped for. (Given that they dedicated so much space to it, I wanted fewer spelling corrections and more discussion.) The sequel stories are a mixed bag, as is often the case, with a few of them successfully mimicking the style of the original while managing to be entertaining; and several just pilling into too many spelling errors and malapropisms to actually be fun to read. Because when you get right down to it, if Jim Theis had an editor and copyeditor, “The Eye of Argon” would be a perfectly fine but forgettable Conan-clone story. The reason that it works is because it’s just bad enough to be entertaining, rather than plain awful.
Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson – Amusingly, I got a physical copy of this, and then it ended up in a Humble Bundle I otherwise wanted before I’d even had a chance to read it. For someone who is clearly on the side of “Arneson was robbed,” Peterson doesn’t actually make Arneson look particularly good. The man apparently couldn’t finish a project to save his life and seems to have spent the majority of his time railing against Gygax and ignoring deadlines for his big-dream projects. Meanwhile, this book builds Gygax up as the evil genius at financial engineering and greedy profiteering (who gets brilliantly out-maneuvered in the end), when it’s clear from what’s presented that Gygax was a mediocre businessman at best and just managed to get (and take) good short-term advice for profiting off his business…and then his luck ran out.
The “steam tunnels” episode does manage to present the most important factor that the popular media at the time ignored: The police didn’t know shit and were grasping at straws. I’m reminded of a story my dad told about the “Son of Sam” killer who used block capital lettering in his missives. The police thought he might have been a comic book letterer because they knew literally nothing about comic book lettering (and one look at the handwriting by professionals shut down that avenue of investigation). The D&D “connection” to the steam tunnels story made for great headlines, but its entire basis was idiot police speculating about something they knew nothing about.
Anyway, this book is clearly deeply-researched (and heavily cited) and it’s as detailed a play-by-play as there could be given that the principal actors are all dead. It was an interesting historical record to me, especially as it ends in 1984 when Gygax was forced out of TSR, and I didn’t get into D&D until the early 90s. Frank Mentzer (who I met at a con years ago and was very impressed by) and Zeb Cook (who wrote the majority of the material that really got me into the hobby) both come off well, so that’s nice.
The Eye of Argon and the Further Adventures of Grignr the Barbarian ed. Michael A. Ventrella - This is a paperback celebration of one of the most widely-renowned terrible fantasy stories of all time, including some history, a reprinting of the original, an annotated retyping of the original, and a half-dozen sequel stories by other authors. Annoyingly, they republished the original Eye of Argon scans in a small, almost unreadable format given the form-factor of the book. The retyped story faithfully reproduces the various spelling, grammar and typographical errors, though the commentary and corrections on the facing pages is a little lighter than I would have hoped for. (Given that they dedicated so much space to it, I wanted fewer spelling corrections and more discussion.) The sequel stories are a mixed bag, as is often the case, with a few of them successfully mimicking the style of the original while managing to be entertaining; and several just pilling into too many spelling errors and malapropisms to actually be fun to read. Because when you get right down to it, if Jim Theis had an editor and copyeditor, “The Eye of Argon” would be a perfectly fine but forgettable Conan-clone story. The reason that it works is because it’s just bad enough to be entertaining, rather than plain awful.
