Word: disks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...authors who are collaborating with computer software companies in adapting their novels to "interactive fiction," an electronic form of literature that transforms the reader into an active participant in the plot. A version of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is available in interactive form on a floppy disk (Telarium; $39.95). Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man) has actually created a software work from scratch: Amazon (Telarium; $39.95), which transports the player and a sidekick parrot named Paco into the jungles of South America in search of a lost city and hidden emeralds. Infocom, the Cambridge-based...
...verbs. The improved parser permits players to display their literary bent by using more complex commands. Zork I, for instance, will respond to more expansive instructions (example: pick up the rusty knife and put it in the sack). Partly as a result, Zork I became the best-selling disk-based game of all time (500,000 copies...
...public taste. McCarthy treated her Ivy maidens with defoliating wit; Segal bastes his Harvard yardbirds with sophomore-level prose: "The athletic season culminated with the many confrontations against Yale" and "While it was arguable that his interpretation of the complete Beethoven piano concerti was the best thing put on disk during the previous twelve months, it was indisputable that his publicity campaign was nonpareil...
...loose rains of comets at the necessary intervals. The result of their calculations: a planet with an orbital plane that slowly rotates around the sun, completing its cycle once every 56 million years. Twice during that cycle, every 28 million years, Planet X's orbit carries it through a disk of comets lying just beyond Neptune, dislodging many of them...
Like Dylan, Thompson has the rarely found depth that allows him to appeal to your sympathy one minute and kick you in the balls the next. No song on this new disk exemplifies this better than the first one, "When The Spell Is Broken." The minor chords issuing from Thompson's twangy, vibrettoed guitar rumble and lament like a Scottish funural dirge, and his solo swoops gracefully and reverently around them. The words, though, are pure vitriol, worthy of an especially pissed-off Dylan or a younger Graham Parker. The extremity of its despair makes this song frightening, with appropriately...