A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2018 Del Rey Books/Random House and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On Tuesday, September 4, Random House’s science fiction/fantasy imprint Del Rey Books published Solo: A Star Wars Story – Expanded Edition, a novelization of director Ron Howard’s 2018 film about the early adventures of a young Han Solo, a Wookiee named Chewbacca, and the roguish gambler and starship owner Lando Calrissian in the years before Han’s involvement with the Rebellion against the Empire. Written by author/podcaster Mur Lafferty ( Six Wakes, I Should Be Writing ), Solo: A Star Wars Story is based on the screenplay and screen story by the father-son team of Lawrence Kasdan ( Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark ) and Jon Kasdan ( Indiana Jones V ). It is a relatively faithful adaptation of the Kasdans’ story, but – as with all of the other Star Wars novels based on the Saga Trilogies and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – Lafferty’s Solo contains material that was left out of th

A Mk. 48 ADCAP torpedo is about to make a Soviet Kresta II cruiser's day very, very bad in this screenshot from a session of Red Storm Rising.  (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd. I've owned quite a few personal computers since the mid-1980s. My first one, an Apple II, was a gift from my late father's older brother Sixto; I remember it fondly because, you know, it was my first real computer. It was the most expensive of all the PCs; with its Imagewriter II printer and color monitor, it cost my uncle $2100 plus whatever the sales tax was in 1987. It was not my first choice; the computer that I'd really wanted to get was a Macintosh, but when my uncle asked the sales rep at Computer Village how much that one cost, the reply was a cool $3200. My uncle said that was a bit too pricey, so I ended up with an Apple II, which was my second choice. (I already used them in my college campus' Apple Lab, so I was familiar with them and liked them well enough.

Actual screen shot from my first session of Crusade in Europe since 1994. Back in the late 1980s, before I acquired my first MS-DOS-based PC, I owned an Apple IIe that I received from my father's brother, Sixto Diaz-Granados, as a gift. I was in college and majoring in journalism then, so I mostly used my Apple for school-related projects such as ENC-2301 essays, articles for the student newspaper, and term papers for the courses that required them.  But even though academic work was my primary focus, I'd be lying if I said I didn't play computer games on my Apple computer. Being young and with not much of a social life, I was, at least for a while, a bit of a gamer while I was in college and even for a few years after that. In my previous post on the topic of gaming and MicroProse's Crusade in Europe , I wrote about how much I enjoyed military-themed strategy games and simulations when I had my Apple IIe. Sure, I also attempted to play games from other g

(C) 1995 Bantam Spectra and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  "Mos Eisley Spaceport," says Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker as they stand on a mesa overlooking the Tatooine metropolis in a transition scene in Episode IV. "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be careful." Of all the many eye-catching and memorable sequences in Star Wars (aka Episode IV: A New Hope ), the fateful meeting between Luke Skywalker, Ben Kenobi, and a pair of smugglers with a starship for hire is perhaps the most intriguing. It's not only important dramatically or even as far as the change in the film's pacing goes (from this point on, there will be chases, shootouts, rescues, and battles), it's also visually intriguing. The dim lighting, the tense atmosphere, all those aliens, and, of course, that funky cantina band playing Benny Goodman-like tunes. Of course, in the film, the focus was on Kenobi, Skywalker, Han Solo, and Chewbacca as they ne

The manual cover art for the Commodore 64 version of Crusade in Europe. The Apple II version had identical artwork. (C) 1985 Microprose Software.  I'm not much of a computer gamer these days, but when I got my first personal computer (an Apple IIe computer with a color monitor) back in 1987, I spent countless hours at my desk playing various games. Some, like Epyx Games' Summer Games and Street Soccer, were sports-themed video games. Others were simulations of military vehicles, planes, Navy warships, and even submarines; some of my favorites in this category included Silent Service, Silent Service II, Strike Fleet, the F-15 Strike Eagle series, M-1 Tank Platoon, and Red Storm Rising. I also spent a lot of time as a keyboard general, immersing myself in purely strategic map-and-military symbol simulations along the lines of Avalon Hill's Gulf Strike, a "top-down" computer version of the eponymous board wargame about a U.S.-Soviet confrontat