A Brief Recommendation

You might have noticed me delving into a slightly patriotic frame of mind in the last post. Well, I am a little bit patriotic when it comes to retro games, although I’d be a fool to say that we were responsible for any of the great classics. Apart from Jet Set Willy. And Sabre Wulf. And Elite. And a few dozen others.

My slight touch of jingoism when it comes to retro games, and a couple of other small bits of science, comes mostly from this book:

Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford. It’s a wonderful catalogue of Britain’s contributions to the world of science and the scientific imagination, going from Black Knight, our own space program, through the rebranding of Concorde from a total failure to a totally decadent failure, the expansion of global communication by means of a van and the A34, the fight to keep the human genome free from the grubby hands of corporations, and the tragic-in-hindsight enthusiasm of the author for the Beagle II Mars probe.

And the secret origin of Elite.

Frankly, it’s worth picking the book up just for that. You can get it here.