Since the first Pong machine was launched three decades ago, computer games have evolved to become the world's second-largest entertainment industry, after music. This fascinating program profiles the visionaries, mavericks, and renegades of this addictive multibillion-dollar industry. Interviews with Nolan Bushnell, Ralph Baer, and others illustrate the innovation and creativity that went into the creation of Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Donkey...

The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement-precision-in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were...

Kable is the superstar and cult hero of the ultraviolent Slayers. Kable is controlled by Simon, a young gamer with rock star status who continues to defy all odds by guiding Kable to victory each week. Taken from his family, imprisoned, and forced to fight against his will, the modern-day gladiator must survive long enough to escape the game, free his family, regain his identity, and save mankind from this ruthless technology.

They had trained body and mind for America's leap into space. But when the moment came, they were replaced. Now, 40 years later, another moment has come and this time it's all theirs. These old-school test pilots whose grasp of outdated technology makes them the only ones able to repair a primitive, deorbiting Russian satellite that imperils Earth.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“A new masterpiece from one of my favorite authors… [How The World Really Works] is a compelling and highly readable book that leaves readers with the fundamental grounding needed to help solve the world’s toughest challenges.”—Bill Gates
 
“Provocative but perceptive . . . You can agree or disagree with Smil—accept or doubt his...

Set in the near future, a skeleton crew of soldiers is stranded at sea on an abandoned military outpost awaiting the arrival of reinforcements or an enemy invasion, whichever comes first.

It's the most overlooked commodity in the world: sand is in every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every computer screen and silicon chip. Sand shelters us, connects us, and inspires us. And, incredibly, we're running out of it. Beiser shares the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it-- and sometimes, even kill...

Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.
Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature — issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic — was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks

...

"The true story of the first time machines came for human jobs--and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today. The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla...