Paul Auster, author. (The New York Trilogy)
I wish I could say more about this. I know Auster was an important mainstream writer, but I’ve never read anything by him.
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Obit watch: May 1, 2024.
Wednesday, May 1st, 2024Everybody was gun book blogging…
Thursday, April 25th, 2024…they read as fast as lightning…
Needs some work.
After the jump, some more old gun books, and one new one.
Obit watch: April 20, 2024.
Saturday, April 20th, 2024In haste: Death finally caught the Midnight Rider.
Daniel C. Dennett, author.
An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.
According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.
For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.
Mr. Dennett irked some scientists by asserting that natural selection alone determined evolution. He was especially disdainful of the eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose ideas on other factors of evolution were summarily dismissed by Mr. Dennett as “goulding.”
Obit watch: April 4, 2024.
Thursday, April 4th, 2024Apologies for being silent yesterday. I have not been feeling well pretty much all week. While I’ve been to our local Quack In the Box and gotten prescriptions, and while they seem to be helping with some things, they’re not helping as much as I would like with others. Then again, I haven’t taken the full course of antibiotics yet.
Joe Flaherty, SCTV guy. While the obit is silent on his cause of death, I do not believe he blowed up real good.
John Barth, writer. I’ve seen Giles Goat-Boy cited as a cyberpunk precursor, but have never actually read it.
Christopher Durang, playwright. I’d actually heard of him, but I’ve never seen a performance of “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You”. I think I’d kind of like to, if only to push myself outside of my comfort zone.
Obit watch: March 29, 2024.
Friday, March 29th, 2024Harvey Elwood Gann (US Army – ret.). He was 103.
Mr. Gann was a flight engineer and top turret gunner with the 449th Bomb Group, 718th Squadron, on B24s. His plane was shot down during a bombing raid and he had to bail out. He was the only member of his crew to survive, but was imprisoned in a German POW camp. He escaped and was recaptured three times: his fourth escape attempt was successful.
He served as a Austin police officer for 38 years, mostly in vice and narcotics according to the online obit. He also wrote a book about his wartime experiences, Escape I Must (affiliate link).
(Hattip on this one to a source who I will leave anonymous for now. While Mr. Gann has an online obituary, my source was informed of this through other non-public channels, and I’m not sure they want to be named right now.)
200 acting credits in IMDB, with 12 more upcoming. They include five episodes of “Hap and Leonard”, “The Rockford Files”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Longstreet”.
NYT obit for Vernor Vinge (archived).
Jennifer Leak, actress. Other credits include the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Delphi Bureau”, and “Nero Wolfe” (the 1981 series with William Conrad in the title role).
Gun books. And train book.
Monday, March 25th, 2024I haven’t done one of these in a bit, and need to get back to it. And since it looks like the baseball season begins this week, I’m going to take the opportunity to throw a metaphorical change-up pitch with a train related book.
I would love to be able to document a book about guns on trains, but I don’t have a copy of Gerald Bull’s book. Yet.
After the jump…
Obit watch: March 21, 2024.
Thursday, March 21st, 2024FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Richard C. Higgins, who passed at 102. The NYT also ran a timely obit.
Mr. Higgins was a radioman at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Mr. Higgins, who later in his life often spoke about his experience to schoolchildren and on social media, described in a 2020 Instagram video pushing planes away from each other as bombs fell around him.
“I was moving planes away from ones that were on fire, because when the tanks exploded, they threw burning gas on the others,” he said.
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According to both the NYT and the Columbian obits, it is believed that there are about 22 survivors still living.
M. Emmet Walsh, one of the great character actors. He’s been a personal favorite of mine since I first saw “Blood Simple”. NYT.
Other credits include…just about every damn thing. 233 acting credits in IMDB. Okay, he didn’t do a “Mannix”. But he did do a “Rockford”, “McMillan and Wife”, and “Ironside”. He was part of the ensemble cast of “UNSUB“. He was in the legendary fiasco (which revisionists now say wasn’t) “At Long Last Love“.
And he hates the cans! Stay away from the cans!
Mr. Walsh had confidence in his ability to deliver, and he knew how valuable that was to harried filmmakers. “You’re casting something, and you’ve got 12 problems; if they’ve got me, they only have 11 problems.”
He said that directors sought him out for his ability to elevate subpar material. “They’d say, ‘This is terrible crap — get Walsh. At least he makes it believable.’ And I got a lot of those jobs.”
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I always thought he classed up everything he was in. A Walsh sighting, much like a William Boyett sighting, thrilled me a bit.
In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Walsh said he was asked about Blade Runner more than any other movie he had ever made. “We shot down in [Los Angeles’] Union Station,” he recalled. “They set it all up in a little office over in a corner, and we had to be out by five in the morning because commuters were coming in for the train. I don’t know if I really understood what in the hell it was all about.”
After seeing the finished film for the first time, Walsh realized he wasn’t the only one with that opinion. “We all sat there and it ended. And nothing,” he said, laughing hysterically. “We didn’t know what to say or to think or do! We didn’t know what in the hell we had done! The only one who seemed to get it was Ridley.”
I never met him, but I think I would have liked to. And I have no idea what his politics were, which I still think is a compliment.
Vernor Vinge, SF writer, has passed away. Unfortunately, all the obits I have found so far are from sources I do not trust or link to. The closest thing I have found to something linkable is a nice tribute from Michael Swanwick.
I haven’t read A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky yet, though they are on my to-read list. I was pretty grandly impressed by “True Names“: I spent a lot of time scouring used paperback stores around UT in the old pre-Internet BBS days to find a copy of Binary Star #5, back in the day when that was the only way to get a copy (before Bluejay reprinted it). You can still get True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which also reprints the story, at a not unreasonable price.
Hacker News thread. The comments are worth reading, especially the one that links Vinge’s annotated A Fire Upon the Deep.
Obit watch: March 20, 2024.
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024Alexander Keewatin Dewdney, also known as “A. K. Dewdney”.
He took over what was known as the “Mathematical Games” column from Douglas Hofstadter (who followed Martin Gardner, and renamed it ” Metamagical Themas”) and, in turn, renamed it “Computer Recreations”. He’s also credited as being one of the inventors of the “Core War” game. Wikipedia.
It isn’t the Christmas season, but I’ll tell this story anyway: one year I was asked what I wanted for Christmas. I said I wanted one of Dewdney’s books.
Every year, my brother retells the story of how my family went all over town hunting for that book, until, at their very last stop (a Bookstop) a particularly clever clerk figured out that the book they were looking for was not The Touring Omnibus but, rather, The TURING Omnibus.
This is one of the reasons I like Amazon so much: while it does somewhat hurt indie bookstores, you don’t have to worry, you can just add it to your wish list. (And Bookstop was never an “indie” anyway.)
(Kids, ask your parents about Bookstop.)
Obit watch: March 19, 2024.
Tuesday, March 19th, 2024Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford (USAF – ret.). NASA tribute. NASA biography page.
He was originally selected for Mercury, but was one inch too tall for the capsule.
He flew two Gemini missions, including Gemini VI (which was the first capsule to perform a space rendezvous). He flew Apollo 10, which scouted landing sites for Apollo 11. And he flew the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
David Seidler, screenwriter. I’ve been going back and forth on this one for notability reasons, but this pushed me into it:
That’s class. That’s the kind of class you don’t see much of these days.
And the exact opposite of class, the burning in Hell watch: Andrew Crispo, art dealer and criminal.
On the night of Feb. 22, 1985, he and an employee, Bernard LeGeros, met a 26-year-old model and student from Norway named Eigil Dag Vesti. They left the club and went north, to an estate in Rockland County, N.Y., owned by Mr. LeGeros’s parents.
What happened over the next few hours is unclear; all three men were on drugs. But in the early hours of Feb. 23, Mr. Legeros shot Mr. Vesti in the back of the head, twice, with a .22-caliber rifle. Mr. Vesti was naked, save for handcuffs around his wrists and a zippered leather hood over his head.
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Mr. LeGeros was arrested on March 27. The case became a tabloid sensation; the news media called it the Death Mask Murder.
Mr. Crispo denied involvement in the killing, and the police never charged him. He also never testified, despite Mr. LeGeros’s insistence that Mr. Crispo had ordered him to kill Mr. Vesti, and despite the discovery of the murder weapon at his gallery.
“I don’t shock, frankly, but one of the most surpassingly ugly things that ever happened in the art world was that Andrew Crispo got off with no charges for the murder of Eigil Dag Vesti,” the writer Gary Indiana told Interview magazine in 2020.
Two months after the Vesti murder, Mr. Crispo and Mr. LeGeros were indicted in a different case, charged with the 1984 kidnapping and torturing of a 26-year-old bartender named Mark Leslie. The case was not tried until 1988. Mr. LeGeros pleaded guilty, but Mr. Crispo was acquitted, having convinced the jury that the activity he participated in was consensual.
Crispo was convicted of tax evasion in 1986 and served three years of a five year sentence. The IRS seized his art and sold it off.
He spent some time trying to make a comeback: his house blew up, and he used settlement money from the gas company to buy more art and another house. He also planned to open a new gallery.
The gallery was set to open in mid-1999. But that May he was arrested yet again, this time for threatening to kidnap the 4-year-old daughter of a lawyer who had been involved in his bankruptcy case.
Mr. Crispo had grown irate after the lawyer’s firm, which controlled the money during his bankruptcy proceedings, delayed sending him a $2,000 check. He told the lawyer that he had photographs of her daughter at a playground, knew where she lived and would kidnap the child if the check did not arrive soon.
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Mr. Crispo was convicted, and in 2000 he was sentenced to seven years in prison. He got out in 2005.
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After getting out of prison a second time, in 2005, Mr. Crispo bought a co-op apartment and two ground-floor spaces in a residential tower in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, intending to open yet another gallery.
But his plans never worked out, and by 2017 he was facing bankruptcy again. He took out a series of loans from a realty company, using his co-op shares and some of his artwork as collateral. When he defaulted on the loans, the realty company took ownership of the shares.
Mr. Crispo refused to leave the apartment, and he erected a series of legal roadblocks to delay eviction. At the same time, he was growing erratic; he continued to use drugs and threw sex parties in his apartment, and on at least one occasion was seen naked and defecating in the hallway.
There’s a good account of the Eigil Dag Vesti killing in Murder Along the Way: A Prosecutor’s Personal Account of Fighting Violent Crime in the Suburbs by H. P. Jeffers and Kenneth Gribetz. Mr. Gribetz was the prosecutor in that case. (Link goes to the mass-market paperback edition, which has a slightly different title.)
My latest batch of million dollar ideas.
Monday, March 18th, 20241. I figure this one will hold up until the estate of Frank Herbert sues me. But then again, with a sufficiently good lawyer, I’m sure we can argue a parody exemption on this one:
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Fremen.
So far, I’ve got three. I’m thinking of recruiting a collaborator to help me flesh out the book a little.
- Walk without rhythm, to avoid attracting the worm.
- Never turn your back to the opposition.
- Don’t get high on your own (spice) supply.
(Yes, I did see “Dune Part 2” yesterday. Why do you ask?)
2. This one may be more of a $100,000 idea than a million dollar one, as there may be geographic limitations:
Vicious Australian Animal as a Service. (VAAaaS).
For s small fee to cover animal wrangling, packaging, shipping, and our profit, we’ll send a vicious Australian animal to your “favorite” person in the world. Message optional. We’ll maintain anonymity, and you can pay in cryptocurrency.
Let’s face it. Wouldn’t you love to send that “special person” who’s been acting like a rude (word that rhymes with “glass bowl”) a box jellyfish? Or a Sydney funnel-web spider? It sends a pretty clear message, and seems to me to be much more effective than a box of fecal matter.
There may be some issues with shipping marine life, like the box jellyfish or blue-ringed octopus, but spiders should be relatively easy. It would just be a small matter of finding animal wranglers and appropriate packaging. And lawyers.
We’d probably operate on a sliding scale, based on the size of the animal. Spiders and snakes should be small and easy to ship, while koalas and drop bears would be more expensive, as they would require special handling and packaging.
(I do have some morals. For that reason, VAAaaS will not ship Tasmanian devils, as they are endangered.)
Obit watch: February 28, 2024.
Wednesday, February 28th, 2024Ole Anderson, one of the Four Horsemen.
That’s the Four Horsemen of professional wrestling.
Through the 1970s and early 1980s, he was a member of the tag team known as the Minnesota Wrecking Crew, which over the years included Gene, Lars and Arn Anderson, who called themselves brothers and were popular around the Midwest. They were part of regional circuits like Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling and Georgia Championship Wrestling that were united under the National Wrestling Alliance, which regularly crowned them tag-team champions.
In the 1980s, Mr. Anderson teamed up with Arn Anderson, Ric Flair and Tully Blanchard to become the Four Horsemen, who went on to dominate the N.W.A. and later World Championship Wrestling, which competed with the W.W.F.
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Brian Stableford, noted author, passed away a few days ago. I don’t have a direct obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick posted a nice tribute to him on his blog.
Obit watch: February 22, 2024.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2024The paper of record finally got around to publishing an obit for Niklaus Wirth.
Ewen MacIntosh, British actor. IMDB.
Lefty Driesell, noted college basketball coach.
Robert Reid, one of the great Houston Rockets.
Lawrence sent over two obits:
Paul D’Amato, actor. IMDB.
Steve Miller, SF author.
Today is Presidents’ Day. How about some gun book crankery?
Monday, February 19th, 2024I recall reading somewhere (I think in Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It) that Lincoln was a big gun guy. If any inventor showed up at the White House with a new or improved weapon design, they were pretty much guaranteed an audience with Abe.
How much of that was desperation to win the war, and how much of it was a fascination with guns and the mechanics of machines, I have no idea.
Short shameful confession: it has been a while since I field stripped a 1911 pattern pistol.
I wanted to break down and lube one of my Commander length guns (using the lubrication suggestions from Bill Wilson’s Gun Guy, and also his lube). I had forgotten what a complete and utter (word that rhymes with “witch”) it is to get the slide stop pin through both the frame and the barrel link. Every time, the link got pushed backwards and into a position where I couldn’t get the stop into place.
I finally got it, but it took me probably 45 minutes. Maybe I need more practice. Good thing I have three more 1911s that need the same treatment. And plenty of Wilson lube left…
After the jump, a few gun books for the discerning eyes of my readers.
Obit watch: February 9, 2024.
Friday, February 9th, 2024I wonder sometimes if I lean too much on the NYT for obits. I do try to pull obits from a variety of places (as long as they are trustworthy sources) and the paper of record doesn’t cover everyone, or cover them in a timely fashion.
But the Times also tends to publish obits for interesting people that I just don’t see elsewhere.
Two examples:
Si Spiegel. He was a pioneer of artificial Christmas trees.
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After American Brush unsuccessfully branched out into the Christmas tree business, Mr. Spiegel, by then a senior machinist, was tasked with closing the artificial tree factory. Instead, he began studying natural conifers, tweaked the brush-making machines to emulate the real trees and patented new production techniques.
He left the renamed American Tree and Wreath Company in 1979 and founded Hudson Valley Tree Company two years later., which began mass-producing 800,000 trees a year on an assembly line that turned one out every four minutes.
By the late 1980s, his company was generating annual sales of $54 million and employed 800 workers in Newburgh, N.Y., and Evansville, Ind. He sold the Hudson Valley Tree Company in 1993, retired as a multimillionaire and turned his attention to cultural, educational and social justice philanthropy.
Yes, he was Jewish. I wouldn’t ordinarily say that, but it is a key part of his origin story: he applied for commercial piloting jobs after WWII, but was consistently rejected because he was Jewish.
Mr. Spiegel celebrated Jewish holidays with his children, but when they were young, a Christmas tree was a winter holiday staple — first a real one, then the best of his fake ones.
“They were pagan symbols,” he told The Times. “My kids liked them.”
The other reason he’s interesting: he flew 35 missions over Germany as a B-17 pilot. On his 33rd mission, his B-17 was shot down and crash-landed in Poland, which was occupied by the Russians at the time.
Elleston Trevor, call your office, please. I don’t see any evidence that he ever wrote a book about his wartime experiences, but I wish he had: I am genuinely curious how they moved the B-17 engine.
Walter Shawlee, who the Times describes as “the sovereign of slide rules”.
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In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to college, and it sent one of them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early 1620s.
Mr. Shawlee’s website developed a subculture of its own, with a network of slide rule-o-philes from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia digging on Mr. Shawlee’s behalf through the mildewed wares of old stationery stores and estate sales and school district warehouses in search of slide rules. In Singapore, a civil servant, Foo Sheow Ming, visited the back room of a bookstore and found 40 unopened crates of more than 12,000 slide rules in multiple varieties. On his website, Mr. Shawlee called the find “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Mr. Foo told The Journal that it was “the mother lode.”
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Lawrence gave me a slide rule tie clip one year, which looks like it may have come from Mr. Shawlee’s website. I treasure it, and wear it on special occasions.
Slide Rule Universe. I was previously unfamiliar with this site, but wow! It looks like a relic of the old school Web, which I absolutely love.
For the historical record: NYT obit for David Kahn.
The U.S. government considered [The Codebreakers] so volatile that the National Security Agency, the country’s premier cryptology arm, pondered how to block its publication. It even considered breaking into Mr. Kahn’s home in Great Neck, N.Y.
Eventually the agency chose more overt means, demanding that the publisher, Macmillan, not release it. The company refused; instead, MacMillan and Mr. Kahn submitted the text to the Department of Defense for review. Mr. Kahn agreed to cut a few paragraphs about Britain’s code-breaking efforts during World War II, which were still classified, but otherwise he kept the book intact.
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Seiji Ozawa, conductor.
Mr. Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the classical music world over the last half-century: a tremendous influx of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in turn helped spread the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.
For much of that time, a belief widespread even among knowledgeable critics held that although highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its interpretive needs or a deep feeling for its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this prejudice by dint of his outsize personality, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer hard work.
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He found himself near the top of the American orchestral world in 1973, when he was named music director of the Boston Symphony. He scored many successes over the years, proving especially adept at big, complex works that many others found unwieldy.He toured widely and recorded extensively with the orchestra. But his 29-year tenure was, many thought, too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’.
Though relatively inexperienced in opera, he left in 2002 to become music director of the august Vienna State Opera, where he stayed until 2010. The rest of his life was mainly consumed with health issues and with dreams of a major comeback on the concert stage, which he was never able to achieve.
Obit watch: February 2, 2024.
Friday, February 2nd, 2024Colonel Roger H.C. Donlon (United States Army – ret.)
Col. Donlon was the first person, and first Special Forces member, to receive the Medal of Honor for action in the Vietnam War.
His Medal of Honor citation:
Rank and organization: Captain, U.S. Army. Place and date: Near Nam Dong, Republic of Vietnam, 6 July 1964. Entered service at: Fort Chaffee, Ark. Born: 30 January 1934, Saugerties, N.Y. G.O. No.: 41, 17 December 1964.
Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while defending a U.S. military installation against a fierce attack by hostile forces.
Capt. Donlon was serving as the commanding officer of the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment A-726 at Camp Nam Dong when a reinforced Viet Cong battalion suddenly launched a full-scale, predawn attack on the camp. During the violent battle that ensued, lasting 5 hours and resulting in heavy casualties on both sides, Capt. Donlon directed the defense operations in the midst of an enemy barrage of mortar shells, falling grenades, and extremely heavy gunfire. Upon the initial onslaught, he swiftly marshaled his forces and ordered the removal of the needed ammunition from a blazing building. He then dashed through a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades to abort a breach of the main gate. En route to this position he detected an enemy demolition team of 3 in the proximity of the main gate and quickly annihilated them. Although exposed to the intense grenade attack, he then succeeded in reaching a 60mm mortar position despite sustaining a severe stomach wound as he was within 5 yards of the gun pit. When he discovered that most of the men in this gunpit were also wounded, he completely disregarded his own injury, directed their withdrawal to a location 30 meters away, and again risked his life by remaining behind and covering the movement with the utmost effectiveness. Noticing that his team sergeant was unable to evacuate the gun pit he crawled toward him and, while dragging the fallen soldier out of the gunpit, an enemy mortar exploded and inflicted a wound in Capt. Donlon’s left shoulder. Although suffering from multiple wounds, he carried the abandoned 60mm mortar weapon to a new location 30 meters away where he found 3 wounded defenders. After administering first aid and encouragement to these men, he left the weapon with them, headed toward another position, and retrieved a 57mm recoilless rifle. Then with great courage and coolness under fire, he returned to the abandoned gun pit, evacuated ammunition for the 2 weapons, and while crawling and dragging the urgently needed ammunition, received a third wound on his leg by an enemy hand grenade. Despite his critical physical condition, he again crawled 175 meters to an 81mm mortar position and directed firing operations which protected the seriously threatened east sector of the camp. He then moved to an eastern 60mm mortar position and upon determining that the vicious enemy assault had weakened, crawled back to the gun pit with the 60mm mortar, set it up for defensive operations, and turned it over to 2 defenders with minor wounds. Without hesitation, he left this sheltered position, and moved from position to position around the beleaguered perimeter while hurling hand grenades at the enemy and inspiring his men to superhuman effort. As he bravely continued to move around the perimeter, a mortar shell exploded, wounding him in the face and body. As the long awaited daylight brought defeat to the enemy forces and their retreat back to the jungle leaving behind 54 of their dead, many weapons, and grenades, Capt. Donlon immediately reorganized his defenses and administered first aid to the wounded. His dynamic leadership, fortitude, and valiant efforts inspired not only the American personnel but the friendly Vietnamese defenders as well and resulted in the successful defense of the camp. Capt. Donlon’s extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.
The linked NYT obit provides a little more color. This was a wild battle.
He wrote two books. I think his first, Outpost of Freedom, was a pretty big seller at the time. We had a version of that in a “Reader’s Digest Condensed Book” at my house when I was a little kid, and I remember reading it pretty regularly. (That same Condensed book also had The Century of the Detective and The Yearling.) His other book was Beyond Nam Dong, about his post-war return.
David Kahn, cryptographic historian and author. (The Codebreakers.)
I read The Codebreakers (the original edition, the one with the key on the cover) when I was in middle school, and it was a big influence on me. I suspect there are a lot of other folks out there who can say the same thing. (Hattip: Bruce Schneier.)
Carl Weathers. THR. IMDB. Pretty well covered elsewhere, and I don’t have much to add.
Don Murray, actor. Other credits include “T.J. Hooker”, “Ghosts Can’t Do It”, and “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes”.
Jennell Jaquays, prominent D&D creator.
Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow-capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack-o’-lanterns.
Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.
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In the early 1980s Ms. Jaquays went to work for Coleco, and she eventually oversaw the teams that designed games for the Coleco Vision, an early home video game console; one notable project was WarGames, an adaptation of the 1983 film.
Long after leaving Coleco, when video games were vastly more sophisticated, Ms. Jaquays designed levels for the first-person shooters Quake II and III and the military strategy game Halo Wars. She also made The War Chiefs, an expansion pack that let users play as Native American cultures vying for power against European civilizations in Age of Empires III.