You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed

As a kid I never played any of The Learning Company's dozens of Reader Rabbit games, so today we'll be correcting this surprising gap in my edutainment knowledge. zorealis suggested the first game in the series, 1984's Reader Rabbit, aka Reader Rabbit and the Fabulous Word Factory. The alternate title sounds suspiciously Oompa-Loompaish to me, so fingers crossed that we will not meet with any gruesome poetic justice.

The game's menu offers nine options: Sorter, Labeler, Word Train, and six different Matchup Games. In Sorter you get a series of words, and you have to decide whether each one matches a given letter in either the first, second, or third position. If it matches, you move it over to the side, but if it doesn't you throw it in the garbage. (This obviously predates the 1990s eco-tainment craze, or else we'd be recycling.)



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Reader Rabbit was wildly popular and led to a slew of sequels and spinoffs. I had never heard of 1986's Writer Rabbit until delphi brought it to my attention. Now, I'm not saying that playing this game will make you as good of a writer as delphi is... but I'm not not saying that.

While Reader Rabbit offers a solid but fairly staid selection of spelling exercises, Writer Rabbit is far more wacky. After punching out from a week of back-breaking labor at the Word Factory, it's time to attend Writer Rabbit's Sentence Party and cut loose with a mix of games mashing up sentence diagramming and Mad Libs. In the Ice Cream Game, you are given a phrase and have to identify it as either WHO, WHAT, DID WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, or HOW.



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You can play Reader Rabbit and Writer Rabbit on the Internet Archive, for the finest in lapine-themed edutainment. Did anyone else play a game from this series? There are a million of them!

In the grim future year of 2021, safety is found only in certain walled communities, while lawlessness prevails in outlying areas. While driving through the California desert to visit family, a doctor and his twin teenaged daughters are captured by members of an isolated cultlike group whose founder was the sole survivor of a deep space mission to Proxima Centauri. The prisoners expect to be killed if they don't escape, but it might be even worse—the former astronaut and his followers carry an alien pathogen that gives them strange powers and bizarre compulsions, and they want to infect their three captives.

This was the last-published book in the Patternist series, but the third one I've read, as I'm following the suggested chronological reading order. I was warned that in this reading order it's totally opaque how this book relates to the others, which certainly is the case! The only apparent connection is Clay Dana, a minor character from Mind of My Mind who is said in this book to have invented interstellar travel using his psionic abilities. But the other characters don't seem to be aware of the telepathic Patternists as a group, so it seems that in the intervening decades they've managed to continue influencing society without fully revealing themselves.

Reading it basically as a stand-alone, the book seems to be about what it means to be human. It questions the dichotomy of human and monster, as the "ordinary" humans of the lawless desert prove more brutal and violent than the infected half-aliens are. The characters assume that allowing the pathogen to spread across Earth would be a bad thing, but when you see what human society is becoming, you wonder if altering more people's nature might be an improvement.

I felt that the book was too long, which is surprising at just over 200 pages. The characters are strongly written (as expected from Butler) but I think there might be too many of them, and sometimes the same events are needlessly reiterated from multiple POVs. I also had trouble with the level of violence. I didn't think it was gratuitous since it seemed necessary for the book to make its thematic points as I understood them; violence is just hard for me to read and there's a lot of it here, including rape and the constant threat of rape.

It'll be interesting to see how my perspective changes once I've read the whole series and seen what readers knew of the Patternist universe when these prequels were published. Worth noting that I will indeed be reading Survivor, a book in the series that's been out of print for ages because Butler apparently hated it. Very curious about that one.