Here's the plot, in a nutshell:

It's the age of the home-made virus, and humanity is dying. It just doesn't know it yet.

In Prague, a young woman named Eva returns home to escape the plagues, only to find her mother missing and the police blaming her for the worst outbreaks in recent memory. Events are complicated by the appearance of a Healer - a merciless Chinese agent - sent to neutralize a new strain that may bring Prague to its knees.

With only days until the launch of a super-virus, Eva must navigate a hostile city and escape to safety before she becomes another faceless victim in this global, slow apocalypse.

What this blurb doesn't capture is the creepy, dark feel to the prose in this well-crafted novel.

Author MCM is also the creator of cool Canadian kids' show RollBots, coming out this fall. And if you are an anti-authoritarian geek, you may remember his story "The Pig and the Box," which free software crusader Richard Stallman praised as a great way to teach kids about why DRM is bad.

You can access Vector here, for computer or phone.

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• Battlezone was developed in 1979 by Atari and released in 1980. Morgan Hoff at Atari was the lead designer, and Ed Rotberg served as the principal programmer. Both had worked on many of Atari's other classic games.
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• Battlezone was a tank simulator that gave you two joysticks, one for the left tread and one for the right, and a single button that fired your gun. You would drive all over an alien landscape, complete with an erupting volcano, and blast enemy tanks and spaceships while dodging simple geometric shapes.
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• In addition, the screen would "crack" when you were killed by an enemy, and would also play Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture when you would enter your initials for the high score.
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• Battlezone incorporated many new design elements that hadn't been seen in coin-operated games before, like a persicope-like viewer and realistic (for the time) simulated tank driving. The game also featured a built-in step to allow shorter gamers to reach the periscope.
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• The game featured wire-frame vector graphics in black and white, but they overlaid red and green cellophane onto the monitor to make it look like the game actually had different colors. The radar and warning messages were in red, while the main graphics were in green.
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• Once the game was released, it was an instant hit. In fact, it became so popular that the United States Army approached Atari and had them design a version of the game that would train gunners on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Only two prototypes were produced that featured realistically modeled enemy helicopters, tanks, and other vehicles.
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• Ed Rotberg was so incensed that Atari was getting involved with the military, that he had several shouting matches with his bosses. He agreed only to stay on at Atari as long as he never had to work on another military project again.
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• Because players covered up most of the game with their face and body, other editions were designed like one without the periscope (because of concerns over hygiene as well, with everyone pressing their faces up against the viewer) and a cocktail table prototype.
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• Rumors persisted that you could drive up to the volcano, enter a secret passage, and then find and explore a castle. Also, people thought that if you continued driving straight for over an hour (!) you could eventually reach the mountains and find a tank factory that was building the enemy tanks. Sadly, neither were true.
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• Red Baron was a game released almost a year after Battlezone, featuring similar wire-frame graphics and gameplay except sit in a World War I biplane instead of a futuristic tank on an alien world. In fact, many Red Baron cabinets were just conversions of Battlezone units, and you could peel off the Red Baron stickers revealing the Battlezone artwork underneath.
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• Battlezone remained popular much longer than most games that came out at the same time, and several different versions of been produced over the years. The game was ported to just about every home and portable video game system, and there were multiplayer versions and sequels produced for PCs.
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• In Battlezone, the 1998 remake for PCs, they included an actual story. Meteors fall on the Earth in 1957, and the Americans and Soviets find a rare element inside them called bio-metal, which lets them build vehicles with special abilities. Of course, the Soviets and Americans use this ability to wage war across the solar system rather than better mankind.
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• Peter Hirschberg is an amazing computer animator and arcade owner who frequent makes 3D models of old arcade cabinets in his spare time. He contributed models to the retro-gaming documentary Chasing Ghosts, and you can check out his Battlezone and Tron models here. Keep in mind there are completely rendered in the computer, and are not photographs or filmed images.
  
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First off, ignore the (cool-looking) cover featuring Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and two other Jedi ready for action; that scene happens only as psychic dream in the opening pages of the book (see below) - the majority of this opener to the year-long story is all about setting the scene and introducing readers to characters and concepts that don't come from the movies. Luckily for "Expanded Universe" virgins like myself, it all follows well-known Lucas formulas pretty well, including a annoying comedy sidekick for the hero: Having the plot revolve around a prophecy makes a lot of sense, considering the movies' reliance on prophecies about balancing the force and all, but there's also an element of Indiana Jones in the way that our heroes are questing after an artifact that gets found by the bad guys first. Sure, there aren't any Sith to give us hot lightsaber action in this first part (Replacement zombie-like aliens the Mandalorians feels a little too generic and dull, right now), but it all zips by fast enough for you not to care: The dialogue is better than at least, oh, five of the movies - writer John Jackson Miller gets his derring-do on without the humorlessness of the last three movies - and the art strikes the right note of being cartoony but not distractingly so.

Dark Horse know what they're doing with their movie and TV comics - They're the ones behind Joss Whedon's awesome Buffy comics - and this is a pretty good launch for what could be a fun story for both Star Wars obsessives and those who just like reading about people shooting each other in space. After four issues of Knights Of The Old Republic, the story crosses into companion title Dark Times (set just after Revenge of the Sith) for two issues, then original trilogy-era Rebellion for two, before ending in Star Wars: Legacy - starring the descendants of Luke, Leia and Han - at the end of the year. If nothing else, you know you want to pick up the ones with 1980s Empire Strikes Back-era jumpsuit Luke, right...?

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic #25 - Vector part 1 [Dark Horse.com]