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Review Excerpts
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Entertainment Weekly
"Stone smartly avoids too much mechanical mumbo jumbo and swerves through the legal battles that bedeviled the sport, treating readers to portraits of the wacky, passionate tinkerers holding the remote controls. Humans, it turns out, are still more interesting than robots."
SV Metro
"The explosive emotional turmoil of the legal disputes turned out to be just as violent as the robot battles themselves, resulting in a lively story of what can happen when a gutsy team of mechanical junkies and creators meet head to head with business, greed and the legal system."
San Francisco Chronicle
"Newsweek's Silicon Valley correspondent Brad Stone introduces a colorful cast of innovators, litigators and agitators, all fighting for their piece of a once-lucrative pie... This cultural history of robotic sports entertainment... doubles as a cautionary tale to any artist breaking into the big, bad world of business."
Amazon.com Reviews
Newsweek reporter Brad Stone set out to chronicle the brief history of robotic sports, a genre peopled by a disparate range of mechanical compulsives spanning the education-driven idealism of Segway Human Transporter inventor Dean Kamen to the willfully enigmatic Mark Pauline's anarchic Survival Research Laboratories. But Stone's straightforward reporting quickly focuses on the tormented tale of Parkinson's afflicted, former ILM animator Marc Thorpe and his struggles to transform his obsession with battling machines into bona fide sport, efforts we learn have directly spawned such cult cable TV fare as Robot Wars, Battle Bots, and Robotica and made unlikely pop-culture heroes of its motley, proud band of mechanized warrior engineers. Thorpe's effusive mix of enthusiasm and naivete are at once his salvation and downfall, especially after he finds himself yoked financially with Priority Records founder Steve Plotnicki, an executive the author portrays as never meeting a business partner he didn't like to sue, and repeatedly.
Thus framed, what emerges is as much cautionary tale about the seemingly limitless bounds of human pettiness and the nettlesome business of copyrighting, branding, and marketing mass-media entertainment as it is hagiography of the gearheads and their beloved gladiators. Lawyers and lawsuits seem to dominate every third page, often overshadowing the exploits of legendary 'bots such as Biohazard and Blendo, and increasingly making the aloofness of gearhead godfathers Pauline and Kamen seem like so much common sense. --Jerry McCulley
Wired Magazine
The book "moves fast and offers high-rpm clashes."
Publisher's Weekly
... Newsweek journalist Stone's original and surprisingly engaging account of the rise of "robotic sport" depicts a world hardly anyone not passionate about these gladiatorial gear fests would have ever suspected. And yet all the elements of a taut thriller... are here.
Kirkus Reviews
What happened to a former Next Big Thing is the topic of some
entertaining reportage by Newsweek Silicon Valley correspondent Stone, who
elucidates the interactions of business and art, of men and machines.
Not long ago, an animatronics maven from Industrial Light and Magic
experienced an epiphany: How about dueling robots? There were at the time
high-minded, mildly competitive engineering challenges at MIT and elsewhere.
But robots designed to destroy each other was different. The idea of
battling 'bots' was eagerly adopted by clever nerds, garage mechanics, and
jazzed gearheads, and in 1994, and arena in the Bay Area was invaded by
Meccano sets gone mad. The machines sported flippers and flame-throwers,
probes, prongs, spikes, and chainsaws as well as pistons, gears, treads,
tires, and elaborate electronic circuitry. Sparks, smoke, and especially
deafening noise characterized the affair. It was more than a hobby. The
commotion was called a sport, perhaps even art. Inevitably, the first
financial backer and the originating artist parted ways. Television spotted
the possibilities of the destructive machinery, and on cable former Baywatch
babes elbowed out the robobuilders. In the destruction, British TV, MTV,
and toy makers saw the future. Proprietorship was disputed. Lawsuit
followed lawsuit, and loyalties of the tinkerers were tested. The robot
wars became tedious legal wars. And so the glory days may be passed, at
least for the first generation. But the bots are loose and roaming and
won't be tamed. In lots of ways, Stone's report may be emblematic of our
civilization. His admonitory tale is strong on descriptions of the machines
and the combat; of even more interest are the people he candidly describes,
from the young enthusiast who had to be placed in a psych ward to the Bruce
Wayne-like rich guy who tried to save the day.
An out-of-the-ordinary account of pop culture.
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