Books questions

The term is today used for handbooks, but a “vademecum” may be any helpful thing one carries around.

Raft is a 1991 hard science fiction book by British writer Stephen Baxter. Raft is both Baxter's debut novel and the first book in the Xeelee Sequence, although the Xeelee are not present. Raft was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992.

Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE (1925 -2017) was an English writer and anthologies editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells. He was co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. He received two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and one John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He wrote the short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (1969), the basis for the Stanley Kubrick-developed Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).

Wiesław Wernic (1906-1986), popular Polish writer and journalist, best known for his series of Wild West books, sometimes called "Polish Karl May". During World War II fought in the Warsaw Uprising, after the war worked for a Polish daily Rzeczpospolita and weekly "Tygodnik Demokratyczny". Unlike Karl May to whom he was often compared, Wernic visited United States a number of times where he met with American Indians and was a leading authority on the history and customs of the Wild West.

HAL 9000 is an entirely fictional machine and yet it seems to stir something in the soul of the computer scientist. Why? The machine is the soft spoken anti-hero in Arthur C Clarke's novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” which was related to the screenplay for the film of the same name, directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English writer George Orwell published in June 1949. The novel is set in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda.

The classic video game Super Mario Bros. has more than a few similarities to the iconic novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland including magic mushrooms, anthropomorphic animals, mysterious portals and passageways, and an all around sort of suspension of reality as we know it that marks both trips through the game and the novel. The comparison isn’t merely the parlor talk of video game geeks though, as Super Mario Bros. creator Miyamoto himself cited the influence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in an interview with Business Week magazine.

Hercule Poirot is a fictional Belgian detective, created by Agatha Christie. Poirot is one of Christie's most famous and long-running characters, appearing in 33 novels, one play (Black Coffee), and more than 50 short stories published between 1920 and 1975. It is almost 25 years since the detective Hercule Poirot, created by Agatha Christie and played by David Suchet, made his debut on ITV. The first of 70 episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot, a minor short story called The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, was broadcast in January 1989.

The capital of Temeria is Vizima, lying on the shore of Lake Vizima. The second largest city is Maribor. Temeria mints its own coin — the oren.

The Posthumous Papers was Charles Dickens's first novel. With the introduction of Sam Weller in chapter 10, the book became the first real publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandise.