Pop Culture Author Celebrates the Spirit of the Sinclair Spectrum Christmas Past and Present

Stirling, United Kingdom, September 26, 2021 --(PR.com)-- Extremis Publishing is delighted to announce the publication of a new book by their resident pop culture guru, Dr Thomas A. Christie. "A Very Spectrum Christmas: Celebrating Seasonal Software on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum" is a guide to festive games on the venerable Spectrum computer, delving into its extraordinary pantheon of seasonal games: the good, the bad, the surprising and the unabashedly surreal.

Throughout the 1980s, thousands of British children were lucky enough to discover a Sinclair ZX Spectrum under their Christmas trees and soon found their eyes opened to a virtual world of wonder. But Santa Claus did more than deliver computers — sometimes he appeared on them, too. From the machine’s formative days in the early eighties right through to the latest independent releases, "A Very Spectrum Christmas" takes a look at what makes a truly memorable festive title for the vintage home microcomputer... as well as unearthing a few games that may have become lost in the mists of Christmas past for good reason.

Tom Christie is no stranger to the subject of either Christmas or retro gaming; in years past he has written books including "The Spectrum of Adventure," a brief history of interactive fiction on the Sinclair computer, and "A Righteously Awesome Eighties Christmas" which is a guide to 1980s festive cinema. Tom holds a PhD in Scottish Literature from the University of Stirling, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2018. He writes widely about film history, popular culture and digital humanities; "A Very Spectrum Christmas" is his sixteenth book.

The book contains a foreword by computing legend Mel Croucher, founder of Britain's first software house back in the 1970s and more recently, creator of the Jeeni streaming music platform, and is fully illustrated with colour screenshots of all the games under discussion. Covering several decades of software development, "A Very Spectrum Christmas" is a treasure trove of retro yuletide experiences — where eighties nostalgia collides with modern day homebrew innovation with frequently unexpected results.

"A Very Spectrum Christmas" is released on the 30th of September 2021, and will be available to buy from all good independent retailers and online booksellers. More information about the book can be found on the Extremis Publishing website at: https://www.extremispublishing.com/a-very-spectrum-christmas.html

Extremis Publishing is an independent publishing house based in Stirling which specialises in arts, media and culture non-fiction. Earlier this month it was named Independent Publishing Company of the Year at the Corporate LiveWire Scotland Prestige Awards 2021/22.