Customer Reviews

Space and Beyond (Choose Your Own Adventure 4)

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This book is one of the more creative ones in the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. Basically, YOU are born to parents of two different planets and you have to figure out which planet YOU want to be your home planet. I think this book really stands out in the series. I can remember being especially fascinated by it as a child. Most children wonder about outer space and aliens at some point, and this book is fun for them to read. It brings in all sorts of fun characters including aliens and robots. For a child, I believe this book would be fantastic. It is definitely one of the more imaginative books in the series. The adventurous story brings me back to my childhood days of imagination where anything was possible.

This could be a strange book at times. But there is also a certain charm about it. There is more to the story than just space travel. It is more like a galactic quest through life as it exists in the deep past, distant future, physical and supernatural sense. There are a number of interesting and unusual endings in the book with some philosophy thrown in for good measure. There are also cross references of wars, epidemics, politics, and civilizations from alien planets to planet earth.
One would be frustrated at first that it seems impossible to fulfill the mission of reaching the planet of your citizenship as this appears to be the goal in the beginning of the story. Being diverted to help other planets, other space organizations, other beings, and even MISSION TRAINING seems to demean the goal of the story. But then again, that is the premise of the story, which makes it a really good read. R.A. Montgomery isn't known to be as good as his colleague, Edward Packard, but he did put forth good writing here. He managed to cram alot about life in the galaxy in 116 pages. Don't expect a lot of what is on the cover of the reissue (a corny Buck Rogers like scene of a laser battle) to be in the story though. Paul Granger's original, lush, colorful artwork is more suitable.

Don't buy this book expecting a reprinting of the original 1978 Choose Your Own Adventure book. The text has been revised, though the revision is serviceable enough; but what's worse is that all of the illustrations have been replaced with hideously bad cartoons. Words cannot even express how amateurish and badly drawn some of these cartoons are, and they're on nearly every page, so it's impossible to ignore them. Buy a used copy of the original book, or choose something else to read.

The "Choose Your Own Adventure" series was a great invention for kids, and the first 14 or so were very interesting. However, simply put, R.A. Montgomery is not very good at writing them, unlike his colleague Edward Packard. Arbitrary, preachy, and sometimes practically incoherent, his books are only for rabid fans of the genre.

This is the first (and so far only) Choose Your Own Adventure book I didn't finish. It reads like dull gibberish from an aging hippie. I stopped reading after coming across my fifth ending of nonsense. The initial plot is that you have just turned 18 (in apparently 3 days and 2 hours) and must now choose your home planet for citizenship. You were born in space and can choose either your father's planet, with its troubled past and dying sun, or your mother's mysterious planet, also with a troubled past but a bright future. On my reading I had the chance to go back to the space academy for lessons, to command a starship, to become a research scientist, and to fight in a shadow vs light war. It sounds terribly exciting. But nothing really happens. And you have a friend follow you around who does so little the writer has to keep reminding you he's there. Now I'm just going to quote the endings I reached so you can fully appreciate the level of writing.

After being taught during a private lesson about the 'infinity of knowledge to explore within ourselves' I was given the choice to either travel to the era of dinosaurs or do some unknown point in the past. I chose the latter and on the next page got: "A chance to go to the unknown is probably really risky, but there is that desire in most people to take risks. You race back in time toward the edge of eternity, the beginning of the entire universe. You achieve an elastic weightlessness, and a sense of complete peace and calm. There is no sound, no light. But no darkness either. You race back to the very beginning, to the pulsating, exciting start. You return to the big bang that started the whole thing. You are and you have been a part of everything, always. You are and you have been a part of everything, always. The beginning is the end. THE END" Wasn't that fun!?

My next path lead me to investigating the cause of war by time traveling to a Mars in the past. Sounds exciting, right? After traveling back this is literally all there is: "When you arrive on Mars, you are invisible and can travel through space, through solid matter, and even into the thoughts of people. What is the cause of revolt on Mars? Who knows. Greed? Famine? Envy? Jealousy? Maybe just an instinctive need to battle, a basic drive to test and fight for the sheer sense of fighting. It's too complex. Everyone has a different answer. They all point to the other guy. All you know is that creatures get killed, cities get destroyed. What a way to live. That's why there is a new way- if only it will work. You are part of the new way, a way of sharing. THE END" What!? This 'way of sharing' hadn't been mentioned even once.

And you join the side of the shadows, who are fighting against beings of light, and are given the choice to either be a ground soldier or a pilot. Both sound pretty exciting. And after choosing the latter this is all I got: "The rocket ship forces sound the most interesting, and besides, you are trained as a space pilot. Ground forces would be difficult for you. You are promoted to a command rank and put in charge of a large spacecraft with laser rocket weapons. From then on you are in space searching out and destroying alien ships. But you think to yourself, is this any kind of life, forever destroying things? Maybe you will quit. THE END" Why bother giving the reader lots of choices just to keep wrapping them up in one page philosophies. I'm not reading for half-baked philosophies, I want adventure!

In the same shadows vs light war after choosing to retreat in battle as a soldier the next page reads: "Retreat is not always a bad thing. After all, you should go with what feels right. To fight now would only create further destruction. Enough damage has been done. Level off, give way. Let the other side realize what has been happening, too. As you retreat, the enemy seems to let up in amazement. The smoke clears, the noise stops. They retreat also. There is no more fighting. THE END" ...

And if I didn't retreat right away this was my other choice and ending: "There is a chance to get away. During a quiet moment, your group escapes to some remote hills far away from the battle area. Then something happens. The energy source for the lasers, the spacecrafts, the communications systems, mysteriously vanishes. There is no more energy except your own human energy. Weapons are useless. Radios and transporters are just pieces of metal and plastic. They are not working either. To survive now, you will have to hunt for food and support each other. THE END" I have no idea what happened. And I don't care. This is when I stopped reading.

The ONLY positive to this book is that there are a lot of choices, though they end up leading to gibberish In the original version of the book the art by Paul Granger was another positive. Unfortunately the art choices were kinda dull and/or small and few took advantage of the artist's skill for detailed drawings. Doubly unfortunate is the fact that in this reissued version the art's been replaced by hideous scratchy art. It looks terrible.