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Choose Your Own Adventure Books Return
KermodeBear writes "Eight of the original 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books are to be republished this summer. From the Article: 'First published in 1979, the books let readers remix their own stories - and face the consequences. [...] the original titles return to bookstores, revamped with 21st-century references (cell phones!).'" For me, it's all about 1987's Space Vampire , by series originator Edward Packard. "Do you eject the vampire through the airlock?"
As I submitted my last comment, I remembered that during this time when the choose your own adventure books were all the rage, I was showed a bunch of very well-written books from a Canadian author named Gordan Korman. These books are targeted to teenagers mainly, and are at a much more advanced reading level than the choose your own adventure books. But kids are a lot smarter than they look and they do take well to intelligent, well-written fiction. Korman's books include a number of series aimed at, I'd say 12 year olds, called the McDonald Hall series, and then a bunch of very good books aimed at slightly older teenagers including "Losing Joe's Place," "A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag," "Don't Care High," "No Coins Please," and so forth. Great books. I also remember reading "Interstellar Pig" by William Sleater. Around that time I was also introduced to a great collection of science fiction short stories by various famous authors, edited by Asimov. I can't remember the title of this book, but it has some great thinker stories in it.
In short there are *lots* of good books out there that are intellectually stimulating as well as entertaining and won't insult kids' intelligence. Although perhaps the age of shoot-em-up games and FPS have ruined kids for that kind of thing. So maybe CYOA's 10-page stories will be well-received.
I really liked the Lone Wolf series. It was quite sophisticated with you being able to keep track of your characters health and choose different powers. Sometimes you'd find a spell or item that had a number attached and at various points in the books you could add that number to your current number to pull off a hidden course of action.
But I don't think anything compared to Steve Jackson's Sorcery series. Lots of detail, lots of depth and if you didn't beat the seven serpents in book three then the villain in book four knew you were coming! Ah, happiness!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I loved the Lone Wolf books. I periodically pick them up and read one when I am in a particularly nostalgic mood. I loved the cross between D&D and CYOA. What a brilliant masterpiece they were. Fortunately, in the vein of open source software, the author, Joe Dever, has graciously given the rights for the electronic distribution of his books free of charge by Project Aon.
I saw Ian Livingstone talk at Hay Literary festival on Wednesday - he said that the original Fighting Fantasy series is also being republished, together with one which never saw the light of day. The talk had an interesting subject, "Geek to Chic", supposedly about how computer games are now extremely fashionable rather than the province of shy geeks. However, it was more interesting to hear his life story, as he developed from geeky, bearded entrepreneur selling Dungeons and Dragons from the back of a van, to helping in the creation of Lara Croft.
I don't recall any of the "proper" Choose your Own Adventure books having a loop-around like that, but I do remember a series called Time Machine, where you played the part of a time-traveling researcher in search of evidence or answers to theories and the like. In them, the option phase wasn't so much whether you fight or run from a villian, but what time period you would go to next. Of course, if you chose the "wrong one", you'd end up in a time-warp, re-experiencing events. It was impossible to die otherwise. In fact, I recall one, where the reader wasn't paying attention and fell off of a cliff and the time-machine device activated an emergency protocol that held the character in "slo-time" while the land around him changed and a small ledge grew beneath him to break the fall.
The title of the parchement was XL. So you turned to page 40 (XL in roman numerals.)
A group of people have, with the permission of Joe Dever, started to transcribe the Lone Wolf, World of Lone Wolf, and other CYOA books to make them available online. Take a look at Project Aon. They've gotten through the Kai and Magnakai books as well as some of the Grand Master books.