Hyperspace (Choose Your Own Adventure, #21) by Edward Packard

Hyperspace (Choose Your Own Adventure, #21) Reviews

• 
  Jeffrey Caston

  A mind-bending, trippy, and very creative installment to this old series. I don't recall this when I was a kid. I might have been growing out of them when this one came out. It's a shame because with it scientific theory driven story and space travel, as a Star Trek and Star Wars hungry kid I like to think I would have loved this one.
• 
  Swankivy

  Okay, I remember being unsure whether I liked this Choose Your Own Adventure book or whether it just freaked me out, but I'd never read a book quite like it. It of course had the usual twists and turns that resulted from letting the reader choose the storyline, but what's different about this one is that the abject bizarreness of the results are actually explained somewhat by the plot. Sometimes in Choose Your Own Adventure, you could literally be choosing the apparently safest option and you would immediately get violently devoured by a snake, arrested, or cursed by someone you'd never met before. But in this book where pulling a lever takes you into "hyperspace," you have no idea what to expect and that seems about right. It reminds me a little of the Infinite Improbability Drive from Douglas Adams's Hitchhhiker's series, and I had some echoes of William Sleator's The Boy Who Reversed Himself. I think the author just went to town enjoying himself because he could get away with it here. I loved the fourth-wall breaking and the theoretical concepts (though in many cases they were poorly fleshed out). It was a lot of fun for me to read as an imaginative child, though I think I believed myself to be missing something when it just wasn't there.
• 
  David Sarkies

  A gateway to the stars
  28 September 2012
  
  I think I am getting to the books were I am really vague about their contents. Many of the later Choose Your Own Adventure books I would have read probably in one sitting and put them aside, and while the cover is recognisable (and it could simply be that I saw it in a shop and thought to myself that I wanted it) I an quite vague about the story. I do remember that my local library did have a number of them and because as a kid I really liked them I would have borrowed them. However, it is interesting that the earlier ones seem to sit in my head a lot more than many of these later ones (and I will probably not be writing any more commentaries on them after the next one).
  
  Hyperspace is one of those concepts that speculates about ways to cross the vast distances of space without having to spend huge amounts of time doing so or having to deal with the problems of sub-light travel (namely that the faster you go, the heavier you get). The idea is that there exists another dimension which is smaller than this dimension and the hyperspace drive allows you to jump into that dimension to be able to travel to the nearest star (that I what I understand of the concept). Today, many of these ideas are little more than speculation, and sometimes I wonder whether we have the economic will to actually consider whether such forms of transport are possible.
  
  Obviously, we need to take a few more steps before we look at interstellar travel, such as establishing colonies on other planets. However, the problem once again is economic will. In our modern capitalist society we always look at the cost-benefit analysis, or whether the benefit of a project is going to outweigh its cost. Many of these ideas will not turn a profit for years down the track, and investors do not want to have to wait that long. This is more so in an environment where the sharemarket is falling.
  
  For instance, there are many companies out there that are exploring new ideas, however while during times of credit growth their stock price might rise on anticipation of results, during times of credit contraction the opposite will happen. Namely, when there is not much money circulating, a company will find it difficult raising capital to continue with the project, and while the project may initially prove profitable, what ends up happening is that the company's seed capital gets burned up in the inevitable failures that one requires to reach success, which means the company has to seek more finance to continue the research. Investors want success and they want success through a proven timeline, and this rarely happens. While money may flow freely during boom times, when those times come to an end, the value of the stock inevitably falls. As they say, the market rises on the rumour and falls on the fact.
• 
  Matthew Cutchen

  I literally just read it cover to cover which was actually kinda perfect for a book about fracturing time and space.
  
  (Read it a million times back when I was a kid.)
• 
  Chris

  This may take the prize for the weirdest CYOA book out there. It's even stranger than "You are a Shark" or "Inside UFO 54-40." It gets meta-fictional in interesting ways and even offers some basic engagement with existentialist questions. It's a good one for people of any age who likes surprises and unusual content in their books.
• 
  Remo

  La serie de Elige tu propia aventura es, literalmente, un clásico de nuestra infancia. He releído algunos, años después, y me parecen un poco cortos de miras, limitados en las posibilidades, pero cuando tenía 10 años cada uno de ellos era una maravilla lista para ser explorada hasta que hubiera dado todo lo que tenía dentro.
  Al final siempre sabías que ibas a recorrer todos y cada uno de los caminos posibles. La emoción estaba, por tanto, en ganar y pasarte la historia al primer intento. Si no podías, pues nada, seguro que en el intento 18 acababas encontrando el camino. A veces los autores iban "a pillar", poniéndote los resultados buenos detrás de decisiones que eran claramente anómalas.
  Recuerdo haber aprendido tanto palabras como hechos y datos en estos libros. No nadar contra la corriente cuando quieres llegar a tierra, dónde colocarse cuando un avión va a despegar, un montón de cosas interesantes y un montón de historias vividas, decenas por cada libro, que convirtieron a las serie en una colección fractal, donde cada vez podías elegir un libro nuevo entre los que ya tenías.
  Llegué hasta el tomo 54 y dejé de tener interés por la serie, pero la serie siguió hasta superar los 180 títulos. Tal vez mis hijos quieran seguir el camino que yo empecé. Si quieres que lo sigan, pasa a la página 7.
• 
  Nick Jones

  Hyperspace is the first metafictional Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book, likely the result of Edward Packard having a psychotic break after having to write half of the preceding entries in the series. The text is prefaced by the usual WARNING!!! that the book is not linear, followed for the first time by A SPECIAL NOTE from the author babbling some postmodern nonsense, and then two full pages of a SPECIAL WARNING!!! babbling about hyperspace. All of the extra prefacing is apparently supposed to ease the reader in to the fact that Hyperspace doesn't actually have a plot.
  
  The various branches of Hyperspace mostly fling weirdness at you. In one, the point of view character (you) starts reading a CYOA book called Hyperspace, but the character in the book isn't reading about themselves in a book, the book they're reading is about traveling through hyperspace in a ship, with the book-within-a-book's text italicized to let you know it's not really happening. Once you reach an ending in the book-within-a-book, you're given the option to loop back to an early point in the story where your character starts doing things for themselves instead of just reading. The story the character is reading has no bearing whatsoever on the story that you are reading, and its plot is comprised of the typical things that would happen in a CYOA book, so it makes absolutely no sense that they weren't just things the point of view character was doing instead of reading about. Another branch has you travel to an alternate dimension where you run into Doctor Nera Vivaldi, a character from previous CYOA books. Your character identifies her as such and names the books you/they have read about her in, and that path can end with her dismissing your impending death with "It's only a book, we'll have another chance." Thank you, I wouldn't have known that I wasn't really dying in real life without that chestnut. Still another nonsensical path is your meeting the book's author Edward Packard and asking him which choice to make next in the book, only for him to fall into a pit, but you know he survives because you're reading the book and he had to have lived to write it. Still another again is a proverbial rabbit hole where you're fumbling around in another reality that's actually a dream, but whose dream is it? Your character's? A hospital patient's? The reader's? A sleeping giant's? It's any of the above, depending on your choices, because consistency is out the window.
  
  I have a headache.
  
  There are some paths in the book that are actually mostly normal for a CYOA story, but the endings are unsatisfying for most of them. In a surprising number you either get stranded or deliberately choose to stay in an anachronistic alternate dimension with an evil mirror universe goateed version of yourself, because being a twin is allegedly so much fun that you're willing to permanently abandon your family without telling them. Mom and Dad will just have to wonder for the rest of their lives if you're lying in a shallow grave somewhere, victim of a serial killer. Fun. In one ending you go to another dimension and return, but on the way back your chromosomes get mixed up and you turn into a bat. No warning of danger. No indication that you will transform into something. No reason whatsoever for you to turn into a bat specifically. The remaining bits are all you wandering around strange, vaguely-defined fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-dimensions, where inexplicable things are happening with absolutely no through-line to any of it.
  
  Hyperspace is a dozen bad ideas jammed together awkwardly, and the metafictional elements don't work at all. There's nothing to latch on to in this, because the text of the book isn't a branching story so much as a very cheap philosophical exercise. I don't want to cast aspersions on Edward Packard, but people were still doing a lot of cocaine in 1983.
• 
  Daniel

  Like most of the Edward Packard CYOA books, this one was a fantastic work of a powerful imagination. Possible storylines lead to terror, paradise, and transcendence. Dr. Nera Vivaldi makes another appearance in this book, as she does in nearly every E.P. SciFi CYOA. I always felt relieved and happy to see her, even though, when she shows up, the shit is usually about to hit the fan. She may very well be the first fictional female I had a crush on.
• 
  Dave Sanders

  This is one of my favorite books of all time, and my fondest memories of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books revolved around this title. I can't even remember why I liked it so much, but for some reason the story captivated my 10 year old imagination and held it tight.
• 
  Marts (Thinker)

  Explore the msteries of Hyperspace in adventure #21 of the 'Choose your own adventure' series... in these books the reader gets to be the central character by choosing what path the tale follows through a variety of endings...
• 
  Nate

  Fabulous and insane. You get to read a Choose Your Own Adventure book within THIS Choose Your Own Adventure book! You get to meet and interact with Dr. Vivaldi (yes, THAT Dr. Vivaldi)! AND you get to meet and interact with Edward Packard (the author)! So meta! That Edward Packard is a crazy dude.
• 
  Sheila Read

  the adventures that I went through when I was bored I just read these books over and over again you would never get to the end of the story.
• 
  •*•.suprasixxcinco.•*•

  I enjoyed the twists and turns in this book. Always a fun read.
• 
  E

  Ridiculous. Absurd. Awesome.
• 
  Abbie

  I had to restart 5 times before I got a happy ending.
• 
  Julie Decker

  Hyperspace. What does that mean? Well, it means that just about anything can happen--and you're in the driver's seat! But you can't expect to know what will happen to you when you enter time and space in a way unlike you've ever imagined before. . . .
  
  Choose Your Own Adventure was a ton of fun for me as a kid, but sometimes it really bothered me that playing it safe still often led to terrible ends and vice versa. In this one, there was even some meta elements that weren't typical of the rest of the series, and truly bizarre occurrences were par for the course. It was a lot more whimsical than most of the rest, and I got a feeling like the author just maybe smoked some wacky weed and went to town.
• 
  'Nathan Burgoine

  I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and constantly borrowed them from the library. I owned a few, too, and would mark little pencilled notations on all the endings I managed to reach in my own copies (I'd tuck aside a piece of paper for the ones from the library). When I was nine and ten, these books got re-read so many times it was unreal, and they paved the way to me wanting to write, too, as sometimes I got annoyed at an obvious, missing option.
  
  This one I loved especially, for it's sci-fi flavor.
• 
  Monica

  ÉSTE ES UNO DE ÉSOS TOMOS ESPECIALES DENTRO DE LA SERIE...DE ÉSAS PIEZAS QUE SE VALORAN CON EL PASO DEL TIEMPO. SE PODRÍA DECIR QUE ES UNA SEGUNDA PARTE O SPIN OFF DE LA EXTRAORDINARIA 'OVNI 54-40'; EL ENTRONO ESTÁ 'InPREGNADO DE ÉSTA'..
  SUMAMENTE EXTRAÑO, PERO SIN LLEGAR A LA CÚSPIDE DEL ANTERIORMENTE MENCIONADO, Y CON UNA NARRATIVA ETÉREA Y PROLONGADA, YA QUE, CURIOSAMENTE, TAN SÓLO CONTIENE 15 HISTORIAS.
  DIMENSIONES Y ESPACIOS QUE JUEGAN CONTIGO.. ¿O TÚ CON ELLOS?, LO DESCUBRIRÁS CUANDO LO LEAS;)
• 
  Josiah

  There certainly are some very creative twists in this book. Edward Packard breaches the fourth wall quite effectively, engineering some of the strangest twists this side of his book "Dream Trips".
  It can be difficult to get into a longer, mainstream story that really displays well the elements that make this story interesting, and the decisions oftentimes seem to be random, with less emphasis than usual on making logical choices, but I would recommend this book.
• 
  JimDavisFan

  Dentro de la serie, este era uno de los libros más extraños. Pero era un libro muy divertido de leer precisamente por su ingenio y creatividad.
  
  La idea de otras dimensiones era por aquel entonces un terreno poco explorado por los libros de ficción (Al menos los libros de ficción dirigidos a un público infantil.)
  
  Quizá en esta época no resulte un libro tan sorprendente para los pequeñines, pero sigue siendo un favorito mío.
• 
  David

  Not the same without the iconic Paul Granger illustrations.
• 
  Mikana

  I loved the choose your-own-adventure books during my early years, and believe these are a great set of books for those who are new to reading their own books.
• 
  Federico DN

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