Inside UFO 54-40 (Choose Your Own Adventure, #12) by Edward Packard

Inside UFO 54-40 (Choose Your Own Adventure, #12) Reviews

• 
  B Schrodinger

  So apparently I got abducted by aliens while travelling by concorde.
  
  WAIT...phew, I was just reading a Choose Your Own Adventure.
  
  I had three exciting (maybe sarcasm) yet different adventures:
  
  1) I questioned the aliens motives and was deemed 'unsuitable', had my brain wiped and was returned to the plane.
  2) I refused to help a captured alien escape and was imprisoned forever!
  3) I defeated my alien masters by laughing at them and landed the UFO back on Earth.
  
  Conclusion: I was probably too easily pleased as a pre-teen.
• 
  David Sarkies

  A UFO joy ride
  9 August 2012
  
  For some strange reason the whole UFO fad that I grew up with has simply vanished. Maybe it is because I no longer watch much television, or maybe it is because I have simply tuned out of the whole thing, but to me it seems that UFOs are no longer in vogue, and if they are, they are only followed by a small group of UFO fanatics. Well, there was a movie that I saw a couple of years ago called 'Paul' which was about a couple of geeks from England who went to Comicon and then decided to tour the UFO spots in the United States, however beyond that UFOs seem to have been put back into the realm of science fiction.
  
  Yes, this gamebook is about UFOs, and it is about you being abducted by a UFO and then having to escape. Apparently the ending where you get to the paradise planet is impossible because there are no choices that actually take you there. Some have pondered this, and it has even been suggested that this was done on purpose, but personally, why would you create an ending that nobody can even get to. It seems to defeat the purpose of this book.
  
  After having read some of the reviews I must admit that I do remember reading this particular book, and I guess the funny alien on the cover also triggers memories. Then there is Easter Island. When I was a kid Easter Island was this strange place where there are stone heads all looking out to sea, however the catch was that since the island is treeless then how did the natives move the statues, and why did they abruptly cease making the statues. Back in the 80s the stock standard answer was 'aliens did it'. Well, as it turns out it that the island did have trees back when the statues were being made, but the trees were since removed by the natives.
  
  I read another book once about the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands, and it has been suggested that the migration of the islanders is actually an event in itself. Unlike us westerners, who had large sailing ships to take us around the world, all the Pacific Islanders had were canoes, which begs the question: how were they able to use these canoes to travel across the largest ocean on the planet, and survive? It has been suggested that they used currents, but then again they did not have navigation equipment either, so there was little communication and trade between the islands. In many cases, if you could see the island from another island, you could travel there (which was how Britain and Ireland were colonised) however if you can't and set out then you are travelling blind. In the end it would have been hit or miss for the islanders to fan out across the Pacific, but they did it.
• 
  Monica

  Estaba entre cuatro o cinco estrellas, pero creo que éste libro merece cinco, por ser una pieza ciertamente original y extravagante. Partimos de la base que estás viajando en un reactor sobre el atlántico y 'algo' posee el cohete!. Los extraterrestres han secuestrado la nave y controlan los que están a bordo de ella, entre ellos tú. A partir de entonces deberás elegir entre intentar escapar del cohete y volver a la tierra ( ayudado por otros seres extraterrestres o no) o intentar ir a ÚLTIMA. EL PLANETA PARADISÍACO! (EN EL PRÓLOGO HAY UNA ADVERTENCIA ESPECIAL ACERCA DE CÓMO CONSEGUIRLO. Muy alucinante, por cierto, el autor se quedó bien a gusto y es lo que le da la guinda al libro). todas las aventuras resultan muy especiales y son muy sugerentes. Es uno de los libros que enganchan de la serie.
  Muy recomendable.
• 
  Jenna 🧵

  The great thing about this series is that they knew what topics and settings kids were obsessed with in those days - kids who probably had a set of World Book and/or Childcraft encyclopedias at hand since, you know, no Interwebs - and there was a CYOA book for each of them. UFO's, most def. Pyramids? Sign me up. Bigfoot? Yes ma'am. Atlantis? Let me at it. Espionage, Jewel thieving, ninjas, hot air balloons, submarines, haunted mansions, medieval castles? Abso-effing-lutely.
• 
  Alex

  Oh. No he llegado. ¿Es que mis decisiones son tan terribles?
• 
  Dane Barrett

  This was a refreshing take on the CYOA formula in that it avoided a silly extra-terrestrial cameo by setting it on an alien ship with extra-terrestrials (with cameos by normal humans instead), and also because for the most part the book forms a cohesive narrative rather than spinning all over the place (mostly; the usual "zen out for no reason other than because I can" ending is still there).
  
  You are abducted by aliens immediately after the beginning of the story (beamed directly off a Concorde; gosh, remember those planes?) and are soon butting heads with the owners of the star ship you are now a prisoner of. You do however end up meeting a number of potential allies (other humans and other imprisoned extra-terrestrials), and the path of the book branches depending which one you decide to ally with.
  
  While some endings can come quickly, it was a breath of fresh air that some of the narratives lasted quite a few pages for a change, even if you happen to pick a bad option (which usually means death or failure in a traditional CYOA adventure book, but here it often just means the narrative goes in a different direction for a while).
  
  There's even a nice secret hidden ending, which was later re-created as an homage to this book in Jason Shiga's "Meanwhile" (which I highly recommend if you like time travel tales and comics).
  
  I definitely enjoyed this book.
• 
  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 100 títulos. Tal vez mis hijos quieran seguir el camino que yo empecé. Si quieres que lo sigan, pasa a la página 7.
• 
  Nick Jones

  This particular Choose Your Own Adventure book has an average story, but an added gimmick of enabling you to reach a place called "Ultima, the planet of paradise," that you cannot reach by the usual method in this series of "making choices or following instructions!" I assumed that this meant there would be clues along the way that would result in your working out a number that would match a page in the book, the book's title "54-40" seeming especially suspicious and likely to contain a part of the overall puzzle.
  
  Of course, I was giving Edward Packard too much credit. There's nothing anywhere in the book that suggests how to get to Ultima, you just have to skim through until you find the randomly inserted page that has you get there.
  
  I've seen other reviewers suggest that Ultima's inaccessibility is symbolic of a person's life and you're meant to come upon the good part randomly or whatever hippie nonsense they're selling, but how about we make it symbolic of the fact that I am a fount of knowledge and everyone should just listen to me. You can find Ultima on page 101. You're welcome.
• 
  Willy Boy

  Grew up reading the CYOA books and this one is a particular favourite. Would love to read interviews with the creators of this series. Or maybe I wouldn't? Or maybe I did in one branch of reality, but it led to my death, suffocated under quicksand, so I chose not to on this go-around.
• 
  Nancy

  Nihlism for 8-14 year olds. A valuable life lesson I have never forgotten.
• 
  Chris

  It gets weird.
• 
  Nate

  Totally awesome. AND I made my way to Ultima by not making a choice! This book is the best.
• 
  Katy Lovejoy

  Finally I get a happy ending the first time!
• 
  Swankivy

  By this point in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, I was starting to get bored with the nonsensical endings and contrived choices, so I tried to gravitate toward the titles that seemed the most likely to follow a fantasy or science fiction path. Obviously if there was a UFO I was probably going to space, so I grabbed this one. And it was good compared to some of the other ones I'd been reading, because the endings didn't all seem to be slightly different versions of the same inevitability and didn't always seem out to kill you. I remember one rather scary ending that made me as the character find a room that made me get younger until I became unborn and I guess I stopped existing. A lot of the things that happened seemed pretty off the wall, but at least interesting and not completely unconnected to everything that had happened, and not necessarily a science fiction cliché (though confusing a computer until it blows up does seem to fit in that category). After finishing a few endings, I used to methodically try to get every ending, and noticed a page that had the coveted Best Ending (you know, you get to discover the space utopia), so I noted what page that was and went through all the other pages looking for a "if you choose X, turn to page Y" instruction. THERE WASN'T ONE. You literally couldn't get the nice ending. I think I felt pretty cheated except that a couple obnoxious places in the book told me you couldn't achieve your goal by being a rule-follower or something. Practically speaking in terms of imagining I'm the character, I don't know how I was supposed to interpret this.
• 
  Julie Decker

  You're the protagonist and you're going to space on UFO 54-40. It'd be super awesome if you could find the perfect planet, but you might have to face some brain-spinningly weird eventualities to get there.
  
  I was usually a completist when it came to reading series, but since Choose Your Own Adventure books generally weren't related to each other, I made my peace with reading them out of order and trying to get the ones that seemed more tailored to my taste. This looked like science fiction, so after boring mysteries and disconnected adventures, I figured I'd like it. The author seemed to really have a good time coming up with all kinds of actually REALLY weird possibilities for you to encounter; it's nice if the weirdness of "YOU'RE IN SPACE" frees authors to really let loose with the strangeness. And believe me, the author did. There's a bit of a snotty "moral" in the book, though--it keeps telling you that the best thing to do is NOT follow the rules. There's a way you can be rewarded if you even go so far as to not follow the book's own rules, and that struck me as hokey.
• 
  'Nathan Burgoine

  I read these when I was nine/ten years old, voraciously devouring them and re-reading them over and over. My grade five teacher saw how much I loved them, and brought a "how-to" book to give to me, and I remember writing one of my own. It was probably terrible. Still, these books were one of my gateway books to reading non-stop for most of my childhood.
  
  I personally owned this one and freaking loved it. It also had a "rumoured" end that you was supposed to be a utopian world you couldn't get to by choice, only by fate. I hunted and hunted through this book, trying all manner of paths, until it clicked and I just looked for a "the end" page I hadn't gotten to and - sure enough, there it was. With no way to get there. Get it?
• 
  Scott

  I loved the CYOA books. There were many imitators, but this line was always the best. And this one was my favorite of them all, because it had a unique twist.
  
  You are repeatedly told that the Eden-like planet you are trying to find cannot be arrived at by following any directions or rules. I tried every choice possible, but noticed while flipping back and forth that there were a few pages that nothing else seemed to lead to.
  
  Then I realized what they had been telling me.
  
  Yes, it's really quite clever, and rather mind-blowing for a kid.
• 
  Lucas

  A lot of these CYOA books require a certain about of cognitive dissonance because different paths chosen in the book result in completely incompatible versions of the reality of the story being revealed- this was especially true of UFO 54-40.
• 
  Marts (Thinker)

  What is fun about these books is that the reader actually becomes the story's central character so you get to make decisions and create an adventure. You can end up reading one story in many different ways.
  
• 
  J.M.

  This is a personal favorite of mine from my childhood. I would spend hours reading it, trying each different path to see how the story ended. Whatever happened to "Choose Your Own Adventure" books anyway?
• 
  Sabrina Bellesbach

  I'm only giving this 4 stars because after I paged through to make sure I went through every scenario- I landed upon finding my way to Ultima and I thought the creativeness in that whole concept was brilliant!
• 
  Ben

  I was extremely engaged by this book, and angry that I could not get the ending I wanted!
• 
  Zack

  A cool spaceship, and monsters galore! Watch out or you may have a bad outcome.
• 
  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.
• 
  Chris

  Edward Packard is a genius. I want to read all his books - Chris Knoecklein, age 32