CYOA: #1: The Cave of Time by Edward Packard

https://darkheritage.blogspot.com/2022/02/choose-your-own-adventure.html

I pulled down my aged, yellowed copy of The Cave of Time and because I had enough free time to do so, I read it through a bunch of times. In fact, I read it enough to catch all of the branches, I think. I skimmed through pretty quickly when I was done, and I'm pretty sure I hit them all. I'm not sure what I expected; I mean, I fell in love with this book when I was eight or nine years old. I'm a bit surprised that it held up well. I expected the text to be brief and punchy, and that was always a strong point for the CYOA series. If the CYOA authors started acting like frustrated YA novelists the books suffered. (As the reviews go on, I know I'll have at least one with this problem.) Give us a crazy high concept, throw some weirdo ideas at us, and make us make a choice. That's all this series needs to work.

My well-loved copy in all of its beaten up glory

What did surprise me, though, is that in hardly any of the branches does the actual concept of the Cave of Time really get described. You're expected, I presume, to catch up because of the title, and when they refer to the Cave of Time (in caps, as a proper noun) author Edward Packard assumes that you've figured it out, even though there's no reason your character, i.e., the second person YOU referred to throughout the book, ever would. But there's a lot to be said for this. Like I said, I wasn't reading The Lord of the Rings yet at this age; I was reading Bunnicula. I don't know what I expected, but like I said up top there a little, some high concept and some crazy ideas, and then move on to the next one; don't spend a lot of time developing it in detail. You're supposed to be excited by the wave of crazy ideas more than anything else, not entranced by the prose or the loving detail given to setting the scene or developing characters. Even a coherent plot kinda defeats the purpose to some degree.

With those expectations firmly in place, I found that The Cave of Time was pretty good. There's a few unusual CYOA tropes, like being off visiting an aunt or uncle with no mention of parents. I don't know what the assumed age of the second person protagonist is, but with Paul Granger's illustrations, you come across as middle-school looking, I think. That was always a bit of a shady detail that it was better not to think too much about, given that you're often wandering alone in dangerous environments. I mean, you start off in Snake Canyon by yourself, hiking I presume, in the backcountry of your uncle's ranch somewhere.

My copy is pretty beat up, even compared to other CYOA books in my collection. I think either my younger brothers or even my own kids at some point got a hold of it and did kind of a number on the spine. I've taped the binding with some clear tape, but pages are threatening to come loose even so. And the book's cover is noticeably faded, and the pages noticeably yellow. But this was a mass market paperback. My copy was the 11th printing from June 1981, and it retailed for $1.50 according to the price printed on the front cover.

The series had an interesting start, and before Bantam took a hold of it and turned it into a household name, several "prototypes" were printed, by either small, local New England presses, or by Archer. Books that were part of this prototype period later went on to become Choose Your Own Adventure entries, and include #62 Sugarcane Island, #7 The Third Planet From Altair and #8 Deadwood City in the late 70s. But for whatever reason, the first book in the series was this one, and it was written by Edward Packard, one of the two main authors of the series for most of its run, and the inventor of the concept. As you can see from the front cover, there's plenty of exciting potential there; a weird Medieval king with a big beard who never actually appears in the book anywhere (there is a Medieval king, but he looks nothing like that!), a dinosaur in Monument valley, a Chinese warrior from their own feudal period, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. 

The cover art is by Paul Granger, who also did the ink line art in the interior. Apparently that's a pen name; for some reason, he illustrated a couple of later versions of books in the series under his real name, Don Hedin. His work is kind of cartoony and stylized, but I always thought it thoroughly appropriate for the subject matter of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and to be honest with you, I've never really liked anyone else's illustrations as much as his when other artists started to get thrown in except for Ralph Reese. His style was different, and yet similarly cartoonish, if that makes sense. It fit the concept equally well. In fact, when they changed the trade dress and art style, my interest in the series waned precipitously. The whole package of how it was when I was introduced to it became part of its success, at least for me personally.

My cover says that you can choose between 40 possible endings. I didn't count them, but I notice that covers of earlier printings within this series say 39. Did they add a new one and revise the text, or is one of the two of those an error? Structurally, this one is perhaps a little on the primitive side, but it works for the concept. By that I mean that some more "advanced" CYOA titles had a single main plotline, and different choices gave you more detail and further fleshed out what was happening, without contradicting each other in any ways. Others had an A story and a B story (and occasionally a C story) depending on your first choice, and the two branches explored the high concept in very different ways. The Cave of Time, on the other hand, just had you continually popping in and out of the Cave of Time, and ending up somewhere that felt mostly kind of random; your temporal destination having little bearing on what you decided to do. The decisions mostly either moved you from one time to another, or had bearing on your success or failure while in a particular time. I actually quite liked the idea that if you ended up somewhere you didn't want to be, you could usually pop back into the cave in a few pages, or less sometimes, and get zapped somewhere else to try your luck there. Mostly these were unique, but there's a few places you could get to through more than one point.

There are plenty of "good" endings where you end up back home where you started, there are plenty of "decent" endings, or maybe some of these are even good, where you end up in some other time and build a fun and exciting life there instead, there are a few endings where you end up somewhere and aren't sure how much you want to be stuck there, and of course, there are plenty of endings where you die horribly. Some of the endings include:

• At least two endings where you make a new life in Anglo-Saxon England nearly a hundred years before the Norman invasion. Although they just treat it like "generic Merrie Olde England."
• Another one where I get hanged from a tree by the king's men in less-than-merrie olde England.
• Two where I go so far into the future that the sun is a swollen red giant about to die.
• Three endings where I talk to some timeless old philosopher who sends me back home.
• One where the timeless old philosopher sends me into WW2 and I get killed by a bomb almost as soon as I arrive.
• Two where I live with cavemen in the Ice Age for the rest of my life.
• One where I go home, but although only a few weeks have passed for me, everyone else is a dozen years older.
• One where I'm on the back of a mammoth who's driven off the edge of a cliff and an astounded paleontologist thinks my bones look shockingly modern for someone who died thousands of years ago.
• One where I linger in a strange Brave New World-like future, not quite settled, but never able to put my finger on exactly what's wrong with everyone.
• One where I'm eaten by some kind of giant bug-looking thing. Not even sure if that's supposed to be the future or the past.
• One where you end up living in a tropical paradise surfing in the ocean and never actually find out if you're in the future or the past.
• One where you get killed by a snake in the jungle while trying to find the Cave of Time to go home.
• One where you're on the Titanic as it sinks, but you escape in a lifeboat. But you're stuck; your exit is on the ship somewhere. Whoops!
• Several where you bring a plesiosaur egg home, and either it gets stolen. Or you give it to a scientist. Or you put it in an incubator, waiting to see what's gonna hatch out of it yourself.
• One where you bring a cute girl your age back from the future and she gets stuck in your time. How YOU doin', Louisa?
• Several were you get home just fine and everyone wonders where you were for a few hours; in one you later write a book about the Cave of Time.
• One where you get captured and conscripted to build the Great Wall.
• Eaten by a saber-tooth.
• Eaten by a T. rex.
• Eaten by the Loch Ness Monster
• One where you're on a semi-submerged reef and can't find any other sign of land anywhere.
• One where you're stuck in the Battle of Britain.
• Several where you end up in Colonial or Westward expansion United States, running a printing press, or a soap manufacturer, or some such. Sometimes this is happy and exciting, sometimes you miss home and are always looking for clues about the Cave of Time again.
• One where you become a reporter in the 20s or 30s or something and have a good life, dying of old age just a few years before you're born.
• One where you meet Abraham Lincoln, but then are stuck in the 1860s. You find that no radio, TV or constant bombardment by pop culture is kinda nice.
• One where you go so far back in time that there's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere yet and you die of suffocation.
• One where you bring a Colonial fellow back with you because he's dying of tuberculosis and he believes your bizarre time traveling story. He ends up becoming a professor of history famous for his knowledge of Colonial America.

This was exactly the kind of weird, exotic, fantastic high concept that made the series so successful, especially in its earlier entries. Sometimes later the themes of the books became too focused and you couldn't do all that much that felt very different. This is related to the "frustrated novelist" problem that marred some of the books. 

If you're a 50 year old man, like me, then you're not likely to get too much out of this other than a sense of nostalgia, remembering that sense of wonder when you first read these forty or more years ago, and maybe the seed of an idea that can be built into something else. These are hardly high literature, or even something that will be remembered by future generations. Heck, it's already been mostly forgotten except by people my age who read them as a kid. But given that I did in fact read these as a kid and have really fond memories of that, I found that my nostalgic trip through the Cave of Time was pretty fun. A worthy use of a spare hour or two. I suspect that most of the other ones that I actually like will be good for the same reason, and these reviews might start to get repetitive. But we'll see. 

UPDATE: I may keep doing this, and in fact, I may do them out of order. I have #2 and #4, but I long ago lost #3. I have it on order, but if I really go through these fast, I may not want to wait for it to arrive.

Obviously, I don't have the entire series. But I ordered most of the ones that I used to have but no longer do, with the exception of Inside UFO 54-40 which always kind of disappointed me, even when I was a kid. I also ordered at least one that I never had, but which is seen by most fans as one of the best ones. I also always wanted Space Vampire and its sequel Vampire Invaders. I almost bought that when it was new, in 1987, but by that point I was more like 15 and wasn't really buying CYOA books very often anymore. I wish that I had, though. For whatever reason, that sells for $30-40 bucks, which is more than I paid for all 5 of the others that I ordered combined. I can't bring myself to spend that much money on a book that I probably won't really like all that much. I have no idea what it's really about other than that vampires are apparently a race of aliens, but that sounds cool enough to me. If I'd bought it in 1987 when I was a teenager, I'd still have it today. Sigh.

If anyone wants to send this to me, or if you find it at a better price than that, let me know. I'd be up for some Space Vampires.