CYOA: #2 Journey Under the Sea by R. A. Montgomery

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

The second book in the series is Journey Under the Sea by the second author, R. A. Montgomery. Montgomery's a strange man with a strange history. I'm sure I read his biography at some point when I was a kid, but none of it stuck. I re-read it again just recently. He worked in administration for an Ivy League university, founded a summer school which he headmastered for a couple of years, founded an R&D company about which his biography says very little, consulted with the Peace Corps in DC and Africa, and of course founded Vermont Crossroads Press, a small (or even vanity) press that discovered and first published Edward Packard's prototypes of what would become the Choose Your Own Adventure series—and later became a bestselling author of volumes in that series when it was sold to Bantam. That's an awful lot of weird and disparate things to do in one's career; I suspect that many of those ventures actually failed, although his biography doesn't mention that. I wouldn't have thought much of it as a kid, but some of those are red flags of weirdness to me now, especially working in DC for the Peace Corps and in academia as an administrator. Be that as it may, he did write some of my favorite volumes in the series, and I always appreciated his style (that said, for many years I could have sworn that he was the author of one of my favorite early entries; turns out all along it was Edward Packard and I just remembered it wrong.) He was a fan of international adventure in weird Third World craphole countries, but then again, this was an era when that kind of exoticism was cool again because of retro pulp influences. Indiana Jones was hugely popular, TV shows like Bring 'Em Back Alive and Tales of the Gold Monkey were popular, so that was OK. What is less appealing is some of the weird tripe-hippy mumbo-jumbo that sometimes he inserts in his books, including quite a bit in this one. Back in the day, I would have thought it merely harmless nonsense, I now see in it the hubristic heresy of Babel; trying to build some kind of secular futuristic Utopia without any reference to true religion. 

Not that I expected my CYOA books to have doctrinally correct Christian themes, necessarily. But as I've aged, I have less patience for philosophies that make a big show of rejecting them all the same.

On top of that, Journey is kind of all over the place. I said earlier that that wasn't necessarily a flaw of Montgomery's compared to Packard; his sense of how to organize the books, I mean. But in this early outing, it feels a little bit all over the place. With very little explanation or exposition, you're immediately whisked off to choices, but you have little context in which to make them, so they feel a little bit random. In spite of this, you sometimes linger on something a little too banal to justify the attention; I made no less than half a dozen decisions back to back on what to do about a stream of bubbles coming from the sea floor, fer cryin' out loud before Montgomery finally let me resolve that issue. A shocking number of the decision points amount to little more than "do you give up yet, or do you go on?" Some of the give-ups bring you to an end, but not as many as you'd think. I think having better choices with a bit more context in which to make them would make the whole thing feel less like random coin flipping to see what happens next, which it sometimes feels like. 

He also did a few other structural things that were interesting, some of which informed later books or even other series, but others I don't recall ever seeing again anywhere else. One of these is that there aren't really two streams based on the base decision that you make first; whichever of the two you pick, there are loads of points in the branches that end up sending you back to the other one or vice versa. This reached its peak in the Tenopia, Kingdom of Frome, and Time Machine series in which there was only one ending and you just kept making choices until you figured out how to avoid looping back again and again into different areas and find your way out of it, like a text maze of sorts. Edward Packard wrote the first two of those series, by the way. Figures. There are also two places in Journey where you get to an ending, but below there is still some direction, telling you that if you don't like that ending, you can turn to another page and get an epilogue to it. One place has a choice; the first one asks if you want to do something, and if so, turn to page whatever... like normal. The other one merely says, If not, The End.

Plenty of hazards that you face in this book are what you'd expect from an adventure story about divers and submarine exploration; sharks, giant squids, whirlpools, etc. But the real meat and potatoes, if you will, is your attempt to discover Atlantis. Atlantis, in Montgomery's world, isn't a sunken ruin, but usually a high tech society living under the waves. Sometimes its aliens. Sometimes its trans-human David Bowman from 2001 weirdness, like people who travel time and space as disembodied thoughts. Sometimes they're people with gills. Sometimes they're feudal layabouts trying to overthrow a king who (it seems probably rightfully) thinks that they're kind of good for nothing and need a strong hand of leadership. 

Montgomery is a little all over the map with his interpretation of Atlanteans, and he has more than one interpretation make an appearance here, but it's obvious that his favorite and most developed is the "advanced" unexplainedly peaceful trans-human interpretation. Who, of course, are thoroughly evil and will only talk to you under threat and duress of kidnapping you permanently. Why there are several endings where you willing submit to this and are supposed to come to think that it's wonderful is something that I'll never understand, because my personality could never accept it. But the alternatives he offers are either cowardly or foolish, so there aren't any good choices to make when you end up in this type of situation, which happens a fair bit, actually.

I had forgotten that while the concept of this book intrigued me a great deal as a kid, especially when there were a lot fewer options to choose from in the series still, the reality of it always kind of disappointed me. Montgomery did get better and some of his later books are among my favorites in the series.

I had this in my original run of CYOA books that I owned, but I lost or sold it years ago. However, I also regained it somehow, after seeing it for sale cheap, I think, a few years ago. But then I never re-read it until now. My version is the 6th printing from March 1981. It has 42 possible endings (out of 117 pages, but some of those are full page artwork, and the preface warning is page 1. That's at least a third of the pages are endings which if you think about it is kinda crazy. 

Another curious thing about this book, and quite a few of Montgomery's books, for that matter, is that the second person protagonist is not portrayed or treated like a kid at any point. Paul Granger's artwork shows a manly dark-haired big-chinned classically American manly man kind of guy who is is assumed that there's a whole history of him developing expertise as a submarine operator and diver. This assumption allows for a greater breadth of storytelling, of course. Edward Packard never seemed to really embrace it. But it's crucial to the whole premise of this book. 

In terms of endings, I:

• Was eaten by sharks
• Eaten by a giant grouper
• Get the bends after a too rapid escape and have to drop out of the mission.
• Get crushed traveling to the center of the earth
• Break the dyke holding the sea from Atlantis and kill everyone in a gigantic flood. Complete with an all caps message that I MADE THE WRONG CHOICE!
• Killed by a poisonous sea serpent
• Give up and someone else discovers Atlantis instead of me
• Captured and detained by Atlanteans for the rest of my life. Several discrete times, actually.
• Give up but several months later, another group invites me to join their team to search for Atlantis, so I try again.
• Have an operation that gives me gills, so now I'm a permanent resident of the seas.
• Get stuck in an Atlantean zoo with a sad horse. Not kidding.
• Get blasted by some weird Atlantean raygun trying to escape. I end up rescued, but my eyesight is permanently damaged, and my career as an undersea adventurer is over
• Get caught in a storm and the submarine is damaged and the mission has to be scrubbed.
• Leave the Atlanteans rather than accept their demand to never return to the surface, but feel bad about it forever.
• Live with the Atlanteans in peace, but never able to leave. Several discrete times, actually
• Join a faction of Atlanteans who are the bad guys, and am sad about being stuck with a bunch of losers for the rest of my life.
• Become an underwater Atlantean farmer. Twice, actually.
• Become an underwater administrator for the king, and the most important person in the kingdom
• Rescued by a whale and brought to the surface where I am then rescued again by a helicopter. Twice, actually. There's actually a lot of me being a damsel in distress in this book, if you think about it.
• Lead a successful, bloodless coup against the king and become one of the Atlanteans, a hero of their Glorious Revolution. Twice.
• Saved by my ship when the choice offered to me was literally "if you don't know what you want to do turn to page 87." I'm shaking my head and chuckling at some of the ideas Montgomery had at this early stage.
• The mission is scrubbed and I can't go back, for reasons that Montgomery doesn't really explain. I just bailed and gave up, and that's that. I'm a loser.
• The laser canon on my submarine (don't ask) blows up because I overheat it trying to cut into Atlantis, and it destroys my entire craft and me in a brief fiery explosion. Which is no doubt immediately put out because I'm underwater.
• I manage to return to the surface, without my sub, but I can't find my ship anywhere. I drown in the middle of nowhere in the ocean. This also happens once where I do find my ship but I'm too injured to signal them and they don't see me.
• Saved, but nobody believes my crazy stories.
• Get turned into a being of light and thought against my will.
• Get turned into a being of light and thought with my express permission. Twice.
• Become Atlantis' greatest musician with some kind of stupid electronic instrument that you feel rather than hear. lolwut?
• Get fed a nice fish dinner by the Atlanteans and then packed away and told never to return.
• Captured by the Atlantean military because I stumbled into their military base. Prisoner for life.
• I go back to find Atlantis again after giving up earlier, but for some reason when I get there, it's come up to the surface.
• Vaporized by the Atlantean secret police because I'm plotting with revolutionary subversives.
• Spend 1,000 years as a being of thought and light and then return to Earth in my body again to find that society has become post-Apocalyptic, Luddite hippy farmers. 
• I give up my revolution against the king because Atlantis is about to flood. I spend a week along with the Atlanteans working double time to save it, and when I do I find that I don't care about Atlantean politics anymore. Not quite sure why I ever did, to be honest?
• Escaped Atlantis when the imminent flood distracted everyone and high-tailed it back to the surface.
• Arrested and imprisoned for life for my part in a plot to overthrow the king.

My weird stint as an Atlantean Brownshirt, as well as my acceptance of weird hippy guru "being of light" nonsense aside, the rest of the book has some pretty cool ideas in it. After reading it again many years after the last time that I did so, I'm convinced that it's not really one of the best titles, and a lot of its structural elements are pretty primitive and poorly conceived compared to things that came along later. But its not one of the worst either; it reads like it's Montgomery's first book in the series, which it is.

I do recall that Montgomery was kind of into weird eastern mysticism in a few other books too, like the one about yetis and Shangri-la, or whatever eastern Utopian fetish he made a part of that book. Maybe that was something that he was kind of in to and I didn't really notice it until now.