CYOA: #71 Space Vampire by Edward Packard

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

Well... I made a big deal about not having Space Vampire and kind of wishing that I had bought it. I did another search on the broader internet because I thought that the Abebooks, Amazon and Thriftbooks prices were all too high. And guess what? It was up on Scribd, a service to which I have an account. I was able to read the entire book online, in a high quality scan. I still don't have it, but I did just barely read the entire thing, exploring, again to the best of my ability to determine, every single branch and reading every single page. I think. Although I didn't buy a copy and add it to my stack in my old basement bookcase, I feel it's appropriate to review it, since I just read the darn thing in its entirety last night over the course of an hour or two.

I should probably do a small digression here and talk about Edward Packard and R. A. Montgomery. They aren't the only authors of CYOA books, of course, although one of the two of them is the author of a good two-thirds, probably, of the collection. The two of them probably jointly deserve credit for the Choose Your Own Adventure series overall; Packard seems to have invented the concept and written the first one, of course, but it was Montgomery's vanity press that first published it, and it was Montgomery's salesmanship (or his wife's, maybe) that got him a major contract with a major publisher (where he promptly invited Packard to join him). Without either of them, there's no CYOA series. And, like I said, they wrote most of the books between the two of them. Packard wrote 60 of the 184 books of the original run, as well as writing several other similar books in similar series (Which Way, Escape from Tenopia, etc.) while Montgomery wrote 37, and his sons wrote a couple more. Montgomery also wrote a number of the Choose Your Own Adventure for younger readers series, which I don't know very well (apparently the age range expected for the original run was about 10-14.) Packard is still alive, although he's now 91 years old; Montgomery was about five years younger, but he died in 2014 at the age of 78. When the CYOA series went big time in '79-'80, Packard was already nearly 50 and Montgomery was well into his 40s. 

Fans of the series sometimes talk about the distinct personality differences between them that are apparent in their work. Montgomery's books in particular are known for having multiple branches that often have little in common with the other branches. Some of the books in this series (including Space Vampires, for that matter) have a consistent premise, and regardless of what choices you make, other elements of the setting (and "plot" if you want to call it that) are consistent. Montgomery's books often did not do this at all. House of Danger for instance, which I'll review at some point, can be a story about time travel and Civil War ghosts, or it can be a story about alien invasion. Or it can be a story about talking chimpanzees who are counterfeiting money so they can drop it all over the world from egg-shaped space ships to destabilize economies all over the world. I'm actually not kidding about that in the least. Montgomery is also famous for making his adult readers feel like they've stumbled into some kind of strange acid trip of the most bizarre ideas that you've never before imagined because they're so crazy. As he matured as a writer in the series, he developed more consistency sometimes, but I do think that there was a fundamental philosophical difference between the two of them. While obviously not every CYOA is a science fiction story (although a very high percentage of them have elements of this, even those that aren't overtly science fiction in theme) the difference between pulpish "red sci-fi" and post-pulpish "blue sci-fi" applies I think to them. (See my earlier discussion on the concept here.) While Montgomery may have occasionally wandered outside the pale with his crazier ideas and structures, I always thought of him as the more cool and fun of the two. Packard was more likely to try and be a little bit smug and educational, using science more correctly and with almost the sense of a lecture thrown in, or exploration of weird philosophical ideas or a moral ax to grind, etc. But this isn't exactly fair; I mean, it was Packard after all who wrote the book that I'll (eventually) get around to reviewing today, in which you're a recent graduate of the Academy and therefore a member of the Space Force looking to stop an actual vampire on a space ship. Packard being "less fun" than Montgomery merely means that he sometimes has other considerations in addition to "what's cool and fun and gee whiz that I can throw in here?" which Montgomery was less likely to bother with. And yes, this diversion will come in handy as I continue to review these, but it also impacts Space Vampire, sometimes, as we'll see below.

I posted the cover art above, and as you can see the trade dress changed. As near as I can tell, the first volume to use the new trade dress was #70, which immediately preceded this one. While the cover art is probably technically superior, it lacks the charm of the earlier stuff and somehow comes across as very generic. This was a step downward, in my opinion, and one of the signs that the series was starting to get tired and lose its way. Plus, what are those two kids looking at? The door is open right next to them to outer space and a vampire is walking in, and they are looking a something else to the side? What is so compelling that you'd ignore imminent death to watch it instead? I know the 80s was before the time of DVRs; maybe they thought that if they missed that episode of Miami Vice they'd never be able to catch it  again, or something. "Hold on, Mr. Vampire and explosive decompression. I'll get to you when there's a commercial break!"

Interior art is by Judith Mitchell. She's not one of my favorites from the series, although I have a fondness for Paul Granger and Ralph Reese as the iconic CYOA illustrators that makes me see almost anyone else as "not right." I also tended to gravitate away from the artists who were soft and feminine in their style. Ahem. See image to the right. Big calf eyes and long eyelashes aren't made scary by the weird teeth and bushy eyebrows; it still looks soft and silly. Granger's and Reese's style were pretty cartoony rather than gritty or realistic or dark or edgy, but they were consistent with the tone of the stories, and in my opinion they are iconic. The look of this book is a serious strike against it.

When you start, you end up going through several pages of text before making your first choice, although it doesn't feel like "frustrated novelist" syndrome, I think Packard just really wanted to set up the premise and scenario/setting a little more than some of the other books where you can pick up the gist of what's going on without any context setting. Curiously, the first choice has an option to, basically, "ignore the vampire and go do something else." Of course, if you pick that, you end up having a vampire stowaway on your ship anyway, so you don't really ever do what you think you're going to do, but what an odd first choice! That said, even though the "no thanks!" option is still all about the space vampire, it's also relatively small with only a few branches; the other one is the main thrust of the story. But the other one immediately gives you somewhat passive aggressive choices, i.e., you can make a choice to run away from attacking space pirates or fight back... but you can't really, because the Captain just wanted to see what you'd say, and he does what he wants to anyway. In fact, he demotes you and crocks your career if he doesn't like your answer. This same dichotomy is given to you a couple of other times, most notably if you don't really like being the bait in his absurdly dumb plan where you fall asleep and count on someone else to freeze the vampire with a force field right as he's about to attack you.

There's a few interesting options where you're kind of pissed off about being busted back from your potential for not agreeing with the Captain and attempt to win back favor by stealing an experimental new ship and going after the vampire on your own, although none of the branching endings along that path work out for you, unsurprisingly. You can kind of tell after a while (sometimes) what the authors are likely to think a "good" choice is and reward you for it, a what they think a "bad" choice is and lead you into a mess. In fact, it's a complaint of some readers when "good" choices have "random" bad things happen to you that you have no control over. I disagree with this; I think the impact of random chance makes these books interesting, and I very much dislike subtle indoctrination to "be safe and do what you're told is always the right thing" vibe that sometimes runs through these. No doubt two years of ridiculous covid nannying has made this seem more obnoxious to me than it would have thirty or forty years ago, though.

While the "main" thrust of the plot is dealing with a ship that's got a vampire on it killing everyone on board and headed towards Earth, there are other ways of encountering the vampire, and a couple branches even have you travel to "Akbar 5" the home planet of the vampires where vampires live in peace with each other because the oceans are made of blood so they have no need for conflict due to the vast, endless expanse of resources. At one point, there's even a paragraph or so digression about this aspect of the vampires, although luckily Packard didn't go all "let's feel sorry for the monsters" here and pull back from the fact that they are, in fact, monsters who prefer to prey on human flesh for their food. In fact, one aspect of the book I liked was that there were several moments where you may have thought you were doing something quite clever and fooling the vampire only to find out that he saw right through what you were doing and outsmarted you instead. Sometimes this was obvious, and anyone reading should have seen the red flags of "don't do this, it can't possibly be a good idea!" but a lot of times that wasn't the case, and choices that might have seemed good in the context of what usually works in these kinds of books didn't actually do so here. I thought this was actually quite novel, and few of the books in the series would do that with any regularity.

There were some "blue sci-fi" moments, where the details of how much air, food and water you had mattered, or other engineering or physics details. This never really rises to the level of a meta lecture on science to the reader, but it occasionally felt dangerously close to veering into that territory. Although once it was used for kind of comic effect; when almost out of air and food you land at what you think is a space force base only to find out that it's empty and there's a big "COMING SOON!" sign on it. Presumably you die shortly after that.

The book also doesn't shy away from the reality of vampire attacks at times. In the 80s, violence on what was "kids entertainment" was often seriously censored and undercut. Despite the popularity of Star Wars with kids as young as five (like me) with arm-lopping and burned up skeletons of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, most of the similar entertainment that you'd find elsewhere couldn't manage to have a decent shootout or swordfight without making it crystal clear that nobody was ever actually getting hurt. The CYOA books weren't as bad as some on this, because from the very beginning there was the assumption that bad choices had the potential of your own ignominious death somewhere. But it's rare that you'd see the crew of your ship killed by a vampire and left a withered husk, especially as a direct consequence of a poor choice that you made. Not unheard of, but rare enough that it really stood out to me here when it happened on more than one occasion.

One interesting Edward Packardism is the presence of Dr. Nera Vivaldi, his favorite "NPC" from the series, who serves as a convenient stand-in for any sciency exposition need, in at least one of the branches and its attendant choices. However, she seems to have been "recast" from her appearance in every other book; instead of having sensible shoulder-length black hair and being young to middle-aged in appearance, she now looks like your grandmother, including with a white grandma cut hairdo and a saggy old-person face. lolwut?! Did Judith Mitchell just not get the notes and went her own way on the art, or what exactly happened?

Anyway, in reading this book I:

• Died as my space suit ran out of oxygen on an asteroid in the middle of nowhere.
• Got busted back to a boring assignment on Pluto, but promised that I'd still be the hot-shot space ace that I wanted to be.
• Got court-martialed and sent to jail. More than once, actually.
• Successfully beat and killed the vampire several times in different branches. One odd one has me feeling sorry that it had to be done. Not sure why and that came out of left field.
• Died due to hull breach and decompression, taking the vampire with me. Twice.
• Was killed on several occasions by the vampire, or even other vampires.
• Hurled into the sun with the vampire. At least I didn't die alone!
• Let the vampire escape on Earth, where presumably he'll have a heyday killing people left and right.
• Was responsible for an entire spaceship full of vampires heading for earth, and the story ends with me hoping Space Force has what it takes to stop them.
• Got turned into a vampire myself.
• Convinced the vampire king Sangfroid on the vampire planet that they don't actually want to come to our solar system (curiously, they are under the mistaken belief that Mars is covered in blood is the main reason that they wanted to come in this ending.) Vivaldi and I part ways on relatively friendly terms with the vampires, expecting that there's no reason they'd ever come to Earth, or earthlings ever go back to Akbar 5 either one.
• Steal the vampire's ship, thwarting their earth invasion plans, and then discovering that me and Nera Vivaldi will have to make the three month long trip with nothing to eat but dried blood. Ha.
• Drifting in the darkness of outer space, presumably lost forever. Although in one ending, I did get found by one of my new friends who knew I were around here somewhere, just as I was about to run out of oxygen.
• I'm given some garlic early on; in only one of the endings does this foreshadowing come back, and I manage to use it to thwart the vampires on the vampire planet. Curiously, I get here by making a lot of "wrong" choices that get me demoted and busted back as a loser, only to, at this last moment because the ship's cook gave me a little bottle of garlic, get hailed as a hero and promoted to command of my own ship.

I wasn't quite sure how Packard would handle the concept of science fiction and space travel and vampires, and I had been curious about that for years, when I remembered to remember the question. However, he did the simplest thing that he could have, probably; just treated them like normal vampires in almost every way, with the assumption that the sun's light is weak enough beyond Mars' orbit to not harm them. I'm not yet sure if I think that's an admirable solution for its elegance and simplicity, or if it's disappointing for its banality.

Although I did actually think the text was one of the better books in the series, I don't think it's worth the inflated price that it seems to be selling for. And honestly, I was sometimes frustrated by the lack of "objectivity" in the text; Packard seemed to think that certain choices were "obviously" better than others, and the whole of the setting would turn against you in a way that didn't feel random, it felt petty and passive aggressive, if you made the wrong ones. This was kind of weird; in most past volumes of the series, having something bad happen to you was part of the fun, but here it somehow didn't feel very fun, it felt arbitrary and somehow borderline preachy. 

Pretty highly recommended, with the caveat that only if you can get it for a reasonable price that's on par with where most of the rest of the volumes are selling. At the price it seems to be going for, I wouldn't buy it, even for the nostalgia bait.