CYOA: #3 By Balloon to the Sahara by D. Terman

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

Douglas Terman has a much more interesting biography than either Packard or Montgomery, having spent time in the military as a fighter pilot and as a sailor. He also wrote military novels, and helped open a Caribbean resort. His Wikipedia biography suggests that he met Montgomery and Packard (as well as other writers) while living in Vermont, and may have been asked to help write this one to meet demand as a favor to his friends. In any case, it's the only one he wrote, and it has a few quirks as such.

Terman wrote his choices a bit more wordy than either Packard or Montgomery, and put more emotion and description in them. Whereas Packard may write "If you choose to turn right, turn to page 61","If you choose to turn left, turn to page 78" Terman would have you flip a coin, and give you the following options: "If it's Heads, steer your rowing boat into the right-hand passageway and hope for the best on page 61.","Tails it is. Well, let's hope that the coin was really lucky. That rumbling of falling water sounds awfully close. You guide the boat into the left-hand passage and float downstream to page 78."

Terman also had a lot of bouncing back and forth. He makes individual read-throughs stretch out longer than the book might indicate (117 pages) by having multiple entry points into certain branches; there are, I believe, three different entry points to the choice of a red, white or green door in a cave, and several other branches have multiple entry points as well, lending the book a kind of looping feel. There are, according to the cover, 40 possible endings, which is quite a few for this kind of book, honestly, meaning that each read-through would normally be fairly short. However, because of the looping and multiple entry points into some of the same content, the individual read-throughs may be longer than you'd think, but repeat read-throughs will send you into a sense of deja vu, even if you make different choices.

I have a 1982 8th printing, and the cover price was $1.75. It was illustrated by the ever illustrious Paul Granger. He illustrated the second person "you" as a blond kid, who looks to be about 14-16 years old, but you are also with your two best friends Sarah and Peter, who look like twins with dark hair, and of course your little dog Harry. Again; the idea that young teenagers could hop in an old-fashioned "Around the World in 80s Days" style balloon in France and cross the Med to gallivant around north Africa is kind of absurd, but in kids adventure books, you don't think too hard about that kind of stuff. It is interesting that at almost every single moment, your two friends are with you. You really are a triple protagonist ensemble rather than a single protagonist like you are in most of these books.

The theme of the book isn't as tight or strict as some, either; while you start off in a balloon heading south across the Mediterranean from France, you may not even end up in the Sahara at all. There are some branches that have you simply out at sea doing stuff. In addition, the Sahara is built up as a place of impossible mystery and exotica. You've got secret government labs (who's government, I wonder? I guess as a kid I probably didn't think that), pirates, bandits, and quite a few aliens, and even an analog to Captain Nemo, as the submarine on the cover art hints at. 

Foolishly, this isn't one of the CYOAs that I kept from my childhood, and I had to buy it a few months ago on the used market. I remember thinking very fondly of this one and missing it quite a bit as one of the better titles, but now as an older, middle-aged man revisiting his childhood and nostalgia-baiting himself, I'm not so sure. I found that the breezy and playful writing style was kind of refreshing, but the bouncing around to unusual themes, like aliens who need salt, and pirates who only hunt whalers because of ideology less compelling than I guess I did when I was younger. I shouldn't be too hard on it; at my age and with my reading experience, none of these books is going to win me over with its brilliance, even those that honestly were my favorites, but somehow I'd built this one up in my mind as somewhat better than I thought it to be here. But because of that relativeness, maybe it's more fair to compare it to the other three titles in the series that I've reviewed recently: Cave of Time, Journey Under the Sea, and Space Vampire. And I suppose compared to all of those, it fairs fairly well. Under the Sea strays into Montgomery's weird hippy acid-trip Stanley Kubrick's end of 2001 weirdness too often, but when it's not, it's providing much more exciting red-blooded boy's adventure; shooting lasers at Atlantis, leading revolts against tyrant kings, getting eaten by giant fish, sharks or squid, etc. Cave of Time is a bit less trippy, but the idea of traveling in time, seeing dinosaurs, weird Brave New World futures, Medieval knights, the Thirteen Colonies, etc. is pretty exciting on its own. And Space Vampire also offers a more exciting sci-fi concept, right up my alley when I was a kid, but also sometimes messes it up with the "be safe and do what you're told" moralizing. Although I really like the gonzo sci-fi concepts, and always have, I do also appreciate the more down-to-earth types of adventure; like flying a hot air balloon over North Africa. Except that we get the gonzo sci-fi concepts anyway. And the idea of three friends and their dog just going on a road trip of sorts of exploration is kind of chill and cool without it having to be two-fisted action all of the time. Granted, in the late 70s and early 80s when these were written, they weren't watered down and mommified too much, but they weren't really all that into two-fisted action either. Half of the time, you're portrayed as a kid in a world of adults.

Come to think of it, there aren't really a lot of more down-to-earth concepts in my collection. There's probably some selection bias, but at the same time, I have (or at least had, in the case of #12) every single title between 1 and 25, and most of the rest of them up into the 30s, and then even a few beyond that. There's a haunted house story, a classic mystery, a spy thriller, and a western... but most of the rest of them either have a science fiction or fantasy-like concept, or heavily introduce those concepts anyway as major options within the book. 

Anyway, I read—I believe—every single page of the adventure in a read-through, and had some of the following endings happen to me:

• drowned in the Mediterranean, but if I didn't want that, I could go on and have someone come save me (odd structural way of doing things)
• all three of us drowned and then by implication were eaten by sharks
• drowned again when our raft smashed on a reef
• eaten by aliens
• became an infamous whale-saving pirate
• became a regretful whale-saving pirate who spent time in prison, but then wrote memoirs that prompted the governments of the world to save the whales (it's worth pointing out that save the whales was definitely what passed for a meme in my childhood.)
• became an unsuccessful whale-saving pirate who sank my own ship and everyone on it
• chopped down by desert nomads with swords
• somehow found my way into a rich sheik's private amusement park, and got sent back home to France
• got stuck in a cave with a mummy who wanted me to recount thousands of years of history to him because he's bored and lonely
• thrown in a dungeon where its implied I'm eaten by something with scary eyes that shine in the dark
• got worshipped by a primitive desert tribe because of Peter's flashlight, but I wonder what will happen when the batteries die...
• we get turned invisible by absent-minded mad scientists, but there's no reversing it. The three of us friends became invisible detectives
• figure out how to communicate with whales and I became a world-famous scientist
• buried under a snowy avalanche in the Atlas Mountains (which aren't exactly known for all of their snow, I might add...)
• found my doppelgangers in another balloon and got shot down by them to die screaming when I crashed to the ground
• found my doppelgangers in another balloon and shot them down instead.
• crossed the desert to the savannas beyond, and found some weird temple where they're expecting me and tell me the wonders of the universe.
• killed (BLATTED) by aliens
• got sentenced to ten years of filling out government forms, but died of boredom before I could serve out my sentence
• broke the valve on my balloon so that it continued to rise until I died of cold and asphyxiation
• settled down with some simple natives and enjoyed the simple life in a desert village
• almost drowned in a cave, but then escape at the last second
• got lost in the desert and died
• escaped the desert, had a movie made about our adventures, but secretly wished to return and have more adventure.
• discovered a lost city and became a famous explorer/archaeologist
• discovered a lost treasure, but then got trapped in a cave-in with the treasure. Whoops!
• found a stack of gold coins, but when I returned home, they'd turned into useless gray pebbles
• made three more friends who look human enough but are actually aliens, or people who have lived among aliens, or something. There's the promise that I can visit their planet when they finish growing up.
• trapped in a cage trap. Unless I decide that I want to let my dog rescue me, in which case it isn't really the end after all. Terman did this twice, as noted above.
• somehow fell from a cave passageway into outer space where I fell forever, I guess.
• discovered a gigantic freshwater lake underground, and brought news to all of the desert tribes.
• brokered a peace treaty between aliens and desert men, where they trade freshwater for salt. Became a famous negotiator for the UN.
• brokered the same peace treaty, but the aliens are a little disappointed not to go to war. They take us on a cruise around the solar system, but I have to travel coach, so it's uncomfortable and the food is terrible. (This one made me laugh.)
• My dog becomes a famous movie star, instead of me, and he buys a mansion and feeds me bones, because why not? He likes them so assumes that I must too.
• got buried in a cave-in
• joined a foreign legion analog, and became fabulously wealthy after writing a novel about my adventures
• enslaved to years of hard labor by the foreign legion
• escaped the desert and got funneled into what sounds like a lead-in to Journey Under the Sea. That was a fun touch.
• found a weird tribe of blue people in the mountains. They wouldn't let me leave, because they don't want to be found, but I liked living with them after all.

Overall, the tone of this book is a bit more playful and whimsical than some of the others. As a fan of red-blooded boys' adventure action stories, that wasn't necessarily what I was always in the mood for, but it's nice because it's a bit of a contrast to most of the other titles in the series. Revisiting all of the endings for the bullet-point list above warmed me up all over again on this title. It is a fun one. It may not be one of the real classics; I tend to like the ones with stronger themes as real classics, but it's one of the better ones nonetheless. And if nothing else, it's nice to see a one-and-done author put out an entry early on. Later, as the two main authors presumably struggled to keep up with demand, they invited some others to write books on a more regular basis, like Richard Brightfield or Julius Goodman, but at this point, they were still experimenting, and the series still had just a bit more of a garage band feel to it rather than a very regular and corporatized series, as it became later.

After this long break, maybe it's not fair to assume that I'll continue shortly to #4, but if I do, it's Space and Beyond by Montgomery, and has a lot of the Montgomeryisms you'd expect. This was in the wake of the initial Star Wars success, so the concept of space adventure was highly in demand, but because Montgomery wrote it, it was often very strange...