When I first discovered the series, I naturally gravitated immediately to this one, because it's a space adventure, I was an 8 year old boy, and it was smack dab in the post Star Wars era; right as Empire Strikes Back was about to be or just had been in theatres, and stuff like Battlestar Galactica was on TV. However, I'm not really sure that those are the best analogs for this book. I had said in some earlier reviews that it was a space opera, but that's not really true. It's more a first contact adventure that's considerably more science fictiony in a more traditional, blue, "smart men with screwdrivers" kind of way. This wasn't nearly as compelling a story as space opera to me, and in some ways it's even less so now. Sadly, the Choose Your Own Adventure series really wasn't all that interested in space opera, even though it launched in a gilded age of Star Wars-inspired derivative space opera. It wasn't until #22 Space Patrol by Julius Goodman that we actually got what can pass for an honest to goodness space opera, and CYOA only dipped its toes in it occasionally (one of the very early reviews I did in this series, Space Vampire also by Edward Packard is one, curiously. It's also #71 in the series.)
When I was in Argentina years ago, I popped into a small bookstore in Buenos Aires, and found Spanish translations of the Star Challenge series, by Christopher Black. It's only a ten book series, and I only have 5-6 of the titles, but those are all space opera. The Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks series had four within the first 20 titles, even though it mostly focused on fantasy (as the series title suggests). Even the Endless Quest series by TSR, which was mostly focused on Dungeons & Dragons themed CYOA type books had two titles based on Star Frontiers space opera game by the time it is in the mid-teens in number of books. (As well as two titles based on the spy game Top Secret and one based on weirdo post-apocalyptic game Gamma World that was a kind of Thundarr the Barbarian setting, with sword & sorcery influences pretty front and center.) It always seemed odd to me that Packard and Montgomery seemed to avoid the genre. I suspect that, like many from their generation, they simply assumed that it was too frivolous compared to "real" science fiction. Looking at sales numbers of science fiction over the decades, that's a very hard position to defend. Space Opera was popular. Smug anti-space opera science fiction wasn't, at least not with mass audiences. It would have been even more difficult to defend this point of view in the wake of the success of the original trilogy Star Wars movies and the many, many derivative space opera titles that were successful in the movies, TV, and books in the early 80s.
That said, that's probably too much detail about what the book is not. Just because Third Planet isn't space opera doesn't mean that it doesn't offer a decent experience, and a much better spacefaring story than Montgomery's Space and Beyond (which you'll remember that my review of was not very positive.)
You're part of a mission to track down some signals received from the titular planet, on a spaceship called Aloha with a four-man crew, counting yourself. It's kind of an odd crew, you've got Bud Stanton, a leaner version of the Paul Grainger illustration of a dark haired big chinned manly fellow, but you've also got Henry Pickens who looks vaguely like Einstein's significantly older cousin or something. Seriously; the guy's illustrated like his in his mid-80s at least. He has no business going on a space exploration mission, even if he is super smart. And it introduced one of Packard's favorite "NPCs", Dr. Nera Vivaldi, a sensibly dressed lady scientist with shoulder-length black hair who I believe is meant to be attractive. The protagonist, i.e. you is illustrated to look like a slightly androgynous 14-year old boy with Hardy Boys length blond hair. It's another one of those "best not to think too much about it or ask" who thought sending a teenaged boy who's still pretty short and physically underdeveloped on a space mission.
We still haven't gotten to the A and B story trees format yet at this point in the series; there's basically one story about antimatter storms threatening to destroy the planets of Altair, so funky aliens are coming to Earth as refugees—or colonists, perhaps. It's not actually clear if their intentions are friendly, although I believe we're supposed to assume that they are.
Curiously, there aren't very many endings that feel really all that successful, if you know what I mean. I mean, there are plenty where you survive, and several where you make first contact, but even those you usually feel like you're being rushed off by looming antimatter storms, and you're often specifically told that you didn't complete your entire mission. There's also much less acid trippy 2001 stuff in this book than in Montgomery's two books so far, but since you saw a bit of that in Packard's The Cave of Time, it's not surprising that there's some here too. Aliens take you to another dimension, which Packard conveniently doesn't tell you anything about because the story stops. It's a bit of a shame; this was the very first title that I was drawn to, by the title itself and the cover art (people say don't judge a book by its cover, but a good cover is the best sales-pitch a book can make) but reading it again recently, I've found that I don't think that it's aged as well as I'd hoped it would. It's not bad, but it just isn't really quite as exciting as one would hope for it to be, unfortunately. And I kind of always felt that way about it; I desperately wanted to like it, but never did as much as I thought that I would.
Some of that weird trippy stuff should be evident from the back cover, honestly. As you can see, the sample choices that it shows you on the back talk about being captured by alien beings, flung millions of years into the future through a time warp, or having you witness the creation of the universe. It's unusual that both Montgomery and Packard seemed to be inordinately fascinated with the beginning and the end of the universe; both Space and Beyond and The Cave of Time featured them, and then we get them again here. And I thought flying all the way to the third planet from Altair only to discover that there were very uncompelling aliens there, if you could even meet them at all, and that the whole place was imminently going to be destroyed by a natural disaster wasn't all that cool; in my imagination, going to the third planet from Altair was all about discovering a fantastic and awesome adventurous new world. Maybe I built the book up in my mind to be something that it wasn't ever likely to be able to be, so I was bound to be disappointed in it.
What's my recommendation to the would be collector? I actually recommend getting it, in spite of my complaints about it. What I'm really complaining about more than anything is that I wanted it to be something that it wasn't ever trying to be (although Bantam were smart enough to make it look sorta like that's what it was going to be) but it's reasonably good at what it actually is; a slightly harder (but still for kids) blue science fiction first contact fantasy. It's also an interesting slice into a fairly specific time and place and style of science fiction that is significantly different than the genre is today. It echoes a lot of the Campbellian stuffy science fiction stuff (see link above) but written for 10 year olds, and making just a brief nod to the success of neo-space opera in the wake of Star Wars.
Frankly, even before Star Wars made a bunch of crappy product and turned off the majority of its fanbase, people who weren't nostalgia-baited by it (like I was for many years) had pointed out that it wasn't really all that interesting or even well-made compared to what it was built on; it's biggest success factors were 1) it was visual media with modern (for the time) special effects, when the closest visual media analogs were old Buster Crabbe serials from the 40s and 50s with super cheap special effects, or weird boring acid trip or cynical dark movies like 2001 or Silent Running and 2) it was bringing back a genre that nobody was making stuff in anymore, even though there was a lot of pent-up demand for it, which Lucas and Kurtz recognized. But again, this is more like Close Encounters of the Third Kind than it is like Star Wars.
As I read through the book, I had the following things happen to me:
- crash landed up in the arctic region, and although it's specifically said that I have training and provisions, that I probably am stuck forever.
- I vanished and was absorbed into some alien consciousness from Deneb 5. Twice.
- Pickens and I landed on a cliff, but somehow the rocks were like quicksand, and we sank and died.
- headed back to earth after getting just enough data to recognize that aliens would be waiting for us when we got there. Several times, actually. This was kind of disappointing, because I never met any aliens, and we did very little exploration; we showed up, found something within a very short window, and then went home.
- found aliens, and then the story stopped.
- got picked up by some beach balls on spindly legs in a crystalline Death Star, but they seemed friendly as the story ended.
- grandpa Pickens and I shorted out our ship trying to laser cut our way into a crystal dome, and had to wait, hoping Stanton or Vivaldi came for us, even though we had no way to signal them.
- got eaten by a gigantic brown amoeba under the sea.
- traveled back to earth with Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, and wondered if I'd gone forward or backwards in time and what I'd find when I arrived.
- got eaten by an elephant-sized giant rat.
- blew up my ship and died.
- took some touristy pictures with furry aliens and Easter Island heads, but had to hoof it back to earth so I didn't die from some alien germs.
- got stranded hundreds of millions of years in the future, and had to hope to find a new planet to live on.
- just disappeared mysteriously. That was a weird one.
- got blasted into another universe.
- got sucked into a black hole. While Vivaldi was optimistic and theorized that we might travel through it, Pickens threw the cold water of realism on this naïve hope.
- escaped a black hole and went back home, where I was given a medal even though I never even got the planet and failed every single mission parameter that I had. Thanks for the bizarre consolation prize, Packard!
- somehow went to the beginning of time, but turned into a spirit version of myself that was going to be born later when my time came, so... OK, I guess?
- shot a missile at an alien something or other in space, but because my ship was traveling as fast as the missile it blew me up. You'd think someone would have checked on the design for exactly that possibility before my ship had missiles installed...
- Vivaldi and I got killed by some kind of defense mechanism of an alien computer room.
- Pickens and I nearly blew up our ship, and we had to limp crippled back to the third planet, hoping that Stanton and Vivaldi could survive until we got there.
- blew our ship up firing a laser at a crystal dome under the ocean. Hey, waitaminute.... I already did that in Journey Under the Sea!
- got captured by very cartoony looking aliens who want to tell me what to do all the time.
- fled the planet after poking around for a while; or really, while someone else poked around because I didn't volunteer to leave the ship. Pickens and I were lucky to keep our ship from being destroyed and to pick up Stanton and Vivaldi who had all the real fun. We'll come back when some kind of antimatter storm shields are developed.
- You escaped the cartoony aliens, but Pickens has some kind of emotional metaphysical epiphany about the fact that aliens actually exist.
- I found a weird crystal alien ship, but when I could see that it was about to blast off, I chickened out and left it. Never saw any aliens, but it looks like the ship is heading towards earth.
- Got stranded on an alien ship and procrastinated getting into hypersleep until for some reason I couldn't anymore. Then I was so lonely and bored that I just died.
- Ship ran out of gas and I crashed into the water moon and died.
- me and the whole crew got stranded on Altair. I guess I wasn't really all that good sometimes at preserving the ship for the return voyage...
- after a weird time-slip attack by aliens, I was able to bail out of the time travel stream. Pickens died, Vivaldi and Stanton are stranded on the third planet from Altair, and I'm who knows where in space and time and now with a crippled ship that I was barely able to limp to some primitive planet to live out the rest of my life on.
- found some aliens in cryo-chambers, but then had to leave. Never talked to them.
- somehow traveled to the end of the universe, and made hopeful remarks that maybe I'd see the beginning of the next one instead of it just all stopping.
- found aliens, but they were literally walking out the door before their planet got destroyed. I decided to travel with them instead of my crew back to earth.
- met an alien briefly, but then had to hoof it back to earth. Vivaldi was all talking about the next mission to come back, but Pickens again with his cold water of truth told her that there wouldn't be a third planet of Altair to come back to after the antimatter storms got through with it.
- went into the hibernation chamber with Vivaldi. When we landed, she was super unobservant, talking about making a new life on a new planet, while I'm noticing the crumbled Coca-Cola can on the ground.
Next up are the last two of the Edward Packard run, including Deadwood City which is another early book that actually predates the Bantam series. While I read that when I was a kid, I didn't gravitate to it at the time and never bought it until recently, so we'll see what I think of it now.
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