Space and Beyond was my selection for a choose-your-own-adventure novel, a decision that I began to regret in retrospect because the further I read into it, the more I grew a dislike for its very unplayful imagination. For a book which seems to get its intrigue from the endless possibilities of the final frontier is from front to back a bucket of cliche platitudes and half-baked pseudo-scientific philosophies. Like many choose your own adventure books, it features me, as a space voyager grown to the age of adulthood within a matter of hours due to interstellar gravitation. I am presented with my first choice to follow after my father and visit his home planet doomed to destruction, or my mother's troubled planet, but this is only the first of many diverse choices leading to -- given the setting -- infinite possibilities. Here in the lies the main problem with the narrative: the scope of the possibilities completely spoils the results. The inability to properly and summarily express the interesting nuances of each pocket of the universe and present them in a cause-and-effect narrative way that children would understand makes the story fall flat and uninteresting.
Among the final results of this book is a choice to travel to an unknown period in time is this vague, heady sort of hippie-esque bromide: "When you arrive on Mars, you are invisible and can travel through space, through solid matter, and even into the thoughts of people. What is the cause of revolt on Mars? Who knows. Greed? Famine? Envy? Jealousy? Maybe just an instinctive need to battle, a basic drive to test and fight for the sheer sense of fighting. It's too complex. Everyone has a different answer." The incessant level of questioning to the reader seems to pass off all responsibility of the author to incite our imaginations; it isn't playful. If the nature of play is a call-and-return, then R.A. Montgomery has gone post-play, expecting the reader to fill in every blank, and every plot-hole. Or perhaps, like too many other choose-your-own-adventure authors, he's not expecting the reader to read at all.
The Brobdingnagian scale of the narrative lends no literary justice to the setting and conflict, and particularly its relation to the reader. The use of second-person storytelling rarely gives proper respect to the presentation of facts to the spectator. Too rarely forgotten is the nature of storytelling, which requires an engagement with the storyteller, but since the opinion's of the author are reserved, or inserted into the spectator's conscience, we lose all sense of personal cognition. It's like listening to someone cascade blame upon you, saying "you did this, you do this!" and being complicit in the events that take place. As we soar deeper into the beyond, our relation to previous events, places and people are made completely meaningless. For instance, between a choice of joining ground combat or air combat with an alien force, you accelerate through an epilogue into existential crisis. "You think to yourself, is this any kind of life, forever destroying things? Maybe you will quit. The end." Children gain knowledge and motivate themselves for linear scholastic endeavors with circular or unstructured playtime, but without any relation to reality, there is no perspective to reel themselves in and out of real life and fictional adventure.
If any fault is to be had with this narrative, it is the intense workload with which Montgomery had tasked himself in 2005. He wrote some 15 books during this period, and at practically 70 years old. Less than a month was spent on developing these stories, so it's no surprise that this particular stories was published practically the way it was written in stream of consciousness absurdity.
No comments:
Post a Comment