Thinking furiously you turn to page 15.
In the house where I grew up, I shared a room with two older brothers.
Paul liked science-fiction This was sci-fi.
It was by Harry Harrison, and it was one of his Stainless Steel Rat novels.
Actually, it was a very special one, an odd one.
But we’ll get to that in a second.
It was a game book.
A book aimed at teenagers, at least, with a cover that promised easy access to carnage.
That would have been enough for me.
I’ve spent the last few hours re-reading and re-re-reading.
And it’s fascinating stuff.
As a Choose Your Own Adventure affair goes, the story is hardly a reach.
You don’t need dice, either, although occasionally you’re asked to flip a coin.
Harrison takes his job seriously, up to a point.
But beyond that point you get to see him - what?
A combination of the two?
There’s lots of stuff like this.
Not poetry, but bits where you might see Harrison pushing against the boundaries of the form.
He tells the reader to learn Esperanto at one point - a bit of a Harrison preoccupation.
Along the way, I think Harrison makes a really interesting discovery.
High Ridge is a story of ghost cowboys and Native Americans fighting over an old mining town.
In another you flee the town, or die fleeing in yet another.
But actually what they advertise is endings rather than deaths.
You might lose a fight and just die.
You might trigger a one-hit trap and that was it.
The story would end with no meaningful form, no pay-off, crafted or accidental.
It would be abrupt and a bit pointless.
Harrison gets around this quite simply.
I don’t think you’re free to even die in this book.
I’ve been playing for a while, and I haven’t died yet.
Instead, what happens - and this is sort of brilliant really - is you get lost instead.
There’s also something quietly instructive.
You get stuck in one of these paragraph mazes when you’ve ceased to focus.
So: playful or bored?
I am tempted to say playful for the most part.
