Harry Harrison and game books this morning! Have a lovely Sunday!
In the house where I grew up, I shared a room with two older brothers. I was a nosy kid, and I have a lot of happy memories of looking through my brothers' books and whatnot while they weren't around. One day - this is decades back; I can at least remember that it was sunny - I found a paperback that my brother Paul had picked up somewhere. Paul liked science-fiction This was sci-fi. It was by Harry Harrison, and it was one of his Stainless Steel Rat novels.
I have no idea why I started to read this book back then - other than I would have been very young, and the whole thing struck me as being pleasantly illicit. A book aimed at teenagers, at least, with a cover that promised easy access to carnage. That would have been enough for me. I can certainly remember why I kept reading, though: far from going over my head - although I'm sure some of it did - the book was charming and light, and the action, narrated by the Rat himself was often funny.
But within this traditional genre mount, I think you get to see something pretty special - something I hadn't noticed, for obvious reasons, on my first, all but forgotten playthrough back in the 1980s. It's this. Harrison takes his job seriously, up to a point. Numbered paragraphs. Choices. An adventure plot.
High Ridge is a story of ghost cowboys and Native Americans fighting over an old mining town. But as you pick through the book, the scenario gives way to many plots: in some you get killed by evil cowboys. In another you flee the town, or die fleeing in yet another. In one plot - a sort of master plot - you actually put an end to the ghostly curse on the town. There's a lot of reader death in High Ridge - it's something the books used to advertise on the covers.
There is a thrill here: it's the literary equivalent of an optical illusion, I think, that Harrison could create so many sections that worked regardless of the order that they're read in. There's also something quietly instructive. You get stuck in one of these paragraph mazes when you've ceased to focus. It reminds me very strongly of the Doldrums in The Phantom Tollbooth, which is not a game book even though it can feel like one.
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