Inside UFO 54-40

This book, along with The Cave of Time, made everybody my age in the early eigties want to choose their own adventure, either in this series or any of the other clones that it brought about. What UFO 54-40 teaches us is the blatant futility of aspiring for a perfect or utopian society unless we as a people learn to collectively cheat and read ahead in the book.

This is one of the few CYOA books that I felt deserved special attention. You learn and discover new things with every choice made, and things don't change willy-nilly just because you went left instead of right. What I mean here is the cause doesn't changes, only the effect. The endings are also concrete and mostly void of the abstract, questionable type. Take a look inside the ufo!

I was in third grade when I stumbled upon my teacher's (Mrs. Smith) copy of this book in our classroom. It was the first time I had ever seen a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. I was enthralled from the get go. As a young child, the ability to choose your path through the story made reading more immediately interactive (as video games purport to be today) and allowed someone (me) with a very low level of patience and attention span to learn to love to read. Above this, there is one very interesting fact about this book. There is an ending that cannot be reached by following the very foundational rules of the book. It must either be found on accident (by turning to the wrong page) or by systematically breaking down the book's paths and realizing one page has no connection to any of the others. It seems very elementary to anyone of any age and experience today, but it struck home to me then a very important lesson - follow your own path, break rules, don't accept anything as fact, dance to the beat of your own drum. Pretty empowering thing to learn from such a seemingly innocuous book huh?

I used to love these books as a kid, and even though invariably thought that those by Edward Packard were the best. This was my third favorite book, behind two other Edward Packard CYOA books Hyperspace and Survival At Sea. This book is only book in the series that also features a unique "special ending" that cannot be encountered through normal decision making. Can you stumble upon paradise?? Get the book to find out!Recommended for anybody who enjoys the Choose Your Own Adventure genre, and especially for kids who enjoy science fiction.

The greatest book ever.