#4. Space and Beyond -- A CYOA Apparently Ghost-Written by Stanley Kubrick
Bantam Books
This book kicks off when you're born on a spaceship traveling at 62 times the speed of light, which causes you to grow into an 18-year-old in just three days and two hours, because the theory of time dilation states that shut up, you bought this book from a catalog with a maze on the back.
Bantam Books"Can I choose a galaxy that wasn't named during Drunken Scrabble?"
There's no time to explore the implications of hyper-aging (does your mind age as well, or is this aBig scenario in outer space? If it's not a Big scenario in outer space, are we free to write that screenplay?) because you're immediately booted off the ship to zoom around from planet to planet, with 44 bizarre endings that are a combination of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a bleak Matthew McConaughey rant. You can fly your spaceship into a black hole and live there with the black hole people, or you can fly your ship at beyond full speed and merge with the undying void of space somehow.
You can become a space pirate, but then all your riches are rendered pointless when the universe abolishes money.
Bantam Books"Thanks, Galactic Obama."
Some of the endings just give up on the story -- and apparently life -- altogether:
Bantam BooksA dozen cyanide pills later, Captain Planet painfully gurgled, "The power ... is out,"
before slipping away forever.
But then there's the one. The one that will haunt our nightmares until our dying day. We're talking, of course, about the planet of old babies.
Bantam Books"When I was your age" stories lose their punch when you were their age 30 seconds ago.
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