I would bet that the majority of Americans my age have read at least one of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels, of which Edward Packard's Cave of Time was (more or less)* the first. I read this pathbreaking book when I was about nine years old and living in Albuquerque, a place I did not like. I found the sky too big, the desert ugly and bleak, the ubiquitous Mexican food too spicy and mushy for my amateur palate, the local people laconic and bony. I wanted to be back in the Northeast, and books, particularly fantasy books - I discovered the Chronicles of Narnia at about the same time - offered escape to a richer, more colorful, more refined environment.
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| Edward Packard, probably. |
Cave of Time offered paths to a new set of realities: the worlds of the past. It was not a comforting book: the possibly endings included being eaten by a dinosaur, enslaved by Han-dynasty warriors, or choking to death on a Precambrian Earth where "oxygen had not yet been introduced into the atmosphere." Yet the various adventure paths were all exciting, and they introduced me and others to the concept of interactive literature. They became a gateway to the obsessions of my teenage years, namely role-playing and computer games. The Cave of Time probably also introduced me to the notion that reading history could, like reading fantasy or science fiction, offer an alternative to living in an unpalatable present. Though the past could prove pretty unpleasant as well.
* Packard had written a previous second-person, dividing-paths novel called Sugarcane Island (1976), which he published with a small press. His publisher, RA Montgomery, then took the CYOA concept to Bantam; Cave of Time was the first offering in their new series.
