The Time Raider

Twistaplot #1

by R.L. Stine, David Febland (Illustrator)

Chills, thrills, screams... — You find yourself at the control panel of the Time Raider, an amazing time machine. Push a button and you will hurtle forward into the future. Push a different button and you will sail back into the distant past. Which will you choose? — Will you choose to visit the future City of Silver where slaves on a spaceship beg you to free them from their evil master? If so turn to page 8.

If you travel back to prehistoric times, will you survive your encounter with the dinosaurs? Turn to page 82.

You don't believe that the Time Raider will work - but you are curious. Go ahead - see what horrors await you. In a TWISTAPLOT book, you decide which path to take and what will happen once you get there. The choice is yours. Happy travels!

Now young readers can beat R.L. Stine at his own game. This chilling Twistaplot reissue challenges readers to complete their own terrifying tale by selecting a truly gruesome ending from one of 20 different possibilities.

Genres: Time Travel, Gamebooks, Childrens, Role Playing Games, Science Fiction

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Robert Lawrence Stine known as R. L. Stine and Jovial Bob Stine, is an American novelist and writer, well known for targeting younger audiences. Stine, who is often called the Stephen King of children's literature, is the author of dozens of popular horror fiction novellas, including the books in the Goosebumps, Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, The Nightmare Room and Fear Street series.

R. L. Stine began his writing career when he was nine years old, and today he has achieved the position of the bestselling children's author in history. In the early 1990s, Stine was catapulted to fame when he wrote the unprecedented, bestselling Goosebumps® series, which sold more than 250 million copies and became a worldwide multimedia phenomenon. His other major series, Fear Street, has over 80 million copies sold.

Stine has received numerous awards of recognition, including several Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards and Disney Adventures Kids' Choice Awards, and he has been selected by kids as one of their favorite authors in the NEA's Read Across America program. He lives in New York, NY.

http://us.macmillan.com/itsthefirstda...

Reviews

[Weathervane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly good! Stine really uses his humour to good effect in this book, and the plot lines are creative and wacky enough to suck you in.

Be right back, gotta lay some eggs for the emperor.

[Aubrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

a delightfully absurd choose your own adventure book from the 80s.

[MiiriAm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me encantó poder decidir, recomendación del buen Dave

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this might still be the only choose-your-own-adventure book I've read, so take my opinion for what it's worth, but this was simple, straightforward (pun unintended) fun. I think the format means that it's almost impossible to have a really fleshed out, complex storyline with an actual character arc, but I've spent most of the past year thinking about interactive storytelling, so it was cool to jump around the pages trying to get a good ending.

The world building in each of the timelines tends to be quite thin, ditto the characters and conflicts. There were a couple conceits that were recycled (movie sets! malfunctioning equipment forcing you to choose the other path!), but there were also some really quirky happily ever afters and even the terrible endings were often portrayed so gleefully, it's hard to be too upset by any of them.

[Mjhancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Your uncle builds a time machine, and you accidentally wind up on its maiden voyage, travelling to either your uncle's childhood, pioneer times, or the far future of dueling and space emperors. Time travel is a common topic for choose your own adventure stories; it allows for the text to explore a wide variety of settings and choice, creating a diversity of experience that becomes harder for a book based on, say, a mountain expedition. It allows for easy looping (though not really practiced much in this particular book) and even has a metatextual element to it. That is, the reader of a CYOA book is performing a sort of time travel by revisiting their past choices, and deciding differently; a time machine is thematically consistent with that action.

This book is of particular interest because it's by R. L. Stine, author best known now for his Goosebumps series. This book was written in the 1980s, long before the heyday of Goosebumps, but he did return to the CYOA form with the Give Yourself Goosebumps series, and it's interesting to compare the before and after products. The big difference is tone; the GYG series tends to have a consistent malignant antagonist and lean a bit towards horror. Time Raider is more in the adventure category, despite the actual possible deaths--being trapped in the body of a bear, having your brain replaced with unfeeling circuitry, getting stuck in a ceaseless time loop--are generally pretty horrific. But the GYG are told with a little more bombast and acknowledge that these events are horror-laden, and that enough for a tonal shift.

The book itself is pretty typical for a time travel plot and choice set. It's actually a little bland; the past scenarios you can find yourself in are either frontier times or the childhood of your father, and the interest comes more from the possible interaction with a historic figure or entering a time loop, respectively. There is some thematic consistency with your uncle being a less than grounded scientist; the pendant that is supposed to act as a safeguard to bring you back to the time machine can malfunction widely, ranging from simple failure to bodyswap. It's a nice element to include; it creates a sense of safety to the process, even if it's largely illusory. I don't think I encountered this book in my old childhood, but I think I would have enjoyed it, as an acceptable alternative to the main CYOA series.

[Josiah · Rating 1 out of 5]

R.L. Stine's gamebooks are unique creations, bouncing between action that sometimes rivals the most exciting I've seen from interactive fiction, humor ranging from smart to slapstick, mild horror as good as anything from the main Goosebumps series, and pervasive silliness that softens the fright so even the youngest readers won't feel scared for too long. The Time Raider was the debut installment in Scholastic's Twistaplot series, and R.L. Stine was probably a good choice to be the first author, though he still was roughly a decade from boarding the runaway bestseller Goosebumps train that would earn him enormous fame and fortune. Time machines would factor in once or twice when R.L. Stine kicked off his own interactive novels series, Give Yourself Goosebumps, but here we get an early look at his treatment of the subject, with glimpses of the surprising plot twists that would later mark his most popular books.

You are visiting your Uncle Edgar for the weekend, and anything can happen when you're at his place. Uncle Edgar is an inventor, and many of his past innovations are downright bizarre (you don't even make it past page one before you're unable to resist teasing him about his failed underwater toaster). But this time your uncle is more excited than usual, and for good reason: He says he has invented a time machine, dubbing it the Time Raider, and wants the two of you to be his first test subjects. You have difficulty believing that even an eccentric brainiac like Edgar could invent a working time machine, but the vehicle really works; however, your uncle's scatterbrained disposition leads to your being sent through time without him. Now your only link with the present time is the green pendant Uncle Edgar put around your neck; squeeze it when you want to return home, and you should be back to your own time in an instant. The question is, will it work when you need it?

You don't have any choice about using the Time Raider, but your decision to go forward or back in time will have a major impact on what happens next in the story. If you journey to the past, you could meet your father and Uncle Edgar when they were children, as Edgar prepares to try out a new sled he's designed to attain optimal distance down the snowy hill behind their house. But be careful what you say to them; you don't come from their era, even if you appear to be their age, and bad things could occur if they become suspicious of you. Traveling to the past could also bring you briefly into contact with the Jurassic world, or to the American Frontier, where natural and manmade threats are just as immediate as anything caused by the metaphysical turbulence of your foray into time-space.

The future as portrayed in The Time Raider is a highly technologized place, with flying cars and crazy emperors and lots of ingrained culturalisms that make no more sense to you than ours would to people who lived two hundred years ago, and it's easy to die in a myriad of horrible ways before you can grab your green pendant and indicate your desire to abandon time travel for the moment. Think your decisions over carefully, but even if you're an astute gamebook manager, you're at least as likely to die as make it back to Uncle Edgar alive, so just go with the flow and see if you can't make a happy ending for yourself. If you get one on your first try, I'll be impressed.

The game mechanism in The Time Raider is usually as simple as making a choice and turning to the corresponding page, though some of those "choices" are based solely on luck, ruling out any benefit from the reader's strategic acumen. The way the story branches based on how lucky you are can be fairly interesting, though at least once your luck doesn't matter at all; even with maximum good-luck power, you die. Such is life, I suppose. But there are some intriguing storylines in The Time Raider, which is why I would rate it one and a half stars despite internal logistics that are frequently perplexing. I liked the ending where you travel to the past and rescue your father and Edgar from an icy, watery grave, even though it takes a little luck to reach the most positive outcome of that adventure. The feeling of reward you experience, watching your young father still living and breathing because of the heroic effort you expended to save him, is something most people will never have, even if you must go back to the present before revealing who you are. Scientifically speaking, it might be best that way. A few endings in this book made me laugh out loud, and I don't think I need to describe them; you'll be able to identify which ones they are when you read them yourself. My favorite storyline from the future lands you in a strange world where everyone moves and talks so slowly, you don't realize at first that they aren't frozen in place. Your choices from that point forward are all crucial, not only to your survival but to the future of this world's inhabitants, and each story path you take shows a bit more of what's really going on here, and what you should do to make things right. Internal consistency throughout The Time Raider is practically nil, and it's far from intact even in this most carefully considered branch, but the twists effectively grabbed my attention and made me want to read more right away. That's a good sign for any book.

The Time Raider is a nice diversion, and though it is illustrated, the story is mostly text, more so than the average Choose Your Own Adventure entry. That makes the book last longer than its ninety-four pages might indicate, even if there are several places where text is reused to join and extend multiple storylines. I wouldn't rate The Time Raider on par with R.L. Stine's best work from the Give Yourself Goosebumps series, but I had fun with it. I encourage others to give it a shot.

[Dope Ghost Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

R.L. Stine can be hit or miss, but The Time Raider, is actually a solid read. He balances the horror, humor, and science fiction very well surprisingly. For a Twist-A-Plot book, it could be a Hell of a lot worse. The writing is adequate enough. Now qualms really, just the fact it's a tad predictable. Everything else is swell. Plus, gotta love that cover!

[Daniel Souza Luz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Li quando era criança. Tenho outra edição, de 1985, também da Ediouro, com a capa azul (a ilustração é a mesma), mas com certeza com o mesmo conteúdo. Fiquei completamente fascinado, li todas as ramificações da história, e ainda tenho guardado o meu exemplar.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a huge fan of the Twistaplot series of books when they came out - even though I was a bit older than their target audience. In general, they are short and easy-to-read, with a whimsical sense of humor and fun fantasy scenarios. They avoided gendering the main character, which probably made them a bit more popular with female readers, although in general the kinds of "adventures" they described would be seen as male-oriented. The main characters are always kids, described as old enough to be independent, but not yet treated as adults by the society around them.

This was the first in the series, and as is usually the case, it suffers a bit from the inexperience of the author. Some of the choices you make will end your adventure very quickly, and the longer storylines seem to lose track of what you have or have not done before. The trips into the future are generally more fantastical and exciting than those to the past - it's kind of neat to imaging meeting your father as a boy, but that's nothing compared to fighting duels or deposing evil dictators. Because it is relatively short, it is possible to run through pretty much all of the possible storylines in maybe 12-15 readings.

Still, in spite of its flaws, "The Time Raider" remains a fun ride, which I would say has dated well and would still appeal to young people today.