Faster than Light

Space Hawks Choose Your Own Adventure #1

by Edward Packard, Dave Cockrum (Illustrator)

Earth falls victim to an enigmatic, advanced race whose space fortress is moving closer all the time. Faster Than Light features a special introductory price of $1.99.

Genres: Choose Your Own Adventure, Fiction, Science Fiction

10 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 1, 1991

About the author

Edward Packard attended and graduated from both Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He was one of the first authors to explore the idea of gamebooks, in which the reader is inserted as the main character and makes choices about the direction the story will go at designated places in the text.

The first such book that Edward Packard wrote in the Choose Your Own Adventure series was titled "Sugarcane Island", but it was not actually published as the first entry in the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. In 1979, the first book to be released in the series was "The Cave of Time", a fantasy time-travel story that remained in print for many years. Eventually, one hundred eighty-four Choose Your Own Adventure books would be published before production on new entries to the series ceased in 1998. Edward Packard was the author of many of these books, though a substantial number of other authors were included as well.

In 2005, Choose Your Own Adventure books once again began to be published, but none of Edward Packard's titles have yet been included among the newly-released books.

Reviews

[Evan Kingston · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this in a toy trunk at my cabin and picked it up to kill an hour, and was severely disappointed with how little actual choosing went on in these books. I remember thinking a whole world of possibilities was inside each time I picked a choose your own adventure up, but there were really only a few choices in this book, most of which just funneled you back into the path regardless of what you picked. When I've gone back and read other books from my childhood, like the Narnia series, I've been surprised to find even more depth there than I remember and intrigued by what I clued in to as a child--but this just made me feel like I was duped. Clunky prose and weak plot aside, this felt like a con job.

[Nate · Rating 1 out of 5]

White people in space with a special introductory price of $1.99! I don’t understand why any kid would want to read a Choose Your Own Adventure book with so few choices to make....

[Ashutosh Sahu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect book for someone who is five or six years old and a precocious reader. The comments on here are from people who read them when much too old

[D.M. Dutcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent for a choose-your-own adventure, with great comic-style art by the legendary Dave Cockrum.

You're a trainee learning to fly one of a twelve new FTL ships. Your decisions will determine whether you die in the attempt, wash out of the program, or achieve your goals. The story is good, but suffers from the attempt at packing two separate tales into one slender book. Your training is basic, and you also attempt duties as a space hawk if you succeed in it. It ends on a "to be continued" note when it probably should have just stuck with training. The art though is excellent retro-style comic book goodness; Dave Cockrum is known for his work on the X-men, and his style perfectly fits the book.

[Josiah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book and the ones that follow are a departure from Edward Packard's typical style in the Choose Your Own Adventure entries in that there are markedly fewer choices for the reader to make, and therefore fewer storylines to potentially follow. The result of this, however, is that each story is written with much more depth, and there is more of an opportunity to get to know the characters and introduce more peripheral people than in most of the series. I enjoyed this book.

[Sheila Read · Rating 5 out of 5]

the adventures that I went through when I was bored I just read these books over and over again you would never get to the end of the story.