Starship Traveller

Boldly going where no Fighting Fantasy Gamebook had gone before, Starship Traveller marked the series' first foray into the Science-Fiction genre. It was also the first Sci-Fi FF I owned, though several more had been published by that point. Opening up the series to other genres obviously increased the potential for new and exciting adventures, but will it be case of 'one small step for Fighting Fantasy' or, will it end up as simply one step too far.

As a book

Two things caught my attention when I first got this book. One of them was the fact that it was considerably shorter than the other FF gamebooks I had previosuly read, clocking in at 340 references as opposed to the usual 400. This is, sadly, rather emblematic of the book as a whole: there's not much there. 

The premise, in fairness, is solid enough. You have inadvertantly travelled through the Seltsian Void (a black hole) which turns out to transport you to an unknown region of space (the book suggests that it's an alternate universe). Naturally, you want to get your ship and crew safely back to Earth. It's a simple plot, but it's a good enough way to set you up as travelling through totally uncharted territories.

Unfortunately, most of what you encounter on your journey will make for very dull reading in the lengthy report you'll have to give to your superior officers once you're safely back home. There's very little sense of the part of space you're in feeling very 'lived in'. There are quite a lot of planets you can come across, but each one feels like a very isolated affair. Inhabitants on one planet will sometimes namedrop another, but that's mostly as far as it goes with respect to creating a feeling of a 'galactic community'. 

This approach to universe-building is legitmate, of course, and would no doubt work just fine if the opportunities you do get for exploration and first contact are enjoyable. As it is, the reduced paragraph count leaves little room for fleshing out these planets. The actual writing is not brilliant, either (I guess writing Sci-Fi just isn't Steve's thing and as a result, many of the places you visit are somewhat unmemorable. The aliens you encounter are usually reasonably well, conceived, but the nature of the book, plus the sub-par implementation of the structure, leads to a general lack of character in those you meet.

There are exceptions - the more dangerous environments you can find yourself in tend to also be more enjoyable, but overall, it's a long way from being the exciting voyage of discovery that it could have been.

As a game

The other thing that caught my attention when I first played the book was the completely different look of the Adventure Sheet: in this book, you don't only roll dice to determine your own attributes, but also for no fewer than six senior officers of your crew, and for your ship itself. There are also separate rules for different types of combat: hand-to-hand (normal FF combat), phaser and ship-to-ship. All this might suggest a more complex adventure, in mechanical terms, than other FF books, but, in part due to the compressed nature of the book, the new mechanics rarely come up and feel tacked on as a result (which is a shame, as they're fairly well formulated). Ironically, for a book with so much dice-rolling in the pre-adventure stage, you can actually win without rolling a single die once you've started! 

The mechanic by which you find your way back to your own universe works pretty well. You have to discover the co-ordinates of the black hole that will take you home as well as the date on which it will appear, and several red herrings can be found, making it not unlike the keys from The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Whilst you do need specific correct information to win, parts of the book can be explored pretty freely without missing anything vital, which is good from a design standpoint. Not knowing whether the information you find is correct until you reach the end also adds more fun to replays than trawling for a specific named object you know you'll die without.

It's also quite a fair book as far as instant deaths go - there's a handful scattered around but their generally not especially arbitrary. Difficulty certainly isn't the issue with this book.

The art

Another negative, I'm afraid. The illustrations certainly look sci-fi-y in style, but for me, too many of them are too lacking in detail or just don't depict anything interesting. They're not all bad, but they're a step down from illustrations in the other books I've reviewed so far

Overall

A disappointing entry into the series. As a child, this book did still occupy me well enough, but I enjoyed it markedly less than the other books I'd played at that point. It hasn't improved with age. As shame, as with some more effort and a bit of a rework this could have been a solid and unique gamebook. As it is, it's a 2.5/10.