“The Emperor Nero likes brave fighters. He does not like comedians.”

I’ve read many glowing reviews of the Storytrails gamebook series, which appears hard to come by and tends to fetch outrageous prices online. This could owe to the fact that they were hardcovers rather than paperback, a novelty for the interactive fiction genre (which is a novelty in its own right, really).

So I figured if I wanted to give these books a shot and add them to the blog, and if I’m forced to pay three figures to do so, I may as well grab one of the anthologies! The cover pictured above is the original cover for today’s gamebook, Terror in the Fourth Dimension, courtesy of Demian’s Gamebook Web Page. Below is the format in which I acquired this book, the Storytrails Book of Science Fiction, which contains not one, not two, but four different Storytrails books in a single hardcover volume. This is fantastic, given how short these books turned out to be.

Allen Sharp wrote these books in the 1980s it appears, and based on what I’ve read so far, he did a bang-up job. I’ve expressed my disappointment many times regarding gamebook authors who bank on the novelty of the gamebook format to get by, rather than using the format to provide a fun and engaging reading experience. Mr Sharp succeeds in the latter with flying colors.

Terror in the Fourth Dimension is a bit of a misguided title, though. It’s not so much a terror as it is an adventure in the same vein as H G Wells’s The Time Machine, with an intrepid explorer taking the first voyage through time in human history.

This goes about as well as you’d expect. He gets off on the wrong foot immediately, bumbling to and fro across the space time continuum just trying to find a place to park. Several destinations are uninhabitable due to minor inconveniences like toxic atmosphere, nuclear holocaust, or the earth having not been born yet. If you’re real lucky you’ll get to make a brief detour in the age of the dinosaurs and nearly feed your ship to Gwangi.

The biggest centerpiece of the story is getting stranded in ancient Rome, during the days of Emperor Nero, from which there are several ways to escape. By that I mean several branching paths that all kind of lead to the same resolution, and even involve copy-pasted chapters with little to no difference between them besides which pages you turn to. After that you get one last hurrah, and two possible endings, both of which are interesting and reasonably satisfying.

The writing is very much above average for this kind of book. It has a more mature feel to it than most books of this genre, and uses first person perspective rather than second, which is refreshing. Somehow that actually makes the story more engaging, since the narrative doesn’t expect me to take on the role of a nebulous hero I can’t relate to. The hero of this story feels like a real guy and some of his insights are interesting, especially in the book’s endings (there aren’t any game overs in this book). It doesn’t shy away from bloodshed, either. Sometimes it’s kill or get killed.

Your choices in Terror in the Fourth Dimension fall into two categories: sometimes you get to use the time machine console to change time periods, and sometimes you just make bold choices to ensure your survival in the moment. The time machine gimmick is pretty cool, and offers you a grid console with page numbers to see what time period you travel to next. Many of these are dead ends that force you to pick another option, but they really help immerse you in the time travel premise and make up for the linearity of this adventure. Many of these dead ends are two-page spreads with detailed artwork to complete the illusion.

And forget about the refined time travel of the Time Machine gamebook series, or even Master of the Past! Time travel in this universe doesn’t rely on silly things like “precision” or “course plotting” or “predicting roughly what date you’re traveling to.” No, Sir, you click a button, the machine takes off, and you have no idea where you’ve ended up until you look out your window. Driving through the fourth dimension based on a roll of the dice really sells the “first time travel experiment” premise, and makes it kind of hilarious at the same time.

The adventure is a very brief affair, with 37 or so chapters spanning two pages each. It’s an interesting format, designating each two-page chapter as a “page,” but I kind of wish the adventure was a little longer and allowed me to make a few more pit stops in unusual eras. Maybe I could get stranded in feudal Japan Shogun-style, or become chieftain of a tribe of Neanderthals, or prevent Hitler from escaping into the future.

There is artwork in the book, but it’s very limited outside of the handful of dead ends in the time machine. John Storey’s illustrations are quite detailed and eye-catching the few times they’re used, especially this excellent rendition of the court of Nero.

The biggest disappointment is the linearity, which I partly blame on the book’s length. A longer book would allow for more time periods to visit and a more fleshed out adventure overall. It would have helped, too, if a couple of the Rome chapters weren’t copy-pasted to account for a slightly different choice in the arena battle. Those chapters could have been used for at least one more time-detour. Maybe the post-human Planet of the Roaches everyone keeps theorizing about?

Whether I recommend Terror in the Fourth Dimension depends on who you are. If you’re a gamebook collector and you can get your hands on it for a price within the realm of sanity, go for it. It’s depressingly short, but it has some interesting takes on the time travel trope. I wouldn’t mind reading a series of short adventures with this Burroughs-esque protagonist.

If you’re just looking for a cool gamebook adventure, the rarity and staggering prices these books offer aren’t worth it, especially due to the short length and linearity. It’s not that it’s a bad book, it’s just too brief and too much a rarity to be worth the cost for a casual reader.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.