Item - Trouble on Planet Earth

This book is exceedingly silly and incoherent; there's little internal consistency, many events make no sense whatsoever, and the characters are mostly annoying stereotypes. The main redeeming feature of this book is that at times it's so insanely bad that it's quite amusing.

More reviews by Demian

Earth's oil dissapearing! Dear me!
Yes. It's great! If it weren't so weird, I'd own it by now.
Rating: 9/10

More reviews by Good

Science fiction meets environmentalism in Trouble on Planet Earth, a classically convoluted R. A. Montgomery gamebook. You and your brother Ned are international detectives. His extrasensory perception routinely turns up leads that solve tough cases, and you do the hard work of strategizing. What faces you now is a daunting challenge: all crude oil reserves on earth have vanished, which could plunge mankind into armageddon. Ned suggests you start investigating in Saudi Arabia, but your instinct is to head to Washington, D.C. and volunteer as assets to the U.S. government. Ned flips a coin to decide, but who will win?

In D.C. you meet CIA director Martha Thornberry, who fills you in on what the government knows. Some say a group called the Organization for World Domination is behind the missing oil, but a prominent scientist believes a nuclear accident is to blame. Pursue the OWD lead and a message comes in from an American agent named Boris, pleading for immediate help in Egypt. After arriving in Egypt, you're in a car when you notice a light flashing Morse code. Take a closer look and you might happen upon a murder scene, with a warning addressed to you. Will you listen to Ms. Thornberry’s demand that you give up and return to the U.S.? If you never went after the Morse code light, you and Ned run into armed guards at the facility that Boris infiltrated on behalf of the U.S. government. Bluff your way inside and you might extract Boris without anyone dying, but play dumb with the guards and you find Boris isn't as pleasant as you hoped. If you reached out to the scientist instead of looking into OWD, it may turn out a nuclear waste problem has doomed earth already. Avoid that, and you end up at an island that conceals an off-grid nuclear power plant, where a meltdown is underway. You'll be lucky to escape without being blasted to radioactive smithereens.

Head for Saudi Arabia from the first, and a man at the airport offers to be your guide. Dismiss his offer, and Ned gets drawn into a shop selling mandala paintings. Ned is fascinated and doesn't want to leave, but if you wait for him, he steps right inside a mandala. Follow him in and you'll see a surreal world where Ned seems happy to stay forever. Eventually he claims to have an answer to the oil crisis, but is he in his right mind? If you never followed Ned into the mandala, you discover that a man from the store has Ned tied up. The man is an alien from the planet Zermacroyd, come to steal your planet's oil to remedy Zermacroyd's fatal energy shortage. Can you thwart his plot? Had you accepted the guide's offer at the airport, Ned never sees the mandalas, but the guide isn't who he pretends to be. He's with Interpol, leading his own investigation. When you become separated from Ned and the Interpol agent and meet a man who promises he can help, he leads you into a building and orders you to forget the whole case. Sneak back in later, and you can search the room he took you to. Its technology is beyond anything you know, but maybe you can type in simple commands and find evidence pertaining to the oil mystery. You're in danger, but be smart and you might stay alive.

A common criticism of the original Choose Your Own Adventure series is that the stories are dry, so I appreciate R. A. Montgomery trying to give you and Ned a humorous rapport. Your age isn't stated, but you don't behave like adults, and some of the quirkiness is charming. The callback to Zermacroyd from Montgomery's Space and Beyond is surprising and fun. Trouble on Planet Earth isn't a good book, though. There are as many different explanations for the oil vanishing as there are main story paths, and most are silly. The book's first decision hangs on a coin flip, taking it out of your hands. Montgomery avoids political rants with one or two painful exceptions, but Trouble on Planet Earth is hardly a literary work of art.

More reviews by KenJenningsJeopardy74

This book starts out fine... for about two or three pages. Then it goes downhill. I can't say this is quite as atrocious as R. A.'s later installment Project UFO, but it's still pretty awful nevertheless. The plot is ludicrous to begin with - and events also differ depending on what path you take. The oil stealing can either be a hoax to get people to panic (thus facilitating the villains taking over the world) or actually aliens robbing Earth's resources for their own use.

More reviews by Stockton

Wow. Yeah. This is another R. A. Montgomery stinker. It just makes no sense whatsoever. Almost every ending leads to death, too. I can only remember 2 "good" endings, and those were just weird. One was that your goofball psychic brother connects the past and present while you're tripping out in a mandala so you can use the oil from the past... and the other one was that you get sent to another planet, put on trial for Earth's misuse of resources, and sentenced to live on the planet and learn from their people. Yeah, that actually seemed like a good ending compared to the others.

As usual, no internal consistency. For example, at one fork, the old man you are with runs towards the villain's lair. Do you follow him or watch? If you just watch, he gets shot within a few seconds and then you and the rest of the group try to run away but are eventually cornered and killed. But if you run after him, guess what happens? You'd think that you'd get shot too, or there would at least be shots fired at you, right? Nope. The volcano explodes and everyone dies.... Oh, R. A. Montgomery, you crazy fox.

And of course there are the nonsense cop-out endings. If you break off ties with the CIA, you flounder around for a few days and then turn to your brother and say, "Let's start all over." THE END. Basically R. A. telling you he couldn't be bothered to think up any more for that storyline, so just go back to the beginning and try again. Not that the other choices will be much better.

One star out of five. Did I mention that I dislike R. A. Montgomery CYOAs?

More reviews by yunakitty