Item - Mission to Microworld

Mission to Microworld nicely balances new stuff with a look back at some old hits. It's up there with Robot World, just behind Star Crystal, if I had to rank the BaIS series. It gives a bad first impression, though: you wind up skipping a couple of puzzles early on due to a typo! (I have to admit, I figured out what was up and felt smart for that.) You need to go to page 8, not 6.

You are sent to the world of Parno, where a metal droid named Electron has taken over. He's delightfully evil, and the citizens he represses are, well, just likeable little ant-human types. He's got this trident which zaps the target of all its energy, and of course you are on the wrong end of it if you make some bad choices.

I had a lot of fun with Mission to Microworld, because you also had a neat little story where you tried to rescue some civilians, weird bug-eyed ants who walk on two feet, from a villain called Electron. He's really effective, a metal Droid with a trident that zaps you and drains all your energy. And that's how a lot of the endings win up, but you also can get turned into a statue, crushed by molecules or, in two separate endings, blown apart by musical soundwaves for very different reasons. You even fail to help the resistance elsewhere. To start, you have a message from your robot droid friend from The Galactic Pirate, who has gone to look for a planet called partner which apparently isn't there. It's truck down to a very small size, and you have to, too, to figure what's going on. While the physics may not be super-rigorous, I really did enjoy running through the exotic world, seeing the sort of civil war going on between Electron's goons and the civilians, and figuring ways to get by. There are intimidating machines, a prison, a garden of lethal plants and even a two-page flying fortress (Electron's, of course!)

Mission to Microworld had no super-dazzling moments, but on finishing it I just thought, man, that was really good. The mystery at the start is cute, and then it combined solid puzzles with catchy drawings, an effective antagonist, and people or at least entities to actually fight for. There wasn't too much nostalgia for the past books, either, but the references to your biodroid friend was welcome. There is an appearance from someone else familiar, too, at the end.

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One of the less memorable books, although inter-series continuity again gets a nod, with characters from book 3 reappearing. Seth McEvoy was running out of puff here, as yet another maniacal super-villain didn't really add much to the proceedings, and the innovations of book 6 are sadly missing.

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Due to the presence of the biodroid and Dr. Cyberg, this is something of a sequel to Robot World. Although this use of series continuity is interesting, the rest of the book is average.

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