Item - The Red Rocket

The Red Rocket may have my favorite death in all of the interplanetary spies. If you plot a course wrong, you wind up at an interstellar hamburger stand. But of course, it is a camouflaged space monster which ends up eating you. It's accessible from a few branches. This pushes the fatal encounter with an GRXXQZYP monster into second. Yes, even as an adult, I enjoy names with no consonants.

This wonderful silliness aside, there's actually a good deal of seriousness in the Red Rocket. You are sent to hash out a tenuous peace between the planets of Pallax and Zavril, who are disputing a moon called Muron and its deposits of Volanium. On the way, you are distracted towards the Sargasso Sea of Space. This is its own little mini-adventure, with an old enemy you didn't know you had. Orbyn turns out to have been the leader of the robot rebellion on Robot World, and he's back and mad. Well, for a robot. You wind up setting a bomb and escaping the city just before it blows up. The race against time has been done before, in Ultraheroes and Doorna. Here it's a bit more tense, since you're being chased by some pretty peeved robots. After all, it's your fault they are in that mess. One of the puzzles here I found funny: you can choose wires that light up "DIE" or "SPY" and both play to Orbyn's laughing-villain act. It's the only lesser of two evil choices I can recall in the series.

There's a point to this distraction, and though objectively the coincidence involved would require an Infinite Improbability Drive, it puts together a good story. You wind up having to lead the peace negotiations, and the puzzles actually blend in pretty well. The interesting thing here is that some bad endings aren't really deaths but just failure and your part to negotiate, which isn't actually related to dialogue choices, but more about finding stuff. There's also one puzzle I liked where you had to figure which molecules could bond together.

However, there's something in The Red Rocket that indicates that the series may be coming to its end. The ending bit has a long goodbye. My young self figured what was going on, and how it was at odds with the admittedly cool death ends. It's a recap of your previous missions. But the recap area was set up by people that actually like you. So it's a bit inconsistent even if it is fun to visit things. It's a bit sad on re-reading, but it felt like the book stuffed in a few cool puzzles that just didn't fit elsewhere. Also, it's a bit odd to have replicas of some old foes reveal a clue, but after the passage of real time, I do look fondly back on them.

Yet even though the end bit takes up one-quarter of the book, the rest has enough story and pace that Red Rocket is in the middle of the BaIS when I rate them. It has the least violent conflict of them all, but boy howdy some of the endings are still cool and weird and a bit disturbing.

More reviews by andrewschultz

As noted by Demian, there is significant continuity in this book with almost the entire series, as at one point you wander through a museum featuring all of your past missions. The attempts to tell a story of peace and harmony among the homicidal life-or-death riddles is certainly brave. The final revelation in the book sits pretty uncomfortably with the fact that you were nearly killed on numerous occasions.

More reviews by Aussiesmurf

This book refers back to almost all of the previous books in the series; it's a direct sequel to Robot World and it draws characters from various other stories. Apart from this it is fairly unexceptional.

More reviews by Demian

Agreed with Demian: Unexceptional. I also found it to be not as memorable as books 10 and 12. The illustrations seemed sloppier than #10, which was done by the same artist.

More reviews by Dtar