Item - The Antimatter Formula

This is Jay Leibold's first entirely non-historical entry in the series, and it's quite good. The introductory section is particularly well-written, conveying the world's silence effectively and eerily and seeming almost poetic coming from a Choose Your Own Adventure book. While the story uses some of the most tired cliches of the series (eccentric scientists and KGB spies, among other things), it does so with enough skill to rise well above the material. Things are helped further by its sense of humor; it's hard not to chuckle at the choice on page 108, for example. Also worth noting is the fact that the boy in the illustrations sometimes looks sort of like I did when I was younger and had less hair. If I'd read this at the time, I imagine this would have increased the immersion factor a bit!

More reviews by Demian

This book is absolutely bonkers, but it doesn't feel like it cheats.

This reads like a spiritual successor to Hyperspace, but it doesn't have the meta qualities.

You start off waking up with everyone else in the world gone. You can choose to enjoy the situation, or you can try to figure out what's going on.

There's a clear antagonist. There are also bizarre universes to experience. The lighthearted tone of the choices leaves you with a better feeling about making a decision leading to death. You don't have any real information to make an informed decision.

It's also notable that this is well-written, and the illustrations are very interesting.

The worst part is that the title is a problem. I'd probably say that even The Antimatter Device is a better title.

More reviews by Jordashebasics

I don't describe many Choose Your Own Adventures as a breath of fresh air, but The Antimatter Formula is, a detour into weird science that hits most of its marks with discipline and panache. You awaken in your bedroom one morning and sense things are different. Your parents, both physicists at the university in Berkeley, California, are gone. Exiting onto the eerily silent street outside your home, you realize there no humans anywhere. Should you call your parents at the Berkeley science lab, or take the car from your garage for a spin through the deserted streets? No one is around to object.

When no one picks up the phone at the lab, you start worrying. Your parents are engaged in volatile research on antimatter; if it went wrong, could humanity have been eradicated overnight? Biking to Berkeley, you find the campus empty. Inside the lab you find a high-tech TV just moments before footsteps sound in the hallway. If you hide before the person arrives, you may be transported by the TV to a world of carnivorous lizards. Maybe you'll escape to another world and meet a neon orange spider who vows to get you home if you steal an object from a monster called the Oglemorooth. If you waited to see who the footsteps belonged to at the Berkeley lab, you discover it's a Dr. Fingley. He seems preoccupied with the "TV"; a hunch tells you to grab it and flee. If you do, Fingley chases you through the empty streets in his car. Using the buttons on the TV—which is an antimatter device—you might be transported onto a houseboat in the middle of a big party. Two FBI agents join Fingley in trying to confiscate the antimatter device. Your parents purposely hid their research from the government; should you defy these FBI men? You have little time to think with multiple enemies on your tail.

Instead of going to Berkeley to check on your parents, did you take advantage of your opportunity to drive the car with no one on the road? If all humans stay gone, you can do anything you want for the rest of your life. You could even teach yourself to fly a jet and sightsee the world. If curiosity, however, prompts you to investigate why everyone is missing, you run into an artificial intelligence officer who says you're on planet Mu, not Earth. The officer escorts you aboard a transporter ship for incarceration on a faraway planet. Can you short out his coding by speaking nonsense? If so, you're left alone with no idea how to control the ship. You could send a distress signal, but if the wrong recipient gets it, you're doomed. If you try navigating the ship yourself, you'll need extensive information about this universe...one in which Earth may not exist. The ship's computer concedes there's a region called the Realm of Unreality that isn't explored; is it your ticket home? You want to believe parallel worlds exist and that you're in this one because of your parents' antimatter experiments. Can you prove it by finding your way back to Earth?

The Antimatter Formula is arguably the best writing of Jay Leibold's career. The paragraphs are lean, and foster a tense atmosphere from page one. The narrative does trespass into silliness at times, particularly in parallel worlds heavy with fantastical elements, but where it sticks to science fiction, this book is wondrous. The vivid writing is a surprise from Jay Leibold, who has often come up with interesting premises but struggled at immersive storytelling. The Antimatter Formula is a gamebook I'll come back to again and again.

More reviews by KenJenningsJeopardy74

The Antimatter Formula proved difficult for me to rate because of the discrepant entertainment qualities of the book’s major narrative arcs. After the fundamental premise of the book is set in the first couple of pages, you can branch off into one of three major arcs: (1) you can become engaged in a game of cat and mouse with Dr. Fingley in, more or less, today’s world/time; (2) you can happen into a fairy tale adventure, or; (3) you can happen into a sci-fi adventure. This is where the difficulty came in for me.

The cat and mouse arc was not boring but, all the same, nothing special. As for the fairy tale narrative—and it really is the stuff of fairy tale lore, not fantasy—I not only found it too childish but I also felt it was beneath the capabilities of a writer as good as Jay Leibold. Needless to say, it was a letdown for me. The superlative sci-fi adventure is really what raises the overall story-telling’s stock. It’s the only narrative arc that is truly inventive and which manages to accomplish things worthy of the attention of a keen gamebook reader. For example, it explores a dystopian civilization in a parallel world wherein a small group of clandestine human resistance fighters are battling to overthrow the oppressive powers that be, generically termed "The Empire," for freedom. Then there is also the delightfully bizarre tertiary branch that reveals that Earth is a fictitious planet that you eventually reach by crossing into the Realm of Unreality in an appropriated spaceship in a parallel universe. As someone with an interest in philosophy, this type of story-telling fills my heart with wonder.

Interestingly, Frank Bolle’s artwork is also not consistently good in this book because several of the illustrations have an overly cartoonish, rather than his signature graphic, quality. Overall, The Antimatter Formula is enjoyable but it’s not as good as I feel it could have been. It has its uppers and downers.

Rating: 6.5/10.0

More reviews by tonylachief