Spoilers LDS: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North & Chris Fenoglio Review Thread

[David cgc]

Blurb:
Warp into the action with Star Trek’s first-ever interactive original graphic novel!

Mariner just wants to have a normal day, but no matter what side of the bed she wakes up on, the world is ending. Literally. If she has coffee, Borg attack! If she has raktajino, cue the Romulan boarding party! And in each scenario, Mariner and her friends end up dead, sometimes the ship is destroyed—and the day starts all over again.

But by exploring the different paths, you, the reader, can discover things that Mariner can’t. There are inconsistencies that don’t make sense—putting aside the fact that Mariner’s choice of drink each morning shouldn’t affect which alien races attack the ship, other facts of her world seem to change too. Something is definitely off. It’s up to you to discover!

About the Author and Illustrator:

Ryan North

Ryan North is a New York Times–bestselling author whose books include How to Invent Everything, Romeo and/or Juliet, and To Be or Not To Be. He’s the creator of Dinosaur Comics and the Eisner Award–winning writer of Adventure Time, Jughead, and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for Marvel Comics, and he has a master’s in computational linguistics from the University of Toronto. Ryan lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenn.

Chris Fenoglio

When he's not watching entirely too much Star Trek, Chris Fenoglio is an artist, colorist, designer, and teacher. He can also muddle around enough on guitar to only be mostly annoying. He has worked on big franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Batman: The Animated Series, Goosebumps, X-Files, Hello Neighbor and Orphan Black as well as personal projects, such as his webcomic Chris & Christina.

Star Trek: Lower Decks—Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North: 9798887241548 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Warp into the action with Star Trek’s first-ever interactive original graphic novel! Mariner just wants to have a normal day, but no matter what side of the bed she wakes up on, the world is ending....

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

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While I know it's standard procedure for comics to go in the appropriate megathread, this is a stand-alone story, longer than a monthly issue, and the first-ever "choosable path" Star Trek book of this millenium, so I thought it deserved a review thread.

 

[Christopher]

the first-ever "choosable path" Star Trek book

First comic book, perhaps, but there were three prose ones in the '80s:

Star Trek II: Distress Call!

Star Trek II: Distress Call! is a Pocket TOS novel – a "plot your own adventure" story loosely based on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – written by William Rotsler. Published by Wanderer Books, it was first released in December 1982. From the book jacket Aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, Captain...

memory-alpha.fandom.com

Voyage to Adventure

From the book jacket WELCOME TO THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE! You're an ensign in the Starfleet and you've been assigned to the Enterprise! With Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, you'll explore amazing new worlds. You might rescue an alien race from a deadly disease, or do battle with a Klingon spy, or...

memory-alpha.fandom.com

Phaser Fight

Blasting off to new adventures on the STARSHIP ENTERPRISE! From the back cover Welcome aboard, ensign! You've been assigned to duty on the Starship Enterprise. Your mission: investigate a mysterious meteor belt with Captain Kirk…or help Bones combat a deadly disease… or fight an alien race with...

memory-alpha.fandom.com

I used to have Voyage to Adventure. I was kind of creeped out when I first paged through it in the bookstore and saw the text addressing the reader as "Chris." How did the book know it was me???


It's not the first time Ryan North has done a "choose your path" comic, either. He did it for The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl once.

 

[David cgc]

Well, I'll be. Given how into Choose Your Own Adventure I was as a kid, I was sure I would've heard about a Star Trek one (though even the reprints were a bit before my time, and the internet having information on even the most obscure Star Trek books fully cataloged was a bit after my CYOA time).

It's not the first time Ryan North has done a "choose your path" comic, either. He did it for The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl once.

He's also done prose CYOAs based on Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth Hamlet.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I picked this up at Chapters today! Looking forward to giving it a go next weekend.

 

[Christopher]

He's also done prose CYOAs based on Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth.

That latter one strikes me as a bit odd, since Macbeth relies heavily on the idea that events are predestined. Unless the book is structured so that every choice leads to the same inevitable doom, but that seems like cheating for a CYOA book.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Maybe it works on historical events, like Macbeth's pilgrimage to Rome during his reign. Scotland was generally stable during his reign, which was, IIRC, seventeen years long. Shakespeare does Macbeth dirty.

 

[David cgc]

That latter one strikes me as a bit odd, since Macbeth relies heavily on the idea that events are predestined. Unless the book is structured so that every choice leads to the same inevitable doom, but that seems like cheating for a CYOA book.

Maybe it works on historical events, like Macbeth's pilgrimage to Rome during his reign. Scotland was generally stable during his reign, which was, IIRC, seventeen years long. Shakespeare does Macbeth dirty.

I had a brain fart, it was Hamlet, not Macbeth.

 

[Christopher]

Maybe it works on historical events, like Macbeth's pilgrimage to Rome during his reign. Scotland was generally stable during his reign, which was, IIRC, seventeen years long. Shakespeare does Macbeth dirty.

Oh, Shakespeare compresses the hell out of the timeline in most of his history plays, as well as rearranging the order of events and inventing imaginary causes (like having the future Richard III murder Henry VI). In King John, he skips over the Magna Carta entirely and claims the First Barons' War was instigated by the death of Prince Arthur a dozen years earlier.

It has long been a source of amusement to me that Gargoyles, an animated series full of fantasy creatures and magic and time travel, depicts Macbeth's history far more accurately than Shakespeare did.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I had a brain fart, it was Hamlet, not Macbeth.

Now I'm thinking about James Thurber's short story, "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," in which two characters, the narrator and an American tourist, analyze Macbeth through the rules of an Agatha Christie-esque mystery. And it ends with the narrator intending to do the same with Hamlet. I don't know that Thurber ever wrote "The Hamlet Murder Mystery."

Which then makes me think of Anthony Boucher's Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Adventure of the Bogle-Wolf," in which Holmes, high off his face on cocaine, listens to Watson's wife Mary tell a child the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and Holmes, being Holmes, but again, high off his face, explains to the child and the increasingly disturbed Mary Watson how it's clearly and evidently a werewolf story.

 

[Cyfa]

Thank you for setting up this review thread, @David cgc
I'm not very good at reviews and the like, but I'll be sure to post something here after my copy has arrived (I ordered it on Thursday) and I've read it - or at least skimmed through!

 

[Victoria]

Coming in slightly late...I have a 4th "chooseable path" Star Trek book from 1984. "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: The Vulcan Treasure" by William Rotsler.

It is listed on Memory Beta and Rotsler's Wikipedia page but appears to be missing from Memory Alpha.

 

[Christopher]

Coming in slightly late...I have a 4th "chooseable path" Star Trek book from 1984. "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: The Vulcan Treasure" by William Rotsler.

It is listed on Memory Beta and Rotsler's Wikipedia page but appears to be missing from Memory Alpha.

Oh, good catch. I think I've heard of that one too.

 

[Victoria]

Not hard to catch. I just looked on my bookshelves and there it was with the others.

 

[Stevil2001]

The Hamlet "chooseable-path adventure" is great, I loved it. I didn't care for the Romeo and/or Juliet one as much.

 

[Cyfa]

My copy of Warp Your Own Way has arrived but I've only had chance to dip into it so far, so I haven't rated it yet.
However, the artwork is spot on and the characters come across almost exactly as they do in the series. Oh, and I love how after my/Mariner's first "adventure" led to a lot of gruesome deaths and ended that story, the next page told me off for turning to it (as in a normal book) instead of going back to the beginning

 

[Steve Roby]

I liked Rotsler's books, which were accompanied by his Star Trek II Short Stories, Star Trek II Biographies, and Star Trek III Short Stories. The other two... well, I was surprised to learn that Michael J. Dodge was actually John M. Ford, author of The Final Reflection, How Much for Just the Planet, and several critically acclaimed fantasy and SF novels. This was more lightweight than his usual work, obviously. The last one, Phaser Fight, was definitely the least. Not much Star Trek feel to it.

As for the Lower Decks book, I think I may need to make a chart. I found one clue and found a new path but got stuck at another clue that didn't seem to work. But it's fun, even if I end up turning it into homework. It's more complex than the older books.

 

[Markonian]

Just ordered it. Will arrive tomorrow. I've only read one choose-your-own-adventure before, so I'm intrigued how this works out.

 

[Markonian]

Wow!
I expected a silly, forgettable romp. But the story had a profound ending.

I followed the instructions while reading, moving between pages as indicated and squinting my eyes to avoid seeing neighboring content. Still, I gathered there was a Khan storyline that I ultimately did not come across. It was difficult sometimes to backtrack, so I focused on completing the story before going through the book front to back to catch anything I missed. Like the VISOR penguins?

It would be cool to see this book and its characters touched upon by The Badey Directive mobile game.

 

[TalkaboutTrek]

I finished up today and really loved it. I kept going back and trying new branches to see where it would take me. Lot's of little Easter eggs typical of Lower Decks and some very cool twists.

I think the VISOR penguins page was a trick. Try as I might I could not find that path.

 

[DarkHorizon]

^It's not a path as such, but to remind/encourage readers to follow the CYOA conventions and not just read from start to finish.