Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books? If you’re of a certain age, you most certainly will. They were the ones where the narrative was all told second-person, about you the reader, and there were decision points in the narrative where you could choose this or that way to progress.
One of the very early books was entitled Inside UFO 54-40 (cover pic). In this, your protagonist ends up aboard a spaceship travelling in search of utopia.
Anyone who’s read one of these books knows that the way you interacted with them was never exactly as the book’s narrative assumed; you’d flick through pages at random and read entries for the thrill of seeing what might happen later on, you’d stop to look at art for entries you hadn’t yet reached, you’d keep your fingers in the pages so you could backtrack on your decisions if they turned out badly.
Flicking through Inside UFO 54-40 showed you that entry 101 was the grand finale, where you made it to Utopia at last, and success was yours!
Only one catch: the book was designed so that there was no way to ever reach entry 101. Utopia was unattainable.
That’s just wonderful.
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Aside of extra geekiness: Inside UFO 54-40 was written by Edward Packard, who was the originator of the choose-your-path format. Those who, like me, assumed the format emerged out of the success of Dungeons & Dragons may be interested to hear that Packard wrote his first such book five years prior to the publication of D&D. (What, I wonder, would roleplaying look like today if it emerged from gamebooks instead of wargames?)
