Starlight Adventures

It's the mid-1980s, adventure gamebooks are at the height of their fame, and the place to go to get the original and the best is Puffin Books, the publishers of Fighting Fantasy.

Such was the concept's popularity that Puffin also published some rather curious offshoots: series that were not part of Fighting Fantasy, but looked a bit like them. They all had the 'ADVENTURE GAMEBOOKS' banner (sometimes referred to as the "sawtooth" design), the same basic cover design, and they all looked pretty similar internally... but they weren't actually part of the Fighting Fantasy banner. One of these was the Cretan Chronicles, which I have expressed my distaste for in an earlier article. Another was the Starlight Adventures - a series of gamebooks aimed at girls.

All six books in the series were written by women - something no Fighting Fantasy book ever has been as of 2018. In fact, the only other gamebook range I can think of that has is the Choose Your Own Adventure franchise, which to its credit has had a wide number of female contributors across its 39-year history. None of the authors ever wrote a gamebook again - in fact, none of them ever wrote anything again, as far as I can tell, which raises the possibility that these were just pen names for male authors. And the books make me feel that it's either that, or the publisher was meddling with them.

(Tangent: Whilst most gamebook player characters are gender-neutral and intended to be player avatars - GrailQuest went so far as to make a point of avoiding illustrating the character of Pip or ever referring to Pip's gender as a running joke, always somehow finding an excuse to avoid illustrating the character in a picture where you'd expect to see them or finding a way to avoid saying 'he' or 'she' in circumstances that would seem to require it - Lone Wolf was an obvious exception, and the Fighting Fantasy book Legend of Zagor required the reader to play as one of four characters from the non-interactive Zagor Chronicles series, all of whom were male. This was particularly problematic as one of the Zagor Chronicles characters was a woman, but Legend replaced her with her brother...)

Two of the books in the series, including the first one - Star Rider - don't require use of dice, or even an inventory. If these were meant to be a 'for girls' counterpart to Fighting Fantasy, then dramatically simplifying the gameplay like this is rather unfortunate. (It's possible that they were just rush-released, as all six books seem to have come out fairly close together.) Other entries in the series do have some mechanics, but never anything like FF: Riddle of the Runaway depends on coin flips and the player's birthdate. There's a romance storyline to Star Rider, which wouldn't be a problem except all of the 'good' endings involve finding love - all of the other books also feature love interests, to varying degrees. (This might have been some directive from above - would six different authors, apparently not communicating with each other, all feel they had to include a love interest? It does feel a bit patronising, to be honest.)

All of the books have a contemporary setting, with no fantasy elements whatsoever, also setting them apart from Fighting Fantasy which never attempted such a thing; it might have been interesting to see what could have been done with a science-fiction or fantasy setting. The books are generally quite varied, though, with the first one based around horse racing, another casting the player as a junior detective, and yet another featuring ice skating.

There's no real consistency between volumes as they're all by different authors - they're all different lengths and have different rules, if any. One or two of them are actually impossible to lose. A general lack of ambition seems to be the series' biggest problem. The third one, Island of Secrets, is probably the most interesting as it requires several playthroughs and different paths to actually see the bigger picture of what's going on (a conceit not seen in many other gamebooks), although it also has some continuity problems as you get introduced to some characters twice.

The books, by themselves, aren't bad, and would be an interesting addition to anyone's gamebook collection. It seems a shame, however, given what the range was meant to be, that they didn't try to be more ambitious at times - some of these are definitely undercooked, to the extent that one choice is based on whether you "feel lucky" at that moment. A comparison I've seen made elsewhere is that they're not really "adventures" because of their lack of scope, although I'm not sure I actually agree with that - the stories are trying to do something different to other gamebooks of the day, even if the writing is at times a bit underdeveloped. I'd love to see what the writers were told to do with this series, and if that was different to what Fighting Fantasy authors were told to do. Because it definitely feels like this series could have been so much more. And there's still the curiosity about the authors - why did they never write anything else, before or since?

The only Starlight authors I can track down are Tessa Strickland and Elizabeth Buchan, co-authors of book #5 Ice Dancer - I say 'track down', I'm just pretty sure this Tessa Strickland and this Elizabeth Buchan are the same ones. (I am presuming the Pat Hewitt who wrote Trance is not the same Pat Hewitt who was later Health Secretary under Tony Blair.) They mention working for Penguin as copy writers and editors for a time, so I do wonder how they came to write this book - difficulty on Penguin's part in finding female authors?

Overall: I'd say I'd tentatively recommend these, if only as a fun curio; as they all have contemporary settings, they also work very well as a look into life in the mid-eighties. You can pick most of them up very cheaply online, and at those prices I say go for it.