Civil War Secret Agent

Time Machine #5

by Steve Perry

Travel back to the time of the Civil War, where your own decisions determine your fate.

Genres: Gamebooks, Fiction, Time Travel, Civil War, War, Speculative Fiction, Choose Your Own Adventure

144 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Librarians note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Steven Carl Perry has written over fifty novels and numerous short stories, which have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. Perry is perhaps best known for the Matador series. He has written books in the Star Wars, Alien and Conan universes. He was a collaborator on all of the Tom Clancy's Net Force series, seven of which have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list. Two of his novelizations, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire and Men in Black have also been bestsellers. Other writing credits include articles, reviews, and essays, animated teleplays, and some unproduced movie scripts. One of his scripts for Batman: The Animated Series was an Emmy Award nominee for Outstanding Writing.

Perry is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, The Animation Guild, and the Writers Guild of America, West

Reviews

[Nick Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Time Machine books generally work decently with their central conceit: That you have to go back in time to find a particular object or bit of information, with unpredictable events keeping you hopping around rather than just popping back to a single end point and making it a one-page book. Unfortunately, just about everything in this particular entry in the series serves to expose the basic silliness of the concept. The question of this book is apparently to find out whether a man who escaped from slavery was lying in his journal about having been aided by Harriet Tubman. Why we wouldn't just take his word for it goes unexplained. Why we wouldn't just go straight to someplace Harriet Tubman was known to have been late in life to ask her directly goes unexplained. Instead, we pop to random locations that Harriet Tubman may have passed through at one time, including dates well prior to when she would have helped the fellow escape. The latter is obviously useless, while the former usually leads to having just missed Harriet Tubman. If you overshot Harriet Tubman by a week or so, why not just go back in time by a week and see her? Prior books are written well enough to dodge that question, but here it just raises the obvious logical questions about time travel. Why not just slip forward or back by a few days? You can obviously move in time and space, so why not just move in space to the place where people have told you your target has gone instead of forty years into the future as well? Why does it seem like the titular time machine only works to take you to specific times and places when it won't help you? Who is even giving you these missions, especially something as off-kilter as trying to prove that a man who escaped slavery is a liar? Was the reader supposed to have invented the time machine, and if so, how could a "kid" that smart keep making such stupid choices while time traveling? If you've got a time machine, why don't you just go back and kill Austin Powers when he's sitting on the crapper or something?

Civil War Secret Agent also seems to have more "wrong path" loops to take you through than previous books, making you reread (skip) long stretches. If there were smarter options to choose it wouldn't be a problem, but when you're only allowed to go to two locations that don't seem to have anything whatsoever to do with your mission, it's rather aggravating to get it "wrong" and have to flip past pages and pages of things you've already dealt with. I'd gladly trade the addition of actual bad endings for more intelligent choices.

Got a lot of these books to go. I hope this one was just an aberration.

[Weathervane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frustratingly dry. Finished it from sense of duty. I did not learn nearly as much as I did from the dinosaur book. Probably would've helped for the author to flesh out a couple secondary characters and make the reader truly care about their fate.

[Remo · Rating 3 out of 5]

La colección de "La máquina del tiempo" era un elige tu propia aventura bastante clásico, al que se le quería dar una pátina de culturilla. Así, no solo ambientaban cada libro en una época específica sobre la que luego íbamos a aprender un montón de cosas, sino que a veces incluso les encargaban los libros a especialistas en la materia (el de los dinosaurios está escrito por un paleontólogo, por ejemplo).
Bueno, el infierno está empedrado de buenas intenciones, como se suele decir. Recuerdo de estos libros un montón de fallos de continuidad (te encuentras con Peter en una rama temporal pero luego al hacer otra distinta y posterior te lo presentan, ese tipo de cosas).
No fueron los primeros que leí, por lo que el efecto maravilla que me hizo amar los originales no lo tuve con estos. Tal vez eso contribuyó a que no me parecieran tan buenos.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Fun story that had me going around in circles. I will say the images are a bit problematic. The drawings of the black people are done in an older style that many people now would most likely find offensive.

[JKR · Rating 3 out of 5]

A weak entry in the Time Machine series.

[Gabriel]

All the books in this series were amazing, but this one ia particular was quite involving, probably due to the subject matter and drawings. A very good read.

My version is a Spanish translation by Timun Mas.

[George · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected more changes through the story line based on my decisions, but there was no significant chance due to them other than taking me longer to read the book. It would be nice to find a book thats purely role-playing