Book Series
The underlying concept of the series is that the reader is a member of an agency known as Spy Center, an organisation that maintains order throughout the galaxy and falls partway between a police service and an intelligence agency. This agency has its headquarters in Sector 666, known as 'The Sector of Illusions'. The reader's character is usually referred to simply as Spy, and the story and illustrations almost always deliberately avoid identifying the Spy's gender or any specific physical characteristics, ensuring the widest possible chance of affinity between the Spy as character and the reader. Individual stories are stand-alone and do not need to be read in any particular order to succeed, however several characters recur throughout the series and earlier events are often referenced later on.
Each novel presents an encapsulated crime or mystery to be solved, and the overall series charts the reader's progress up the ranks with a number of promotions being received over the entire run of novels. Most novels follow the basic format of the reader being contacted by Spy Center who then assign them a mission and usually issue them with an associated disguise. There are often people that the reader must contact, usually spies themselves or else working in league with Spy Center.
The stories are quite linear, with the reader advancing through the set plot by solving a number of puzzles of a 'succeed or fail' style, said failure often resulting in the Spy's death or the story otherwise immediately coming to an end. As such, the reader's choices rarely impact the storyline itself, only their progression through it.
Read more about this topic: Be An Interplanetary Spy
Famous quotes containing the words book and/or series:
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—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)