Terry Pratchett ventures into video games, and so does protagonist Johnny Maxwell – ‘The Hero with a Thousand Extra Lives!’ This latest paperback edition features cover illustration by Mark Beech, the artist behind the covers for Dragons at Crumbling Castle, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard and the most recent editions of The Bromeliad Trilogy and The Carpet People!
£6.99
The first book in Terry Pratchett’s Johnny Maxwell adventure series is an action-packed thrill ride featuring starships, aliens and a video game that answers back. Defeating the ScreeWee was easier when it was all just a game….
AUTHOR’S NOTE…
“Only You Can Save Mankind was written during the Gulf War – not the one we had in 2003, which was the sequel, but the one more than ten years before. I hope no one intends to make it a trilogy. Computers were just getting powerful enough to run realistic-looking games. At the same time, people were watching the first ‘video war’. Every night the news showed the views form the bomb-sight cameras, in what looked like live action, often presented by the late General ‘Storming Norman’ Schwartzkopf, who was in charge.
On your computer: games that looked like war. On your TV: a war that looked like a game. If you weren’t careful, you could get confused . . .
Oh, and mobile phones weren’t that common, at least for kids. If you were away from home you had to use a phone attatched by a wire to the wall. It was terrible.
– Terry Pratchett 2004, updated 2013
Publisher: Random House Children’s Publishers UK
ISBN: 9780552576796
