Johnny Maxwell 01 – Only You Can Save Mankind

Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind is a science fiction story for 9 year olds about a boy whose computer game aliens ask him to stop shooting.

What happens

Johnny is on level ten. He's died six times already and it's only five o'clock. The enemy capital ship is finally in his sights and all he has to do is fire.

Then a message comes up on the screen. We wish to talk.

He types back, rudely, that aliens are there to be shot at, not talked to. They type back that they would rather not be shot at. They send him a picture of their children.

So Johnny does the only sensible thing and presses Save Game.

What follows is a conversation, typed badly by both sides, that quietly takes the floor out from under him. He tells the Captain it's only a game. She asks what a game is. He points out that he dies all the time and comes back. She says they don't. When they die they die for ever.

And then she tells him to look behind him, and the whole enemy fleet is sitting on his radar, and none of them are firing.

It's a very funny book too. Wobbler Johnson copies games for the entire school and his dad's office photocopier does the manuals. Johnny writes everybody's history homework by taking his essay about peasants in Bolivia and swapping the llamas for kings getting their heads chopped off.

Two things to flag. The computers are ancient. Floppy discs, a joystick, a Fire button, a printed manual. Your reader may need a sentence of explanation and will then find it hilarious.

The other thing is quieter and matters more. Johnny's parents are going through what the book only ever calls the Trying Times, and there is shouting downstairs. He turns the volume up so he can't hear it. It is never spelled out and it is never made a big scene of, which is exactly why it might land hard on a child who recognises it.

For a reader who is fine with that, this is a proper thinking book dressed as a shoot-em-up. It asks who the aliens are in any game, and it doesn't hand your reader the answer.

What to read next

There's more of the same boy in the library. In the one where Johnny starts seeing the dead, Wobbler is still his best friend, the Trying Times have moved on to a new phase, and the town council wants to sell the cemetery.