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5.0 out of 5 stars
Aimed at young adults but sure to delight any Discworld fan, Jul 26 2006
I've never understood why the books in the Johnny Maxwell series are so hard to find. Not only are they written by one of the world's most engaging, brilliant authors, they are a rare example of truly intelligent books aimed at a young adult audience; they are loads of fun for adults, as well. It seems a little strange to journey with Terry Pratchett to a place other than the Discworld, but this little jaunt is quite enjoyable - and future echoes of Discworld begin to emerge as the series progresses. Johnny Maxwell is just a normal twelve-year old kid, or at least he tries to be. When we first meet him, he is living in Trying Times, sort of left to take care of himself while his parents argue. Trying Times moves to Being Sensible About Things, and by the second book we find Johnny living with his grandfather. He's still a normal kid - it's just that things seem to happen to him that don't happen to anyone else - aliens inside a computer game surrender to him and name him their Chosen One, dead people start talking to him, and he even manages to stumble into time travel.
Like any kid, Johnny enjoys a good computer game every now and then, and his friend Wobbler supplies him with just about any pirated game he could want. He has destroyed all but the last alien ship in the game Only You Can Save Mankind when a message suddenly appears on the screen: We wish to talk. Thus begins a journey that takes him inside the game as the Chosen One, the human who will lead the alien ScreeWee race back to safety beyond The Boundary. The reptilian captain of the ScreeWee is tired of fighting; the human fighters appear out of nowhere, kill and destroy ships in her fleet, and keep coming back no matter how many times they are killed. She has seen what happened to the Space Invaders and would rather surrender than die fighting.
As always with Pratchett, the characters are well-developed and quite remarkable. I really liked Wobbler, the future hacker who designed his own game called Journey to Alpha Centauri to be played in real time, meaning all the thousands of years it would take to reach Alpha Centauri is how many years the game would take you to actually finish it. Beyond the comedy present in this story, there is also a message. The backdrop of the earth-based events of the book is the Persian Gulf War, and the juxtaposition of this war that is real but seems like a game with the computer game that becomes real for Johnny Maxwell conveys a message about violence and one's attitude toward it. It is not an overbearing theme, but it is there to some degree, helping make this short novel much more than just a juvenile read intended to entertain the reader and nothing more.
Johnny often takes a short cut to school through a local cemetery, and it is there that he meets the Alderman, the long dead and buried Alderman. He and the rest of the good folks residing in the cemetery are quite put out by the fact that the cemetery has been sold by the city to a corporation planning on putting office buildings there. Since Johnny is the only human who can see them (and why Johnny can see them is rather a mystery, although the Alderman thinks it is because he is too lazy not to see them), the dead look to him to save their eternal resting place. Stopping a big corporation from doing something the city has granted it the legal right to do is no easy task, especially for a twelve-year-old boy and his friends, but Johnny is wonderfully resourceful.
Johnny and the Dead rings quite distinctly at times of the type of humor showcased by the author in his Discworld novels. The dead people add a lot of life to this book, oddly enough. Their vibrant personalities more often than not clash in a number of very funny ways as they all try to cope with modern life - or the lack of it.
In my opinion, Johnny and the Bomb is the best book in the series. It bears a strong resemblance to Pratchett's Discworld ideas and characterizations, containing much more social commentary, satire, and sidesplitting comedy than the first two books. This time around, Johnny becomes a time traveler - quite unexpectedly. The whole gang (Johnny, Wobbler, Bigmac, Yo-less, and Kirsty) goes back in time to 1941, the very day preceding an accidental bombing of the town. They try to be careful not to mess the future up, but Bigmac and Wobbler seem to have a natural attraction to trouble. Finding their way back home to the future is a difficult task; arriving back home without Wobbler and having to figure out a way to go back and retrieve him is even harder, especially since it involves convincing the 1941 authorities that the town is going to be bombed at a specific time.
The characters of Johnny's remarkable friends are fleshed out in this novel to a much greater extent than they were in the previous two novels. Time displacement forces the kids to deal with issues of racism and sexism, for example. Serious issues aside, though, the book is just hilarious; the proffered hypotheses about the different legs of the Trousers of Time is vintage Pratchett material. This adventure really is the type of thing you might expect to happen on the Discworld, and I daresay any Pratchett fan of any age should enjoy this book (and the whole series) immensely. I find myself wishing for more Johnny Maxwell stories; I feel as if I know these characters now, and they are a fascinating, increasingly funny bunch of guys to hang around with.
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