The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy by Terry Pratchett (omnibus of three novels published by The Science Fiction Book Club, 1996; contains Only You Can Save Mankind, 1992, Johnny and the Dead, 1993, and Johnny and the Bomb, 1996)
Johnny Maxwell is the hero of three YA books by Pratchett. We first meet him when he is twelve and going through Troubling Times -- his father has lost his job and his parents are arguing constantly and are about to break up. He lives in the English town of Blackbury, outside of London. Johnny is a strange kid; surprisingly normal and thus does not fit into any of the school cliques. He thinks a lot and is slow to react and often thinks he is stupid, especially compared to his friends, who hang out together because they have no one else to hang out with.
Johnny's best friend is Wobbles, so named because he is fat and wobbles when he walks. Wobbles is an electrical and computer genius who pirates video games and gives them away. Bigmac is one of the three young skinheads in the town. He wants to be tough but is asthmatic. He dreams of guns and weaponry and wants to join the army, b ut he does not like bullets. Bigmac is not a criminal, per se, but he does have a habit of taking cars that the owners have left the keys in; he considers he is doing a favor for the car owners by running the vehicles properly, and he almost always returns the cars in one piece. Bigmac lives in a rundown housing development with his criminal older brother and his brother's vicious dog. The local police always have they eyes on Bigmac. Bigmac is a genius at mathematics. Yo-less is a West Indian who lives with his mother, a nurse. Yo-less is a straight arrow and wants to be a doctor. He does not go in for the stereotypical black talk and never greets anyone by saying "Yo," hence his nickname. He seethes inside at racial discrimination. And then there's Kirsty, who alternatively calls herself Sigourney, Kimberley, Klytemnestra, and Kasandra (she does not like her given name). Kirsty is an over-achiever and is very good at it. She is highly intelligent and has poor people skills. She looks down at Johnny with pity, while he finds it easy to talk to her because she just doesn't listen. Kirsty can be highly dangerous to anyone who calls her "Missy" or "Little Lady." with this motley group what could go wrong? Almost anything.
It's the mid-90s and Johnny is trying put a pirated copy of a video game that Wobbles has given him. In Only You Can Save Mankind the alien ScreeWee have destroyed almost all of Earth's defensive fleet. There is only one starship left and you are piloting it -- you are the only thing that stands in the way of the ScreeWee's total destruction of the Earth. You are Earth's Last Hope! It's a tricky game and Johnny gets killed every time he plays. But because it is a game, he lives again each time he plays the game...until he is killed. But Johnny is getting better at it. Then a message flashes across his computer screen: WE GIVE UP. What? Is this some sort of strange twist built into the game? The messages continue. WE SURRENDER. DON'T KILL US. It turns out the ScreeWee in the game are real, and -- unlike Johnny -- if they are killed in the game, they don't come back; they are just dead. And the Scree Wee, who are actually not the rampaging killers the game makes them out to be, don't like that. The ScreeWee, reptilian creatures from a matriarchal society, resemble giant newts, or perhaps large snakes with arms, and now that they have surrender to Johnny, he must provide them safe passage back to their home world, many light years away. But his is a computer game and there are many other players out there, all determined to kill the ScreeWee and save Earth -- and one of the most determined players is Kirsty...
Now reference is made of this in the second book, Johnny and the Dead, although it is a given that strange things happen whenever Johnny is around. Johnny, Wobbles, Yo-less, and Bigmac are walking through an old cemetery in town when Johnny spots a strange man outside of a tomb. The man .is a long-deceased Alderman for the town and he and Johnny begin a conversation. Johnny's friends cannot see the man and wonder why Johnny is talking to thin air. The dead Alderman, Thomas Bowler, is surprised he can communicate with the living because that has never happened before. Bowler is curious about what has happened in the town since he had passed away. Johnny doesn't know much about current or past events (hey, he's only twelve or thirteen, cut him some slack), but he decides the best thing would be to drop off a local paper at Bowler's tomb the next day so the Alderman could catch up. It just so happened that a large developer has just gotten approval from the Council to buy the cemetery, with the intention of ripping up the graveyard and putting a large factory.. This does not sit well with the Alderman, nor any of the other denizens of the cemetery. They insist that Johnny, who is the only person they can communicate with, put a stop to this plan. Things get complicated.
{By the way, the dead are not ghosts. They are emphatic they are not ghosts -- which seems to be a dirty term to them. They are just the dead. Johnny's friends come up with other words to describe them: "post-senior citizens," "breathily challenged," and "vertically disadvantaged." there is one actually ghost in the cemetery, however, the grumpy Mr. Grimm.)
Johnny and the Bomb is a time travel extravaganza, taking place a year of so later. The local bag lady, Mrs. Tachyon wheels a shopping trolley (cart) filled with black bags and her very nasty cat, Guilty, throughout the town, as well as through various past times. Mrs. Tachyon has always been very old, very disheveled, and not quite right in the head. She makes no sense when she talks. Johnny and the gang come across a bunch of upset trolleys and bundles in a parking lot; one of the bundles is wearing trainers --it's Mrs. Tachyon and she has had an accident. An ambulance comes and takes her away, leaving Johnny with Mrs. Tachyon's trolley and all of her bundles. Johnny takes the trolley (complete with Guilty) to his house to hold it until Mrs. Tachyon gets better. The bags in the trolley move. It turns out that the bags are filled with time. The Johnny reached into a bag...
Now Johnny and his friends are in the past -- in 1941, on the very day when a German bomb hits the town (the Germans were aiming for a different town, but they got lost), killing nineteen people because for some reason the air raid signal didn't work. Johnny cannot stop the bomb, but perhaps he can save the people doomed to die. The problem is that the police do not like the look of Bigmac and he has all of these late 20th century devices that look like they might be spy thingabobs. And Yo-less is black and people keep calling him Sambo. And everybody dismisses Kirsty because she's a girl. And Wobbles is wobbling and looking for someplace safe. Johnny and the gang make it back to their present but Wobbles isn't with them, because Wobbles stayed in 1941 and eventually became the richest man on Earth. Johnny and his friends have to back for Wobbles (and to try to save people from the bomb blast). This time they decide to go back dressed in clothing appropriate for the time, but somehow Bigmac ends up wearing a German military outfit and Kirsty is wearing and outfit that is totally inappropriate for her fourteen-year-old age. As usual with Johnny's adventures, things get complicated.
The books are funny. The books are exciting And there are important messages buried close to the surface in Pratchett's satire. All three books are winners and highly recommended. They should not read as Discworld-lite, but as Discworld-different.
