#135 Reading Space Team by Barry Hutchison
The galaxy just called for help. Unfortunately, it dialed the wrong number.
Small-time conman, Cal Carver, is having a bad day. Imprisoned and forced to share a cell with a cannibalistic serial killer, Cal thinks things can’t possibly get any worse.
He is wrong.
It’s not until two-thirds of the human race is wiped out and Cal is mistakenly abducted by aliens that his day really starts to go downhill.
Whisked across the galaxy, Cal is thrown into a team of some of the sector’s most notorious villains and scumbags. Their mission should be simple enough, but as one screw-up leads to another, they find themselves in a frantic battle to save an entire alien civilization – and its god – from total annihilation.
Featuring epic space battles, alien gangsters, and several thousand flying Tobey Maguires, Space Teamis the first book in the internationally bestselling series by award-winning author, Barry J. Hutchison, and is perfect for fans of Hitchhiker’s Guide and Guardians of the Galaxy.
I had to use his blurb to describe the first book in the series because I don’t think I would have done it justice. I really really enjoyed listening to this on Audible, I thought the high joke rate per paragraph was going to get annoying, but it didn’t. This isn’t some teenager shoving as many gags into a story as possible, this is a well-crafted story with well-developed characters, a lovely narrative arc, lots of lovely devices to get lots of swearing in the dialogue without actually swearing at all and the ability to pick holes in it’s own plot and answer it before the pedants get started.
If I had enough time I would plough through all twelve books in the series right now but instead I have settled for downloading the book of short stories which comes free when you sign up to his email list.
He does have two other series: Dan Deadman which, judging by the cover, is comic noir space detective, and Sidekicks, which looks hilarious:
When sworn protectors of Earth, the Justice Platoon, are all horribly killed, their former arch-enemies come crawling out of the woodwork. Outnumbered, outgunned, and out of options, the US Government has no choice but to activate the Sidekicks Initiative, dragging the Platoon’s middle-aged ex-sidekicks out of retirement.
In 2010, HarperCollins Children’s Books published his Invisible Fiends horror series about a boy whose childhood imaginary friend comes back when he’s a teenager and tries to kill him. It went on to win some prizes, sell to some foreign countries, and marked the start of his professional writing career.
Now he’s had around 70 books published, all aimed at children or teenagers. He’s written for publishers such as Penguin Random House, Nosy Crow, Egmont, Stripes and Little, Brown. He’s written 30+ episodes of children’s comedy for CITV, and regularly contributes to comics like The Beano.
If you like the Mastery of the Stars series, then you’ll love Space Team, I’ll certainly be reading more of this shizz.
p.s. anyone recognise the ship?
