"Erstwhile Saviours Wanted - Immortality An Advantage"
The Bookmole
Reflections On The Art Of Adolescence
Being a teenage boy is tough.
Being a teenager in love is even tougher.
And being in love with a fictional character is tougher still.
Clifford King is deeply, desperately, and hormonally in love with Zondra Amazon – warrior, pin-up, and heroine of a fantasy comic.
A hopeless situation…perhaps.
One night, Clifford is visited by Godfrey and his Bookmole, a creature that can bring fiction to life. It’s an opportunity too good to miss. Clifford has to have the Bookmole. Godfrey is happy to help out, but steals Clifford’s most treasured possession in exchange and so starts a pursuit through magical and dangerous realms, which will lead Clifford to discover the truth about his missing father and to learn the real meaning of tough.
There are worse nightmares than adolescence.
In a world where life is cheap - to create - who will draw the boundaries?
Pestworld (aka Benedict Benoletti’s World) has no indigenous flora or fauna. Its terraforming and seeding are models of sophistication and execution; nectar for the academic bees of the ancient worlds. History begins with the landfall of humans -- the first cave painting was with an aerosol and the only fossil record is Country and Western.
Pestworld
Imagine a blank world. A world a long way from Earth. Imagine having the chance to design a world - to plant, seed, create, build, to make a new and better Earth exactly to specification. Imagine a Paradise. You have to imagine, because it's no longer like that....
In a madcap decade of experiment, pride and oneupmanship, the competing scientists of the Smithsonian Extra-Solar Institute of Life-Sciences and the University of Plateau unleashed upon the planet a horde of designer pests. Small and large, humorous and deadly - the weirder the pest, the greater the kudos. Okay…the scientists didn’t exactly unleash them. They escaped. But you could say it was as inevitable as a leak in a gene pool. The result is the same. A Brave New World reduced to a land of madness and fear, of crazy humour and sudden death.
Sigmund Parvo is a Pestmeister – a hunter of pests. Newly graduated from the Academy – the only home, as an orphan, he has ever known – Parvo is promoted to the high post of Pestmeister of the Parish. Considering his unpopularity in college and his, at times, difficult relationship with the teachers, he is uneasy at the promotion. But he does at least have one friend – Sergio, the retired metal fabricator, who enlightens and entertains him with tales of the past and insights into the present.
Parvo’s unease is compounded when a letter arrives from his employers, the High Lords. He is instructed to capture the most dangerous pest on the planet, a pest which has never been captured before, though many have attempted and died. The wild benedict.
Parvo’s
quest will take him through life and death struggles with both pests
and men, through intrigue and betrayal. He will encounter crazy
and wonderful creatures: the westlake balancing mallard, the thompson
fanger, the kanazawa turtletooth, the stringfinger, the marconi
fermenting gargoyle, hindenberg hover-grazer, tindall telescopic
gazelle and others. And in the end he will learn some hard truths
about friendship and trust and the wild benedict, and the most
surprising truth of all - about himself.