Johnny and the Bomb
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About this ebook
From the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett, beloved and bestselling author of the Discworld fantasy series, comes time-travel adventure that mixes outrageous humor and nail-biting suspense!
Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This has never been more true than when he finds himself in his hometown on May 21, 1941, over forty years before his birth!
An accidental time traveler, Johnny knows his history. He knows England is at war, and he knows that on this day German bombs will fall on the town. It happened. It's history. And as Johnny and his friends quickly discover, tampering with history can have unpredictable—and drastic—effects on the future.
But letting history take its course means letting people die. What if Johnny warns someone and changes history? What will happen to the future? If Johnny uses his knowledge to save innocent lives by being in the right place at the right time, is he doing the right thing?
Read more of Johnny Maxwell's adventures in Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead!
Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) is the acclaimed creator of the globally revered Discworld series. In all, he authored more than fifty bestselling books, which have sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he was the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal. He was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature in 2009, although he always wryly maintained that his greatest service to literature was to avoid writing any.
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Reviews for Johnny and the Bomb
22 ratings15 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After a bit of a shaky start this turns into rather a good little novel with some great scenes. It's best to read them in the order Pratchett has arranged them in.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I think this book was my favourite of the trilogy. I think Pratchett did a good job of laughing at teenagers and wartime Britain.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Accidentally read out of order, thought this was second book of three but it's actually the third.Didn't feel like I was missing out on anything by missing second book, except Johnny's parents are suddenly separated.Lots of very funny bits as well as references to the Discworld books.A quick read which took longer because of my having to travel to my cousin's wedding. Got through the last half very quickly.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Clever.
-------------
Read it back when I working really hard to appreciate the love my friends have for Pratchett, don't remember it now. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Johnny and the Bomb. So very clever, so very accurate, so very casual, a daft, funny time-travelling young adult yarn.. .. .. .. and yet .. .. Nobody is who they think they are, or where they think they are. Brilliant stuff.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is not the broad comedy that many Pratchett fans expect. It's more serious, and intriguing. A young adult novel, quite competent.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Amazingly, this book took eleven years from its UK publication to be published in the US, appearing here in 2007. The version I read was the US one, whose Americanization has its dumber moments: I did at least a triple take when there was mention of the High Street being littered with, among other typical items, empty "chip packets". Just to add to the conceptual confusion, later in the book at least one discarded packet of fish and chips played a minor role; I had to be grateful for the small mercy that this didn't become "fish and fries".
Such quirks -- and they're few -- don't really detract from the enjoyability of the book, which is considerable. Young Johnny Maxwell and his pals Wobbler, Yo-less, Bigmac and Kirsty, know old Mrs Tachyon as one of Blackbury's characters: babbling battily and pushing her decrepit supermarket trolley around town, her vicious cat Guilty aboard it among the numerous mysterious black plastic bags, the bag lady is hard to miss. When she's involved in an accident and has to be rushed to hospital, Johnny takes cart, bags and cat home for safekeeping in the family garage. Inadvertently manipulating one of the bags, he undergoes what one might call a spontaneous time-travel experience. It seems that what Mrs Tachyon has been storing in her bags is time. A little later, in a more controlled experiment, Johnny takes his chums with him, and they find they're in Blackbury as it was in 1941; moreover, Johnny realizes that it's not just any day in 1941 but the day leading up to the night he's just been reading about for his school history project, the night when a German bombing mission, off course, dropped its load on Blackbury's Paradise Street, causing huge damage and the loss of many lives.
Kirsty is the brains of the group; she's also widely regarded as insufferable, because of her intelligence, her pronounced feminism, and her pushiness . . . so I loved the character most of any in the book She has numerous good lines, but none (in my opinion) better than the one she comes out with on the pals' arrival in 1941:
"Oh dear, it's going to be that kind of adventure after all," she hissed, sitting up. "It's just the sort of thing I didn't want to happen. Me, and four token boys. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It's only a mercy we haven't got a dog." (p83)
Johnny is keen to avert the night's tragedy; even so, he's aware of the Trousers of Time effect, that if you alter something in the past you can find yourself going down the wrong leg of the Trousers to arrive in a different future from the one you expected. Indeed, exactly this happens during the pals' various adventures when Wobbler, who's got separated from the rest, unwittingly manages to make his own grandfather (who at the time of encounter is Richmal Crompton's William Brown in all but name) a victim of the bombing raid, thereby cancelling out his own existence in a future to which the rest of the kids briefly return. (The section of the book featuring this subtly different alternative future is especially nicely handled.) In the end Johnny realizes the challenge is to get the air raid siren sounded in time that, while Paradise Road and its nearby pickle factory are destroyed, just as the old newspaper he read for his school project told him, the residents are able to get to their shelters. But this isn't as easy as it sounds, because the switch for the siren is in the police station in town, and will not be pulled until the rozzers hear from the lookout post on a distant hill; the storm that has misled the German bombers has blown out the phone from the lookout post, and the backup motorbike there won't start . . .
Like all the best kids' books, this holds as much to engage adults as most adult novels do, if not more. As noted, Kirsty's a joy; also wonderful among the characters is Yo-less, who's black but also, clashing with ignorant racial stereotypes, the class nerd -- a nerd so nerdish that, as is observed somewhere in the text, if you gave him a baseball cap he'd put it on the right way round. In connection with Yo-less, the book refreshingly confronts casual racism, in both past and present Blackbury, face-on: people do not mean their remarks and attitudes about Yo-less unkindly, not really, but they're fucking offensive all the same. At first Kirsty makes the excuse for them that "it's only the way they've been brought up" and tells Yo-less not to worry; but then, when she encounters some 1940s casual sexism, he tosses the same line back at her and she gets the point. The time-travel aspects of the tale are neatly worked out, as are the potentials for paradox. Much recommended. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5It's Terry Pratchett's doing, so of course it's fun. It plays around with the idea of time travel in a way that doesn't break my brain too much, which I can accept easily enough to drag me along for the ride. I'm told it's not the first book in the series, though, and it shows: I would probably have cared more if, well, I'd already cared.
I'm not really sure what to say about it. I was quite excited to get a Terry Pratchett book on my course, but now I've got it, I don't think I'm going to write about it. It's clever and sometimes funny, and there's hints at engaging with deeper issues, but most of the time I was a little bored -- probably due to the target audience being quite a bit younger than I am! -- and just reading it because I had to. Which is a bit of a shame because I normally love Terry Pratchett. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pratchet-Johnny and the Bomb-can the guys travel in time and alert the town before the bombs land?
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'm not really a huge Pratchett fan, and sadly, I don't think this is one of the gems. I liked the way the time is looked at in the book, especially the idea of how to move through it. Not a classic, but a slightly different way of doing a story with parallel universes. Loved the bag lady.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5While I don't think the Johnny Maxwell books are as great as Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, I am disappointed that there are only three. With this last one, Johnny and the Bomb, the character of Johnny seems to really take shape and accept his "powers". It would be great to follow him on more adventures where is large imagination is so large, it escapes his head and turns real. As it is, however, the last book in this trilogy treats readers to a thoughtful look about time travel and World War II. Pratchett presents a diverse look about the issues that come up between the time travel and war. He delivers many thoughtful ideas that can ruminate in one's mind for quite a while. Overall, this is a wonderful series of books series of books that are more lesson oriented than the Discworld books, but still very enjoyable and contemplative.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is the third in Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trillogy, and while Only You Can Save Mankind is still my favorite, I loved this one too. Like all Pratchett, you'll get lovely layers of humor, a deep sense of humanity, and a fun, tightly woven plot. Recommende for all readers.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In my favorite of the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, Johnny crosses paths with Mrs. Tachyon, a bag lady who also is a time traveller. He and his friends travel back to WWII in their town with the predictable changing of time that must be fixed. However, instead of simply changing time back to its previous path, Johnny wants to prevent a bomb wiping out Paradise Street in the middle of the night. This necessitates a lot of maneuvering by the kids with the usual humorous Pratchett twists and turns along the way. I was surprised at what a page turner it became by the end as I stayed up way past bedtime to get Johnny and his pals home again.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pratchett starts off again by taking an off-the-cuff saying literally. What if you really had "bags of time"? What would you do? Where and when would you go? And if you had the chance to change something, would you?
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Children go back in time and find themselves involved in an adventure set in the 2nd World War. Great characters and a good plot.
Book preview
Johnny and the Bomb - Terry Pratchett
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the Meteorological Office, the Royal Mint, and my old friend Bernard Pearson—who, if he doesn’t know something, always knows a man who does—for their help in the research for this book. When historical details are wrong, it’s my fault for not listening. But who knows what really happened in the other leg of the Trousers of Time?
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: After the Bombs
Chapter 2: Mrs. Tachyon
Chapter 3: Bags of Time
Chapter 4: Men in Black
Chapter 5: The Truth Is Out of Here
Chapter 6: The Olden Days
Chapter 7: Heavy Mental
Chapter 8: Trousers of Time
Chapter 9: Every Little Girl . . .
Chapter 10: Running into Time
Chapter 11: You Want Fries with That?
Chapter 12: Up Another Leg
Chapter 13: Some Other Now . . .
Back Ads
About the Author
Books by Terry Pratchett
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
AFTER THE BOMBS
It was nine o’clock in the evening, in Blackbury High Street.
It was dark, with occasional light from the full moon behind streamers of worn-out cloud. The wind was from the southwest and there had been another thunderstorm, which freshened the air and made the cobbles slippery.
A police sergeant moved, very slowly and sedately, along the street.
Here and there, if someone was very close, they might have seen the faintest line of light around a blacked-out window. From within came the quiet sounds of people living their lives—the muffled notes of a piano as someone practiced scales, over and over again, and the murmur and occasional burst of laughter from the radio.
Some of the shop windows had sandbags piled in front of them. A poster outside one shop urged people to Dig for Victory, as if it were some kind of turnip.
On the horizon, in the direction of Slate, the thin beams of searchlights tried to pry bombers out of the clouds.
The policeman turned the corner and walked up the next street, his boots seeming very loud in the stillness.
The beat took him up as far as the Methodist chapel, and in theory would then take him down Paradise Street, but it didn’t do that tonight because there was no Paradise Street anymore. Not since last night.
There was a truck parked by the chapel. Light leaked out from the tarpaulin that covered the back.
He banged on it.
You can’t park that ’ere, gents,
he said. I fine you one mug of tea and we shall say no more about it, eh?
The tarpaulin was pushed back and a soldier jumped out. There was a brief vision of the interior—a warm tent of orange light, with a few soldiers sitting around a little stove, and the air thick with cigarette smoke.
The soldier grinned.
Give us a mug and a wad for the sergeant,
he said to someone in the truck.
A tin mug of scalding black tea and a brick-thick sandwich were handed out.
Much obliged,
said the policeman, taking them. He leaned against the truck.
How’s it going, then?
he said. Haven’t heard a bang.
It’s a twenty-five-pounder,
said the soldier. Went right down through the cellar floor. You lot took a real pounding last night, eh? Want a look?
Is it safe?
Course not,
said the soldier cheerfully. That’s why we’re here, right? Come on.
He pinched out his cigarette and put it behind his ear.
I thought you lot’d be guarding it,
said the policeman.
It’s dark, and it’s been pouring,
said the soldier. Who’s going to steal an unexploded bomb?
Yes, but . . .
The sergeant looked in the direction of the ruined street.
There was the sound of bricks sliding.
Someone is, by the sound of it,
he said.
What? We’ve got warning signs up!
said the soldier. We only knocked off for a brew-up! Oi!
Their boots crunched on the rubble that had been strewn across the road.
"It is safe, isn’t it?’ said the sergeant.
Not if someone drops a dirty great heap of bricks on it, no! Oi! You!
The moon came out from behind the clouds. They could make out a figure at the other end of what remained of the street, near the wall of the pickle factory.
The sergeant skidded to a halt.
Oh, no,
he whispered. It’s Mrs. Tachyon.
The soldier stared at the small figure that was dragging some sort of cart through the rubble.
Who’s she?
Let’s just take it quietly, shall we?
said the sergeant, grabbing his arm.
He shone his flashlight and set his face into a sort of mad friendly grin.
That you, Mrs. Tachyon?
he said. It’s me, Sergeant Bourke. Bit chilly to be out at this time of night, eh? Got a nice warm cell back at the station, yes? I daresay there could be a big hot mug of cocoa for you if you just come along with me—how about that?
Can’t she read all them warning signs? Is she mental?
said the soldier under his breath. She’s right by the house with the bomb in the cellar!
Yes . . . no . . . she’s just different,
said the sergeant. Bit . . . touched.
He raised his voice. You just stay where you are, love, and we’ll come and get you. Don’t want you hurting yourself on all this junk, do we?
Here, has she been looting?
said the soldier. She could get shot for that, pinching stuff from bombed-out houses!
No one’s going to shoot Mrs. Tachyon,
said the sergeant. "We know her, see? She was in the cells the other night."
What’d she done?
Nothing. We let her nap in a spare cell in the station if it’s a nippy night. I gave her sixpence and a pair of ole boots what belonged to me mum only yesterday. Well, look at her. She’s old enough to be your granny, poor old biddy.
Mrs. Tachyon stood and watched them owlishly as they walked, very cautiously, toward her.
The soldier saw a wizened little woman wearing what looked like a party dress with layers of other clothes on top, and a woolly hat with a bobble on it. She was pushing a wire cart on wheels. It had a metal label on it.
Tesco’s,
he said. What’s that?
Dunno where she gets half her stuff,
muttered the sergeant.
The cart seemed to be full of black bags. But there were other things, which glittered in the moonlight.
"I know where she got that stuff, muttered the soldier.
That’s been pinched from the pickle factory!"
Oh, half the town was in there this morning,
said the sergeant. A few jars of gherkins won’t hurt.
Yeah, but you can’t have this sort of thing. ’Ere, you! Missus! You just let me have a look at—
He reached toward the cart.
Some sort of demon, all teeth and glowing eyes, erupted from it and clawed the skin off the back of his hand.
Blast! ’Ere, help me get hold of—
But the sergeant had backed away.
That’s Guilty, that is,
he said. I should come away if I was you!
Mrs. Tachyon cackled.
Thunderbirds Are Go!
she chortled. "Wot, no bananas? That’s what you think, my old dollypot!"
She hauled the cart around and trotted off, dragging it behind her.
"Hey, don’t go in there—" the soldier shouted.
The old woman hauled the cart over a pile of bricks. A piece of wall collapsed behind her.
The last brick hit something far below, which went boink.
The soldier and the policeman froze in mid run.
The moon went behind a cloud again.
In the darkness, there was a ticking sound. It was far off, and a bit muffled, but in that pool of silence both men heard it all the way up their spines.
The sergeant’s foot, which had been in the air, came down slowly.
How long’ve you got if it starts to tick?
he whispered.
There was no one there. The soldier was accelerating away.
The policeman ran after him and was halfway up the ruins of Paradise Street before the world behind him suddenly became full of excitement.
It was nine o’clock in the evening, in Blackbury High Street.
In the window of the electrical shop, nine TVs showed the same picture. Nine televisions projected their flickering screens at the empty air.
A newspaper blew along the deserted pavement until it wrapped around the stalks in an ornamental flower bed. The wind caught an empty beer can and bowled it across the pavement until it hit a drain.
The High Street was what the Blackbury District Council called a Pedestrian Precinct and Amenity Area, although no one was quite sure what the amenities were, or even what an amenity was. Perhaps it was the benches, cunningly designed so that people wouldn’t sit on them for too long and make the place untidy. Or maybe it was the flower beds, which sprouted a regular crop of the hardy perennial Chip Packet. It couldn’t have been the ornamental trees. They’d looked quite big and leafy on the original drawings a few years ago, but what with cutbacks and one thing and another, no one had actually got around to planting any.
The sodium lights made the night cold as ice.
The newspaper blew on again and wrapped itself around a yellow litter bin in the shape of a fat dog with its mouth open.
Something landed in an alleyway and groaned.
Tick tick tick! Tickety Boo! Ow! National . . . Health . . . Service . . .
The interesting thing about worrying about things, thought Johnny Maxwell, was the way there was always something new to worry about.
His friend Kirsty said it was because he was a natural worrier, but that was because she didn’t worry about anything. She got angry instead, and did things about it, whatever it was. He really envied the way she decided what it was and knew exactly what to do about it almost instantly. Currently she was saving the planet most evenings, and foxes on weekends.
Johnny just worried. Usually they were the same old worries—school, money, whether you could get AIDS from watching television, and so on. But occasionally one would come out of nowhere and knock all the others down.
Right now, it was his mind.
It’s not exactly the same as being ill,
said Yo-less, who’d read all the way through his mother’s medical encyclopedia.
It’s not being ill at all. If lots of bad things have happened to you, it’s healthy to be depressed,
said Johnny. "That’s sense, isn’t it? What with the business going down the drain, and Dad pushing off, and Mum just sitting around smoking all the time and everything. I mean, going around smiling and saying, ‘Oh, it’s not so bad’—that would be mental."
That’s right,
said Yo-less, who’d read a bit about psychology as well.
My gran went mental,
said Bigmac. She—ow!
Sorry,
said Yo-less. I wasn’t looking where I put my foot, but fair’s fair—you weren’t either.
It’s just dreams,
said Johnny. "It’s nothing mad."
Although, he had to admit, it was dreams during the day, too. Dreams so real that they filled his eyes and ears.
The planes . . .
The bombs . . .
And the fossil fly. Why that? There’d be these nightmares, and in the middle of it, there’d be the fly. It was a tiny one, in a piece of amber. He’d saved up for it and done a science project on it. But it wasn’t even scary-looking. It was just a fly from millions of years ago. Why was that in a nightmare?
Huh. Schoolteachers? Why couldn’t they be like they were supposed to be and just chuck things at you if you weren’t paying attention? Instead they all seemed to have been worrying about him and sending notes home and getting him to see a specialist, although the specialist wasn’t too bad and at least it got him out of math.
One of the notes had said he was disturbed.
Well, who wasn’t disturbed? He hadn’t shown it to his mum. Things were bad enough as it was.
You getting on all right at your granddad’s?
asked Yo-less.
It’s not too bad. Granddad does the housework, most of the time anyway. He’s good at fried bread. And Surprise Surprise.
What’s that?
You know that stall in the market that sells tins that’ve got the labels off?
Yes?
Well, he buys loads of those. And you’ve got to eat them once they’re opened.
Yuk.
Oh, pineapple and meatballs isn’t too bad.
They walked on through the evening street.
The thing about all of us, Johnny thought, the sad thing is that we’re not very good. Actually, that’s not the worst part. The worst part is we’re not even much good at being not much good.
Take Yo-less. When you looked at Yo-less, you might think he had possibilities. He was black. Technically. But he never said Yo,
and only said check it out
in the supermarket, and the only person he ever called a mother was his mother. Yo-less said it was racial stereotyping to say all black kids acted like that, but however you looked at it, Yo-less had been born with a defective cool. Trainspotters were cooler than Yo-less. If you gave Yo-less a baseball cap, he’d put it on the right way around. That’s how, well, yo-less Yo-less was. Sometimes he actually wore a tie.
Now, Bigmac . . . Bigmac was good. He was good at math. Sort of. It made the teachers wild. You could show Bigmac some sort of horrible equation and he’d say x=2.75
and he’d be right. But he never knew why. It’s just what it is,
he’d say. And that was no good. Knowing the answers wasn’t what math was about. Math was about showing how you worked them out, even if you got them wrong. Bigmac was also a skinhead. Bigmac and Bazza and Skazz were the last three skinheads in Blackbury. At least, the last three who weren’t someone’s dad. And he had LOVE and HAT on his knuckles, but only in pen because when he’d gone to get tattooed, he fainted. And he bred tropical fish.
As for Wobbler . . . Wobbler wasn’t even a nerd. He wanted to be a nerd but they wouldn’t let him join. He had a Nerd Pride badge and he messed around with computers. What Wobbler wanted was to be a kid in milk-bottle-bottom