1) THE IRON WOMAN by Ted Hughes.
Everyone knows and loves THE IRON MAN but less well known is this 1993 sequel in which a female iron giant emerges from a marsh to warn mankind of impending ecological doom. Where the first book is a melancholy and contemplative fairytale, this second is a feverish psychedelic nightmare. One of the craziest books I have ever read.

2) STAR GIRL by Jerry Spinelli
Spinelli excels at bittersweet tales featuring angsty kid protagonists battling the problems of everyday life. Leo is one such hero whose life is turned upside down when a strange and defiantly non-conformist new girl comes to his school. Reading this is like putting your heart in a tumble drier.

3) JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH by Roald Dahl
Is this Dahl’s best book? Quite possibly. Everything about it works. The characters are unforgettable (the joyfully unrepentant pest of a centipede might be best of all) and the invention never flags. The encounter with the cloud people is as superbly creepy as anything Dahl has written.

4) THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter
Time-travel shenanigans in 1960s Liverpool by the modern master of science fiction. Engaging, compulsive and, at times, outright horrific. One of the very few science fiction novels to feature a cameo appearance by Cilla Black.

5) THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by Lewis Carroll
If for no other reason than the inclusion of JABBERWOCKY – one of the greatest poems in the English language (if indeed, those odd words really count as English) – this deserves a place on this list.

6) SKELLIG by David Almond
Who or what is the strange creature lurking in Michael’s garage? An air of mystery, foreboding and death clings to this dark little tale. About as near as a children’s book can get to a David Lynch film. A modern classic.

7) THE TURBULENT TERM OF TIKE TILER by Gene Kemp
Tike Tiler is a wild kid but extremely loyal to best friend Danny. When it looks like the two are about to be separated, Tike decides upon drastic action. One of the best books ever about day-to-day life at school, TIKE TILER was also the first book I read (or more accurately, had read to me) that had a twist at the end, forcing me to revaluate the entire story.

8 ) WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams
Rabbits as heroes? Who’d have thought it? Adams’s rabbits have their own culture, words, even mythology, and are entirely believable. A masterclass in world creation.

9) HOLES by Louis Sachar
The story of Stanley Yelnats incarceration in the Camp Green Lake correctional facility, where juvenile delinquents are forced to dig holes to “build their character”. Pure fun from start to finish.

10) TIMMY THE HAMSTER by Bryson Kinsey
Sometimes dismissed as merely a prolific hack (TIMMY is his fortieth novel!) Kinsey is almost unique among writers in being able to conjure up horror out of almost nothing. In this typically twisted tale, a young boy develops almost imperceptible psychic powers following a traumatic experience. But slight powers are all he needs…

Meeting a reader who enjoys your book really makes this writing lark worthwhile. That and the money.

Space Lizards Stole My Brain is a zany, off-the-wall addition to this ever growing list of great children’s books that deserve more attention from the media than they are getting. I am currently re-reading Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s books* and slipped reading Space Lizards in between The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and The Restaurant At The End of the Universe, just to see how it compared against two of the very best science fiction comedy books ever written, and I was pleasantly surprised. To say that Mark Griffiths is a new Douglas Adams (albeit for a younger audience) would be incredibly premature based upon this one book, but the early indications are very promising indeed.

Space Lizards tells the story of two very different people enitities organisms characters. One is Admiral Skink, intergalactic warmonger extraordinaire, and the other is Lance Spratley, 11, from Cottleton. Admiral Skink is the bloodthirsty, merciless Grand Ruler of the Swerdlixian Lizard Swarm, hellbent on nothing sort of galaxial domination. Lance is your normal, intelligent, geeky science nerd, who has a passion for maths, computers and “the occasional game of Zork Bullfree – Slayer of Astromoops.”, passions he shares with his friend Tori.

At the beginning of the story Skink, his battle cruiser, and all its occupants are destroyed by the Hideous and Unimaginably Vast Comet Creature of Poppledock. Fortunately for the evil Admiral, one of his now-dead underlings fitted him with A Braintwizzler 360 Mind Migration System, and on death so his complete consciousness and memories are fixed into a memory wafer that is then jettisoned into space, eventually to crashland on the nearest habitable planet, and transfer said memories into the brain of the nearest suitable living organism. Unfortunately for Lance…. yes, you guessed it. After falling into the crater caused by the falling wafer, Lance awakes to find himself inside a virtual world within the wafer, whilst his body is up and about containing the mind of a lizard alien.

Al kinds of madcap antics follow, as Skink comes to terms with inhabiting an vastly inferior body frame, and having to suffer the shame of being bullied, and spoken down to by Lance’s rather nasty mother. If only he can get his hands on the wafer then he can activate a homing beacon that will bring his vast fleets of Swardlixians to the rescue, at which point he can get a new lizard body and proceed to destroy the Planet Earth. Lance, meanwhile, has to survive the virtual Fear, Pain and Misery Specialists who want to torture him into revealing all the weaknesses of his species, and then somehow get back into his own body and save the planet. It’s a good job that he is smarter than your average 11 year old!

7+ boys and girls will love this book, especially if they are into programmes like Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures. It is fast-paced, laugh-out-loud funny and just great Fun (with a capital F!). What’s more, there is a sequel scheduled for August, delightfully titled Space Lizards Ate My Sister (and let’s face it, every boy with an annoying younger sister has wished for this, or something similar, at least once).

(c) Darren Hartwell

Yesterday I walked into Blackwells bookshop on Oxford Road, Manchester and saw this (note the shiny-spined red and green book in the middle).

Weird, eh?

Well no. Not really. It took a shedload of hard work. I’m reminded of quote from a Monty Python sketch:

Could Marconi have invented the radio if he hadn’t by pure chance spent years working at the problem?

That’s it really, isn’t it? It’s great having dreams and fantasies and ambitions but at the end of the day you have to apply bum to chair and spend an awful long time working at it to get anywhere. But that’s as it should be. Books wouldn’t be the precious, magical objects they are if anyone could just knock one off with no effort (I’m discounting works by reality TV stars here). So how did Space Lizards Stole My Brain! get from scribbled note to bookshelf-hogging physical object? Read on…

Cast your mind back to the distant year of 2005. Christopher Eccleston was Prime Minister. Tony Blair was Doctor Who. And I decided that I positively, definitely, abso-flipping-lutely have to write a children’s novel. I have an idea about an evil alien warlord who is trapped in the body of a nerdy 11 year old Earth boy. I’ve brushed up on prose writing techniques by studying the advice of top writers like Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk. And I’ve invested in a new USB drive so I can ferry my material between home and work (where I only work on it during DESIGNATED BREAK PERIODS, of course). Off I go…type type type, setting myself a target of a thousand words a day. It seems to be working. I’m quietly chuffed with the first three chapters – in many ways the most important part of the book as it’s on these that agents and publishers will initially judge you. If nothing else I’m having fun.

But then.

But then I read an article online called something like “The Top 20 Mistakes Made By Aspiring Novelists”. I realise I’ve made about seven of them. It feels like a punch in the stomach. Instead of going back and fixing the problems, I get discouraged. The book feels unsalvageable to me. About this time, there is some interest in my scriptwriting and I end up writing some plays, two for stage and one for Radio 4. Maybe novel writing isn’t for me…

Four years pass. Now Gordon Brown is Doctor Who but rumour has it he is about to regenerate very soon. And still the urge to write a book niggles away at me like a psychotic wasp that’s ignoring a restraining order. I open up the old Word document of Space Lizards, then called Lord Dragonbreath. The opening still reads really well. And the rest of it isn’t terrible. If I snip this bit here and add another bit there… I should finish this thing, I think, and send it off.

So I do.

In time-honoured tradition, I acquire a copy of The Writer’s & Artist’s Yearbook (the one aimed specifically at children’s writers) and make a list of about 25 potential agents. I send off the first three chapters to each of them. Simultaneously. If you waited for an agent to reply before submitting to another you’d be lucky to get a book published before the heat death of the Universe.

Then I wait.

Replies trickle in. Mainly rejections.

A few agents want to read the rest of the book. Brilliant! Off it goes to them. Then two agents get back to me. They like it and want to represent me! After a little consideration I go with Kate Shaw at the Viney Agency. Kate imagines the book could be the start of a series. A series? The thought never occurred to me (showing how little I understood what publishers are looking for). Kate also has some suggestions for rewrites. She feels the book is too long and too unfocussed. The story needs to be boiled down to its essentials. I agree and set about a rewrite. There’s nothing like a bit of interest in your work to motivate you to produce another draft. Eventually Kate thinks the book is ready to submit to publishers. Manuscripts are despatched. Follow-up emails are sent. Meetings are set-up. Cups of Earl Grey are consumed in swanky London patisseries (patisseries are very important in the world of publishing, I learn.) And then … offers are made.

We go with Simon & Schuster. Their offer seems best and they will without doubt be lovely people to work with.

Whew! Done it! We have a deal! The book’s coming out! The work is done, right?

Turns out not.

Editorial changes remain to be finalised, as does copyediting, finding an illustrator (again it had never occurred to me it might need illustrations), approving character designs, producing layouts, producing illustration briefs, producing and approving cover designs and copy for the back cover blurb, producing and approving the illustrations themselves, producing cover proofs, setting up a web site … on and on it goes. A publication date is settled on, then brought forward, then reverted to the original. But now, at last, the end is in sight.

Ahead of publication I decide to have some drinks with friends to celebrate at the Fab Café in Manchester. We have lizard cupcakes.

Apologies to the Fab Café for my tired and emotional, silly-dancing, cupcake-throwing behaviour that night. As you can see, it’s taken a long time getting this thing from my notebook and into the shops.

Martin Amis once said he could never write children’s literature because of the restrictions this would place on his artistic freedom. I don’t know if Marty has read the nursery rhyme ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ recently, but in it a cow actually jumps over the moon. I mean, how much freer can literature be?

Science fiction comedy (and if a cow jumping over the moon doesn’t count as that, I don’t know what does) seems to me a natural form to use when writing for children, allowing, as it does, tremendous scope for the imagination and for the inversion of the normal way of things. Indeed, science fiction with a humorous twist is at the core of much memorable children’s literature. The marvellous medicine George feeds his granny in the Roald Dahl story is simply a comic update of Dr Jekyll’s potion.

The mind-swap trope, in particular, has a long and distinguished history in (usually comic) literature – from F. Anstey’s classic tale of father and son who exchange souls, Vice Versa, through PG Wodehouse’s Laughing Gas, to the modern braintwizzling hijinx of Mary Rodgers’ Freaky Friday and Todd Strasser’s Help! I’m Trapped… series. These stories appeal to children’s innate sense of fairness because they usually portray imposing authority figures being forced to undergo the humiliations they normally inflict on others.

In my book Space Lizards Stole My Brain!, an evil, warmongering, alien lizard creature, Admiral Skink, is brought down to Earth, literally, when his mind is transferred into the body of an ordinary Earth boy, Lance Spratley. Skink, the interstellar bully (at the opening of the book we see him picking on a weaker, nerdier, alien civilisation) is forced to experience life from the victim’s point of view. Now it is he who is pushed around by the stronger life forms that normally plague the existence of Lance Spratley – school bullies, mean teachers, tyrannical parents and an impossibly bossy little sister. Slowly, the alien warlord develops a grudging respect for the fortitude that Lance must show in the face of such daily indignities.

Using the viewpoint of an alien creature as a distorting lens, the everyday upsets and worries of an 11 year old boy are made to look like weird, incomprehensible, life-threatening perils – in fact, just the way they actually feel to an 11 year old boy. Admiral Skink is Lance’s alter ego in many ways. When, his mind trapped in Lance’s body, he goes on a ruinous rampage through town astride a dinosaur, it’s hard not to feel that it is the frustrated child Lance himself who is taking destructive revenge on a world that constantly slights him.

Science fiction is often about what ifs – what philosophers call thought experiments – ways in which we reimagine the world to compare and contrast it with the one we’re familiar with. Children do this with constant and unthinking freedom in their games, and by writing comic science fiction for them, as an adult I can go some way towards recapturing that freedom.