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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

After all that, a final TL;DR
Nicholas Fisk’s books are punchily short but thought-provoking, unsettling, with memorably sour endings.
If you’ve never read any, I think of John Christopher or Time Bandits as his nearest tonally troubling contemporaries.
Find one and try one.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Star Stormers is worth a read, but a mix. Saved from becoming too repetitive by their going in very different directions, though some of that doesn’t work and it goes on a bit too long.
And yet.
Much of it’s intriguingly alien.
And the Octopus Emperor is indelibly creepy as f—.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

While some elements are deeply weird to the last (one death you wouldn’t regret yet disturbing in its final mad trailing away, like an angel betrayed by god dying).
So, after my first *complete* reading of all five:

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Volcano has weird alien life in common with Evil Eye, then goes back to the main plot, so it feels like a round-up (and is).
Again, there’s not really a twist in the tale, but there are terrible prices and that works for me.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

I’d always had a sense of these as never-ending, and never-ending anxiety!
And, phew, the finale is much better than books 3 and 4, which is a relief too.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Star Stormers 5 – Volcano
I gave up ever finding a physical copy and bought an ebook.
Unexpectedly, a definite conclusion to the series. Both for the lingering unresolved trails at each previous novel and (because I’d only got as far as book 3)…

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Star Stormers 4 – Evil Eye
The most different
The most physical
The most disappointing:
Possibly because of 40 years’ anticipation
Possibly because it lacks a twist
Possibly because ‘hunters’ aren’t that interesting (and a bit icky that it’s the two kids of colour who go feral).

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

From this point my grown-up re-read became simply a ‘read’; I still have my copies of the first three, but never found the last two at the time and had been left hanging. Then a charity shop provided an ex-library copy of…

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Star Stormers 2 – Sunburst
A very different kind of ghost ship, very Fisk, and for a very different sort of ghosts probably the most horrifying of the books.

3 – Catfang
More linear: a bit Cordwainer Smith vs submarine warfare. The least creepy.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

The rest of the story is creepy as f—
The vast old Glory Ark packed with religious maniacs
The first encounter with Octopus Emperor – how alien, yet just how recognisable his tyranny is. Which, with reaching out to the parents, is the main thread through the rest of the books.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

On re-reading, I immediately remembered from four decades ago the tone-setting moment where a teacher watches them take off, realises that’s why they’ve been skipping school, and gloomily wishes them luck while thinking of “the last lot”: burned to a crisp.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Star Stormers 1 – Starstormers
Yes, I would go back in time and have a word with the copy-editor about titling consistency, but in every other way the best of the series.
To begin: kids left on Earth while their parents build a space colony strive to get out there to see them.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

The “Octopus Emperor” remains unsettling, whether in seductive golden glass façade or reality of buzzing dust. Not tentacular – its name one of many myths grown about it – but amorphously insinuative, with an oppressive servant Voice and hollowed-out slaves…

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

The most memorable thing about the series – beyond kids flying around in a meteorite with a drive, which was incredibly exciting when I was eight, and which I can remember drawing zooming about – is the enemy:

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Fisk was also clearly trying to modernise in 1980: his four protagonists are made up of two girls and two boys, two white, one Chinese and one Black, and mostly he makes this work but sometimes his writing’s a bit awkward now (notably book 4).

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Star Stormers TL;DR
Four kids kit-build a spaceship in search of their parents across five novels.
Your tolerance for kid heroes may vary, yet these are more horror and despair than Famous Five
The first two are eerily brilliant, the rest less successful (but not mere repeats).

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Yet even before I was ten years old existential crises captivated me, and that makes A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair Nicholas Fisk’s most powerful novel for me.

While bar Grinny, his Star Stormers series are my most recent (re)read…

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

**Yes, really – I know it looks like they’ve kept the first couple of letters as a blatant caricature, but this book is 41 years old.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

*Terrible pun, so in penance: Fisk’s uncle was the Irish actor Micheál Mac Liammóir, who was gay with a fascinating self-created life (which seems very much a metaphor). ‘Nicholas Fisk’ himself was a pen-name for David Higginbottom.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

While the sequel You Remember Me! still more uncannily suggested a much more recent short-term ‘Prime Minister’, though I’m not sure whether she or Lisa Treadgold** went to pieces even faster on live TV.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Though Grinny eerily bringing to mind old ladies from church when I was a boy was bad enough, a little voice from decades ago screamed inside me seeing the horrible ending coming!

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

I’m afraid my reading speed is way down on my childhood voraciousness and the number of books I’ve started then put on the stack when distracted is now many dozens…

….But I started re-reading Grinny on the way to a tiresome hospital appointment and, for once, read on through the night to finish it.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

I’d not read Grinny since I was at school, so I read it again this time two years ago for Fisk’s centenary and the book’s own fiftieth (it warns me about the GAE. Too late*).

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

I was never sure if I *liked* them but always remembered them, perhaps because they felt upsetting but naggingly right.
Trillions and Grinny are probably Nicholas Fisk’s most iconic books, so either of those are good places to start.

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Alex Will Resurrect That Werewolf Pic 🔸🏳️‍🌈 @alexwilcock.bsky.social · 35m

Nicholas Fisk novels are an uncanny mix of reality and the weird, with confoundingly sour endings that stayed with me. Even when ‘baddies’ are defeated, the ‘goodies’ end up disappointed in unhappy endings and unresolved lives: rarely ‘victorious’; never reassuring.

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