Space Crime Conspiracy

‘I don’t understand how this morning no one knew who I was but now I’m stuck in a room full of weird hairy alien policemen, in a space station that smells of cabbage and farts.’ Few of us finding ourselves in a similar predicament would regard it with anything less than the incredulous horror with which young teenager Stanley Bound confronts it in Jones’s romp – through space – of a novel. Unhappy in both his London home and school environments, Stanley finds himself abducted by aliens into distant realms of intergalactic space, his crime apparently being that he has murdered one President Vorlugenar. What follows is a protracted effort on the boy’s part to clear his name, a pursuit in which he is alternately helped and hindered by a cast of divertingly bizarre (and occasionally sinister) characters. Best by far of those befriending him on his quest for justice is a creature known as Spore, a sort of talking mushroom, complete with his own engaging idiolect. Those ranged against him include the megalomaniac Commander Kevolo and a gang of bird-headed pirates known as the Marauding Picaroons. Picaresque in moments it all certainly is, culminating in a trial scene which, in its zany inconsequentialities, makes the one in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland seem a model of order and propriety. It is all very inventive and good-humoured – and not totally without taking some opportunities to raise rather more serious matters (about, say, political corruption and genetic engineering) along the galactic way.