Recommended holiday reads: Alan Perrott

Trapped!! Gas knocking me out, too — getting sleepy ... guess I'm done for ... Goodbye all ... Mother ..."

Spine-tingling, isn't it? And just the set-up you want to kick off a ripsnorting interstellar adventure. But let me back the truck up a bit, this isn't just a good Chrissy read, The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century could also mark the birth of a new genre.

So, for the record, I dub thee Roots Animation. Chur.

Buck's big book came out in 1970, nine years before Gil Gerard's camp, spandex-clad television reprise, and pulls together all of our hero's daily, rocket pistol-toting, comic strips from 1929 through to 1946 — golden years for proto sci-fi indeed, and just the business for a golden summer.

Who wouldn't be drawn to chapter headings such as "The Monkeymen of Planet X" or "Martians Invade Jupiter" or "The Fu Manchu moustache of Ming the Merciless"?

Keeping with the escapist theme — and why not, it's the holidays — it's time to rip into the new flag-bearers of British sci-fi.

Peter F. Hamilton has finally released Judas Unleashed, the sequel to Pandora's Star and a space opera fan's space opera. I've even reread the first slab of book in preparation because it's a tangled web of galaxy-spanning shoot-bang-fire with enough characters and plotlines to fill out several decades of Coro St. But a warning for first-timers, PFH does not write short books.

Far grimmer is this year's China Mieville newbie, Looking for Jake and Other Stories. Now Mieville spills way outside the lines of sci-fi; he prefers to call it fantastic fiction, which does have a hint of Buck Rogers about it.

I guess it's a fair enough catch-all for his tactile brand where horror meets fantasy meets bizarre sexual antics. Personally, I think he's still resolving the anguish he has oft described of the day when his schoolmates discovered his name rhymed with ladies' bits.

Anyway, Looking For Jake, etc features 14 tales, including his award-winning novella, The Tain, and On The Way To the Front, which is presented in comic form.

Lastly, you don't always have to buy a book to enjoy its summer flavours — you can dip your toe in bookshops. I have a good mate who enjoys the mystical, self-helpy wares available from Pathfinder on Lorne St and I have to say for a good giggle there is little to beat Michael Roads.

He's a dinkum Aussie with a special talent: he can talk to plants, and in Talking With Nature he relates a few of his leafy chats where they all seem to babble like elfin Lord of the Rings folk. Crack a tear to a rose's plea as it calls on Roads to pluck its single bloom because it's just too hot to be flowering: "Do not mourn a dying rose. I die, yet I live, for am I not also the rose in the garden, all roses in all gardens, all roses in all vases?"

Great gobbledegook.


* Alan Perrott is a canvas writer