Fantasy - Comic 2006

File Updated: 05/02/2007

Tangled Web UK: New Fantasy - Comic Titles 2006

Michael Gerber Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parodies Published June 2006 by Gollancz at Ł12.99 ISBN: 0 575 07 894 4
Omnibus Edition
As Unauthorised as it is unfortunate
Brought together for the first time in one ‘bumper’ volume, here are Michael Gerber’s hilarious parodies,
Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody
Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel
Barry Trotter and the Dead Horse
Relive the whole ghastly tale of Barry Trotter, Lon Measley and Ermine Cringer. Amusingly, the story starts when Barry is 22 and shiftless, goes on to tell what happened when he was 39 and pathetic and then, because we couldn’t think what to do next but needed to crank out one more book, zips back, via a supremely unlikely plot device, to when he was 9 and just plain vile.
Laugh! At Lord Valumart’s bizarrely inept attempts to kill Barry. Wonder! Just how Bumblemore got to be headmaster. Heave! At Lon’s toilet habits. Sigh! When you realise that it isn’t a Harry Potter book after all. What? You’ve only just worked that out? And now you’ve bought this book? And you can’t find the receipt? Oh dear, oh dear.
Witty. Cultured. Erudite. Thought-provoking. Brilliant. None of these describe Michael Gerber.
Foolish. Naďve. On the run. Given that he has just taken it upon himself to pour scorn on Christian fundamentalists with The Chronicles Of Blarnia, his parody of the Narnia books, some of these might.
Three Barry Trotter parodies in one fantastic value volume - the ruthless exploitation of the reading public goes on!
• Sales of the individual Barry Trotter titles now at more than half a million • The Barry Trotter books spent more than six months he Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller lists
• A publishing phenomenon all of its own
• These `bullet points’ look quite good don’t they?
• It’s a sort of marketing thing isn’t it?
• Apparently.
Obligatory Legal Mumbo-Jumbo. This book has not been authorized or endorsed by J.K. Rowling or the publishers of the Harry Potter books. Harry Potter is a registered trademark of Warner Bros. `Yes! Now, now,’ she panted.
`Gerber has succeeded in creating a marginally grotesque, bouncing beauty of a throwaway tome. Down with Potter! Trotter is the real thing’ The Morning Star

About The Author
Michael Gerber is 32 and an American, but that’s alright because he likes Peter Cook and Monty Python and thinks most American comedy is utter crap - present book excepted (or not, but you’ll have to buy it to find out).
In fact he thinks Bill Hicks would’ve loved this book, especially the dirty parts, and would’ve particularly appreciated his memory being used to hawk a cheesy parody.
His writing has appeared in, amongst others, The New Yorker, Playboy and The Wall Street Journal. This is his first book. And it shows.
Michael Gerber would like to make it clear that while he expects you to blame him for this book the state of Britain’s railways really is down to some other guy. Thousands of New and used Books at your Fingertips...
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Michael Gerber Barry Trotter and the Dead Horse Pbk published August 2006 by Gollancz at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0 575 07692 5

Find out just how awful Barry was when he first came to Hogwash.
The previous two Barry Trotter books have sold 600,000 copies, to people all around the world who really should know better. So when Mike said he wanted to do a prequel (technical terminology for `artistically, unjustified but financially sound hasty last-minute addition to an unexpectedly successful series of books’) you can be sure we put on our best ‘what-a-great-idea’ faces, and agreed.
And because this is a ‘prequel’ (see above) you really don’t have to have read either Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody or Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel (even though we’re taking this opportunity to remind you just what great books they really are) before you buy this book.
OBLIGATORY LEGAL MUMBO JUMBO
Ahem (must get this cough looked at). This book has not been authorised or endorsed by J. K, Rowling or the publishers of the Harry Potter books. Harry Potter is a registered trademark of Warner Bros.Thank you. Now buy this book.

About The Author
Michael Gerber is 32 and an American, but that’s alright because he likes Peter Cook and Monty Python and thinks most American comedy is utter crap - present book excepted (or not, but you’ll have to buy it to find out).
In fact he thinks Bill Hicks would’ve loved this book, especially the dirty parts, and would’ve particularly appreciated his memory being used to hawk a cheesy parody.
His writing has appeared in, amongst others, The New Yorker, Playboy and The Wall Street Journal. This is his first book. And it shows.
Michael Gerber would like to make it clear that while he expects you to blame him for this book the state of Britain’s railways really is down to some other guy. Thousands of New and used Books at your Fingertips...
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David Langford The Wyrdest Link: Terry Pratchett's Discworld Quizbook Published April 2006 by Gollancz at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0 575 07704 2
So you think you know your way around Terry Pratchett’s Discworld? Can you say offhand just where your figgin is? Do you know Orangutan well enough to tell the sympathetic noise `Oook’ from the danger-warning ‘Oook’? Are you 100 per cent sure of how to spell WIZZARD? Or will you be … The Wyrdest Link?
First came The Unseen University Challenge, the Discworld quizbook that left a trail of exploded minds from London Ankh-Morpork. Now The Wyrdest Link returns with hundreds more Discworld posers that will test your funnybone to the most hellish limits of endurance, questions in the merciless tradition of the Star Chamber, the Spanish Inquisition, and Anne Robinson. And come to think of it, is it a good or a bad thing to be…
The Wyrdest Link?

How did you do?
There are a grand total of 850 points.
If you scored more than this you are probably a sorcerer and entitled to the supreme honorary title Doctorum Fiddleri Tempus-Minimus.
If you scored 750 points or more you clearly share the deep learning of those revered dwarfs the drudak’ak*.
If you scored between 100-750 you gain honorary citizenship of that magical Discworld region from which so many over- and under-achievers come… you are the Wyrdest Lancre, and also win the Mrs Cake Happy Medium Award.
If you scored between 0-99 you have a wonderful personality and gook hair but you should read some more of that nice Mr Pratchett’s books and try again. You Are The Wyrdest Link. Terry Pratchett is the Creator of the Discworld and the author of more than 30 bestselling and award-winning Discworld novels and assorted spinoffery. He lives behind a whole network of very upmarket computers in Wiltshire (no longer just connected to the world by a piece of damp string).
`I’d be willing to wrestle a polar bear if it were lying on a Langford book that I hadn’t yet read!’ Lionel Fanthorpe, Fortean TV

About The Author
David Langford has been intimately involved in the Discworld from the time The Colour of Magic, the first Discworld novel, was published. It is rumoured, in some dark, dank quarters, that he knows even more about the Discworld and the strange denizens that people this marvellous world than the Creator himself. Thousands of New and used Books at your Fingertips...
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Terry Pratchett The Art of Discworld Pbk published October 2005 by Gollancz at Ł10.99 ISBN: 0575077123

The Discworld: a world bursting with magic, a land of contrasts and extremes that floats through space on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle. In the bustling metropolis of Ankh-Morpork, the oldest city on the Disc, you can find every luxury and perversion known to man or dwarf and a lair few yet to be properly invented; in the ancient empire of Klatch there are fifteen words for assassination. The kingdom of Lancre may be small, but in this case size definitely isn’t everything; in the dark country of Uberwald, things do go bump in the night.
The inhabitants of Discworld are even more unforgettable than the places. There are witches and wizards - Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick (now a Queen, of course), and those in training (willingly or otherwise): Agnes Nitt,Tiffany Aching; Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, the Librarian, Rincewind, the Bursar: all play their part.
There are great heroes, like Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde, Sam Vimes, Captain Carrot and the men* of the City Watch ... and there are the ordinary folk like Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Foul Ole Ron, the Igors. And there’s Death, and his increasingly extended family.
The Discworld might have started out in the imagination of its Creator, Terry Pratchett, but over the past 30 or more books, it has taken on a life of its own. Here, artist Paul Kidbv, steered by the author’s words, takes his own voyage through the Disc, revealing, in glorious colour and intricate black and white, the cornucopia of characters that have won the hearts of millions of adoring readers the world over: Here is The Art of Discworld.
`A very handsome book ... Pratchett’s insider ‘gossip’ about characters coupled with Kidby’s line drawings gives considerable insight into the collaborative process between writer and artist’ Locus
About The Author
Terry Pratchett is Britain's bestselling living novelist and lives behind a (very upmarket) keyboard in Wiltshire, where he answers letters in a desperate attempt to find time to write. He used to grow carnivorous plants, but now they've taken over the greenhouse and he avoids going in.
He says he doesn't want to get a life after all, because it feels like he's already trying to lead three. He is having a new conservatory built for the carnivorous plants, because they deserve it. Thousands of New and used Books at your Fingertips...
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Adam Roberts The Va Dinci Cod Pbk published May 2006 by Gollancz at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0575077719

In his own blood, the dying man had written a single sentence in splashy, red letters. It was very much a red letter statement:
The Catholic Church Had Me Murdered
For long seconds Donglan stared at the mysterious message. ‘That, Doctor Donglan,’ said Tash, ‘is why we have called you in at this time. That mysterious message.’
‘It may,’ said Robert, ‘be an anagram.’
‘We wondered about that,’ said Tash. ‘Can you decipher it?’
Donglan smiled. ‘Of course. It is my speciality,’ he said. He tried to add ‘I am an anagram master’, but instead said ‘I amanana manna’ and ‘I am anamanna’ and stopped.

Five utterly baffling mysteries that will change what you believe about the world. And fish. And the wisdom of ever reading another book:
• An eminent, renowned museum curator lies dead in his own gallery, with a three foot cod stuffed down his throat ...
• A brilliant young man, a renowned anagrammatologist, good-looking, gsoh, own flat, good job, non-smoker, very high standards of personal hygiene, single, he’s not gay, and he’s not antisocial, he meets lots of women really, just nobody seems quite right ...
• A beautiful, renowned young French police cryptologist who studied for her cryptology degree at Royal Holloway* - a university without a department in cryptology ...
• A book full of rehashed conspiracy theory cods (Oh! My! God!) wallop becomes a global bestseller.
• Another book that should be called The Eda Vinci Cod gets called The Va Dinci Cod instead. An anagram is it? Err no.
The true reasons for the success of Don Brine’s books are a secret that not even the Knights Templar, the CIA or the Church of the Resplendent Latter Day Apostles Who came Down from Space to Smite the Liberals (Alabama) are privy to.
Less-than-interestingly if you transcribe Don Brine into the Cyrillic alphabet and read it in a mirror and then transcribe it back out of the Cyrillic it reads as a transliteration of the Hebrew for Adam Roberts. If you squint a bit.
Adam Roberts, get this, actually does teach at Royal Holloway. But not cryptology. Perhaps not even English.

*Hilariously, Royal Holloway have asked us to point out that every one is very excited by the Masters degree programmes in cryptology offered by their ‘world leading’ research centre in information Security. Whatever that means.

About The Author
Adam Roberts is a lecturer at the University of London. He has an MA from Aberdeen and a PhD in English and Classics from Cambridge. Adam has been a Lecturer of English at Royal Holloway, University of London since 1990. His areas of specialisation are:
1) Nineteenth Century. He is Deputy Director of RHUL’s MA in Victorian Media and Culture.
2) Postmodernism. Deputy Director of the RHUL MA in Postmodernism, Literature and Contemporary Culture and
3) Science Fiction.
He is also the Deputy Dean of Arts.
Adam has edited and published a number of academic books: Robert Browning (Twayne 1996) (ed.); Robert Browning (OUP: The Oxford Authors 1998); Romantic and Victorian Long Poems: a Guide (Ashgate 1999) (ed.); Tennyson (OUP: The Oxford Authors 2000) (assoc. ed); The Oxford Readers Guide to Dickens (OUP 1999); Fredric Jameson (Routledge: Routledge Critical Thinkers, September 2000); Science Fiction (Routledge New Critical Idiom 2000).
Adam’s previous SF novels include Salt (for which he received an Arthur C. Clarke award nomination), he followed that up with On and last year published Stone. Polystom is Adam’s Roberts’ fourth novel.
He currently lives in Staines with his wife and daughter. Thousands of New and used Books at your Fingertips...
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