He's called David Higginbottom?

"I've already killed three people with my skimmer, but that hardly counts - they were all Senior Citizens."

So says Dano Gazzard, slipped nonchalently into a paragraph describing himself and his surroundings, so casually that it goes unnoticed by a ten-year-old reader looking forward to some kind of science-fiction children's story. By the time this ten-year-old gets to the end of "Time Trap" with its ingeniously tightly-knotted time-travel circular insanity plotline and the pretty horrific ending where the good guys don't win, he's hooked on the works of Nicholas Fisk for life.

So it was nice to find out that the favourite author of my boyhood years has acquired a Wikipedia page since I last tried to look him up on the internet. And hey, check it out! Not only is his real name David Higginbottom, he shares my birthday! And he's, as far as whoever wrote the wiki page knows, at least, still alive, and nearly 85. I need to find a way to send him a long-overdue fan letter.

Words can't describe how cool the books of Nicholas Fisk are. Calling them children's sci-fi does them a real disservice - I'd never read anything so adult in tone (and still haven't read much that can compare with his best stuff, even now). It's criminal that he's not better-known. I'd love to see his stuff back in print again, because most of his books I got from the library. All I've got on my bookshelves now are tattered old copies of "Time Trap" and "Robot Revolt" and a more recent edition of "Trillions" I found a few years ago.

Now my interest has been piqued by that bibliography (including some that the libraries at Horncastle and Boston didn't have in their collections), I really want to track down copies of the likes of "A Rag, A Bone And A Hank Of Hair" ('And please do not tell me that Jack cannot be killed, because I say he can') and "Space Hostages" (the rather graphic description of the dying, deranged Flight Lieutenant sticks with me even now). And so many other long-lost favourites on that list, too - "Leadfoot" was always a particular favourite, no sci-fi in that one, just a boy and a car, Oddiputs the evil robot from "Sweets From A Stranger and other stories", "On The Flip Side", which gave me weird dreams for a month afterwards (those blobs were scary!)...

I need to start trawling eBay and charity shops. And re-reading the handful of books I've still got. Starting with Robot Revolt - great story, bad title. I think a lot of his titles were forced on him by the publishers, but this one especially - sure, it's snappy and it lures readers in, probably, but the point of the book is that while it is about a robot revolt, we don't realise that until late on in the story. We think it's about Hez and Abi and the Pastor, until things come to a head and we see that Max has been using the heroes for his own purposes. And then there's another twist to come after that...

Great stuff. Seriously.