Sweets from a Stranger

 Now this is another favourite from Nicholas Fisk, although one I discovered quite a bit later than the many other books of his I'd read - I can't exactly fix a date on when I read it, but I would think I must have been a teenager. It's a collection of ten short stories, and re-reading it now all these years later is quite fascinating...

The cover has nothing to do with any of the stories in the book. It's credited to Dave Holmes, and it fits the generally creepy-sci-fi theme of the stories, but I assume it wasn't specifically commissioned for this edition. I don't remember the cover of the one I had from the library (Boston library, I think) in the old days. The illustrations inside the book aren't very good, though - by David Barlow, they actually depict the scenes nicely, but the faces are horrible and spoil the whole effect.

Anyway, you don't buy this kind of book for the pictures. What interests me about these ten stories is how familiar or unfamiliar I was with them some thirty years later - does that reflect on how good or bad the stories were, or on my appreciation or understanding of them at the time? Here's a run through the contents:

1. Sweets from a Stranger

I remembered this one almost word for word; it's very good. Eleven-year-old Tina can't help but laugh when a car driver makes an inept attempt to persuade her to get into his car with an offer of sweeties. It turns out he's an alien, doing a terrible job of trying to prepare for an invasion, and Tina has to help him phone home to tell his bosses he just can't do it. Grateful, he offers to show her his home planet, she goes along with him... and finds she actually has been cleverly kidnapped. Brilliant.

2. The Thieves of Galac

This one, though, didn't ring a bell at all. Mala and Tal are among the few remaining humans who stayed behind on Earth after a successful conquest by robots sent from Galac. It's a pretty miserable place, and now the sentinel robots have started stealing pointless junk for their senile masters back home. The short story seems to go through at least three different plots that would fuel a full-length sci-fi novel of the 1950s, and I'm surprised nothing stuck in my brain, but it's not the most compelling one in the book.

3. Space Invaders

I remember this one well, though the ending didn't stick in my brain at all. Jason is addicted to playing video games at the arcade, and he's stolen money from his mum's purse to do it. He wins a lot of money on the games, gets tired, keeps playing, and loses it all. But as he's on his last few coins the arcade games talk to each other in machine-language, and one of the games decides Jason is such a nice player, it will let him win! It's a nice story, even if the only bits that I recall were the bits with the arcade games - this book was published in 1982, and it's a very 1982 idea of the future of video games, which seemed strange even when I first read it. Still fun, though!

4. Mind-Milk

No recollection of this one in the slightest. Alien creatures use their mindprobe to 'milk' the daydreams of children, only for it to turn out that one boy is daydreaming about destroying those same alien creatures. I probably don't remember this one because I just didn't get it... and I still don't really get what Nicholas Fisk was going for here. I suppose there'll always be a dud or two in a collection like this.

5. Perfect Paul

This one, on the other hand, I remember well, just because I remember it being a surprisingly stupid story from a great writer. Young Paul is a perfect child in every way, and when he dies in a bike accident, he's far too perfect to go to the normal good people's afterlife; he gets exclusive VIP treatment and gets sent to Uppermost, where his perfection even annoys the people there. So they give him the ultimate punishment, and have him reincarnated as a schoolteacher. It's a very lame punchline.

6. Oddiputs

From the worst to the best, this is one I remember very vividly, and it's brilliant. Oddiputs is a robot who doesn't quite work properly, and is the victim of constant teasing and mistreatment by evil eight-year-old Sally. Eventually, Oddiputs' flawed thinking process leads him to the conclusion that he must kill her. It's a very creepy battle of wits, with a great ending!

7. Swap-Shop

Again, this is one I remember clearly, though I'd forgotten there's an extra bit at the end. Bogey and Jo discover a hole in the wall that seems to be a portal to some other universe. If you put something in it, the other side will send back a superior alien equivalent, always powered by a little button with a golden worm spinning in it. After a lot of experimentation and attempts to communicate with the other side, Bogey climbs through the hole himself, and comes back... different. Very creepy and cool, but I remembered it as ending with the moment of his return and was surprised to find it goes on a bit beyond that, while still remaining inconclusive. Still fun to read, anyway!

8. Nightmare's Dream

This is why I wanted to write about the stories I remembered and didn't remember, because I don't remember reading this one at all, and I have a worrying feeling that this is because I completely missed what the story's all about. A normal boy has horrible dreams that he's a hideous alien monster chained up in a yard on Earth... or is it the other way around? Very cool, and although I hope my younger self did get it, I rather think he didn't. Oh well, at least I can appreciate it at the age of forty-five!

9. Cutie Pie

Another one where I didn't remember the ending. Is it a weakness with the stories that makes them a little anti-climactic, with the really good ideas earlier in the narrative? Or is it me not being an attentive reader? Maybe a little of both. Anyway, an adorable alien creature is brought to Earth from an inhospitable alien planet, and becomes the latest international sensation. But Cutie Pie doesn't thrive in the perfectly-recreated atmosphere of the planet he came from - and no wonder, because he's not a native of that planet, he'd gone there to endure the conditions as a test of manhood. Nearly killed by his captivity, he escapes, finds Earth's atmosphere much more liveable, and recovers. And then in a bit I don't remember at all, makes friends with a baby and goes back home. I think it IS the endings being anti-climactic, because the really great storytelling in a lot of these ones is already done by the middle of the tale!

10. Teddies Rule, OK?

This one's a complete blank in my memory. Little Mandy is inseparable from her teddy bear, and her father decides to surprise her by giving it artificial intelligence so it can talk back to her. And it all gets a bit creepy from there. But the story is rather vague about everything, and it's a slightly limp ending to a collection that's definitely got more hits than misses.

I really recommend this, and the rest of Nicholas Fisk's oeuvre, as essential reading! Please do find as many of them as you can, and maybe we can re-introduce him to a whole new generation! I'm sure nothing could go wrong with that idea, unless their teddy bears and robots start giving them ideas...