Sometimes, when telling a story, it's good to recap. It helps your audience see the larger picture and allows you a moment to catch your breath while you think how to tell the next bit.
We have before us the story of a young man living in a suburban world very similar to our own, a boy who has the very ordinary desire to be wanted and included, yet has the extraordinary ability to do all of the things that other eleven year olds can only dream about.
Howard Carter has built robots to help him clean his room and mow the lawn and a time machine to help him go back in time and undo the mistakes that keep him on the outside looking in. The lawn mower develops a propensity for self-expression on the lawns of his neighbors, his room-cleaning robot becomes a pirate and his time machine never takes him to the past he remembers and won’t take him to the future he hopes for.
While his dazzling talents have drawn him at least two good friends, they have also drawn the notice of an alien with a puppet fixation, a government agency so secret even the government doesn’t know about them, and a mad science teacher. With the hunters closing in, Howard took his two friends and attempted to escape as far into the past as his time machine would take him. But his future self apparently felt as if his young life was not complicated enough because he sent his future wife to destroy the time machine, taking most of the hillside with it.
In the aftermath of the time machine’s destruction, Howard, his future wife, his family, his friends and his science teacher were captured by WARD, the Wartime Advanced Research Directorate, and taken to a hidden base buried somewhere on the west coast of the United States. There, Howard is shown an army of robots being built to defend the planet against an alien invasion fleet. The invasion is expected but the aliens are early and humankind cannot hope to repel the invasion without Howard’s help.
Meanwhile, we find that Howard’s future wife is also the future queen of the planet, the puppet alien is running around in a new body and the mad scientist has discovered to his surprise that in fact, he isn’t mad at all, just a little irked.
Cry havoc and let slip the robots of war...
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Pages to Type is a blog about books, writing and literary culture (with the occasional digression into coffee and the care and feeding of giant robots).