By Jason Bradbury
Not content with being the UK’s best-known face of technology, Jason Bradbury, host of The Gadget Show on Five, has just launched his first novel, a pacey techno-thriller for kids called Dot Robot.
It features Jackson Farley, maths nerd, computer geek and all-round smart kid who, rather than go outside and face the local bullies, whiles away his time playing online RPGs and generally surfing the net. Intrigued by the cryptic questions of an unknown hacker who keeps interrupting his game time, Jackson follows the clues around the web until he unlocks the secret of MeX, a top-secret defence force founded and funded by technology billionaire Devlin Lear.
Devlin has been watching Jackson and has decided to recruit him into MeX along with three other whiz-kids; Brooke, a brash American girl with a gift for complex engineering and the Kojima Twins, a pair of professional gamers from Japan. The aim of MeX is to pilot small robot craft of Lear’s design into areas of conflict and take out the bad guys in order to save the world. It’s all great fun at first but eventually things take a big turn for the worse and soon Jackson finds himself up to his neck in a humanitarian crime he was not trained to deal with.
I don’t doubt for a second that this book will be a big hit, it’s nicely written, the pace is pretty good and the geeks shall inherit the earth, or at least they will if Jason Bradbury has anything to do with it. If there’s any question marks over it I would say that Mr Bradbury tries too hard to make maths and science seem cool – an admirable idea though that is and I take my hat off to him for trying – but whole chunks of the narrative are taken up with our protagonist working out equations for fun and calculating Pi to a zillion places. Now it may be just me, but that stuff has a tendency to rip me out of the story and then I have to work harder to get back into it later on, and if I have that problem, I wonder how the target audience of children will cope?
Having said that, the writing style is friendly and inclusive, making sometimes complex subject matter easy to absorb and understand and the story itself is simple and straightforward, upbeat and a lot of fun, if a tad clichéd. Jackson lives with his widower father and the complicated relationship the two of them have is deftly handled and rounds out Jackson’s character into something more than just a school nerd, while the long-distance friendship he develops with Brooke is another aspect of the characterisation that Jason got just right.
I’m not entirely sure what Jason plans to do next, but I can see these kids popping up again as this turns into a series that runs and runs, but if every kid that reads one of his books decides to grow up to be a mathematician or an engineer instead of a reality TV star it would be no bad thing at all.
Dot Robot is published by Puffin Books and is available from Play.com, Blackwell and all good book stores.
Jason Bradbury maintains a very popular blog.