Things That Still Makes Being Me Just That Bit Better... Number 1
... And of course, I will start with a book, one I have mentioned a few times in passing. Not a brilliant book, no - what this was was a really rather good 1950s short story padded out to pulp novel length, and I know perfectly well that its age, its pulp nature and its padding do show. And that he wrote far better (Wasp, "And Then There Were None", "Allamagoosa". I don't care. I love it, and have for most of my reading life, and I am positive it is one of the influences on the way I myself write humour...
(click to enlarge)
The copy I first read was a an op shop find of my mother's - Mum was a devoted reader of second-hand SF, she had hundreds of the books (I'm damn sure she never got round to reading them all, nothing else would explain the scatter of John Norman's Gor novels I remember all too well :) Next of Kin was one of the ones that several siblings coveted, and she ended up getting three copies - mine was from the little second hand bookshop I mentioned here, it's from the 70s (can't you tell from the cover?) and is one of the ones I'd grab if Armageddon was bearing down (it's a fact that several of these grabbees are old, cheap second-hand books, but then they're the ones that would be almost impossible to replace).
The original short story - "The Space Willies" - was published in 1958, and Next of Kin in 1959. They involve one of Russell's favourite themes, the single resourceful, irreverent human against dim-witted alien bureaucracy (and human military bureaucracy in this case as well). It's basically American Golden Age SF but written with a very British mindset, the satirical, disrespectful-of-pretty-much-everything mindset of the average British soldier as vividly evoked in Spike Milligan's war memoirs. And almost as a further nod to Milligan, page 105 is "where the story really starts" - the first part is a meandering sort-of-military-picaresque comedy scattered with fun set-pieces, with the hero Leeming being sent off into space alone to gather intelligence on the alien enemies in a galactic war, wandering around gathering information on enemy planets and going even more looney in the isolation...
... then crashing on planet 83, getting marooned...
... and then captured (yes, "...and this is where the story really starts".) The whole plot's on wikipedia but suffice to say his single-handed escape plan (totally lacking in anything to help but his wits, his captor's lack of wits, a 'bopamagilvie' and an invisible Eustace) throw the entire war on an unexpected path.
No, it's not great literature or even great science fiction, but a lot of people love this book for good reason. It's patchy, but the patches come more than often enough to excuse the drier bits inbetween and the patches are always amusing and often hilarious (and some of the words he comes up with - like bopamagilvie and the alien insult faplap - are so good they've entered the family lexicon :)