Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett

Johnny Maxwell is your average teenage kid. He avoids doing homework and spends most of his time hanging out with friends or playing video games. One night, while playing the computer game “Only You Can Save Mankind,” a strange message flashes across the screen: We wish to talk. We surrender.

Rather than obliterating the alien’s spaceships in order to set a new high score, Johnny nobly accepts the game aliens’ surrender. Then things really start to get weird. The game aliens expect to be properly treated as prisoners of war. They demand safe passage back to their home planet, as well as several thousand orders of hamburgers and fries to feed their fleet.

In this mind-bending, reality-warping novel from Terry Pratchett, nothing is quite as it seems. How are the aliens able to enter Johnny’s dreams from the game? Why is everyone else’s copy of “Only You Can Save Mankind” now broken? Is this all a dream, or is it real? And will Johnny be able to save the alien race from the most dreaded enemy of all – humans?

Set during the first Gulf War, Only You Can Save Mankind is a crazy tale of real and virtual warfare that is as darkly funny as it is insightful. As Pratchett writes in the introduction: “On your computer: games that look like war. On your TV: war that looked like a game. If you weren’t careful, you could get confused….” Indeed.