A heart-warming tale of Armageddon from one of the funniest, most original voices in comic fiction today...The third planet out from the star was blue, with green splodges. Dirt. Oh, the bomb thought. And then its courage, determination and nobility-of-spirit subroutines cut in, overriding everything else, adrenalizing its command functions and bypassing its cyberphrenetic nodes. Here goes, said the bomb to itself. Calibrate navigational pod. Engage primary thrusters. Ready auxiliary drive. It knew, in that moment, that its own doom was near; because it was giving itself orders, and it wasn't putting in any 'the's.

Tom Holt's first book was published when he was just thirteen and, to his horror, he was hailed as an infant prodigy. While studying at Oxford, however, he discovered bar billiards and turned from poetry to comic fiction.