MEET OUR AUTHOR

After having his spaceship wrecked by the dreaded finkumpoops, space pirate Captain Codswallop takes refuge on Earth and unwittingly brings three finkumpoops with him.
The finkumpoops are small furry creatures called Fink, Um and Poop who as well as being technological geniuses are complete idiots. They have a habit of taking things apart and putting them back together again in such a way as to make them do things they were never meant to do.
Because of the devastation they cause, planets known to be infested with finkumpoops are invariable blown to smithereens by a fleet of Gorbanian battlecruisers – a fate that awaits Earth unless something is done to rid it of finkumpoops.
Robbie Callaghan is a schoolboy. The summer holiday has just begun and he is already bored. Forced to flee his house to escape the attention of a couple of doting spinsters, he stumbles upon Hobb's End, an old station that has been converted into a home-cum-workshop by a stage magician who goes by the name of Manfred the Magnificent.
Mannie (as he is otherwise known) tells Robbie he has picked up a distress signal from somewhere out near Mars. Robbie, of course, doesn't believe him and tells him so.
That night, however, Robbie sees a strange light in the sky that leaves him wondering.
In the morning, he gets a phone call from Mannie who claims a spaceship has landed in the scrapyard at the back of the old station. Still sceptical, Robbie rushes to Hobb's End only to be told the spaceship is invisible. Annoyed at being made a fool of, Robbie throws a stone in the direction of the alleged space ship and is astounded when it seems to bounce off something invisible.
They are attacked by Captain Codswallop but saved by the invisible forcefield surrounding the spaceship. When the finkumpoops show up, the space pirate runs screaming back into the ship.
As Robbie and Mannie look on, the finkumpoops take a load of scrap from the scrapyard and turn it into an antigravity device which Manny gets his hands on. As soon as he turns on the gadget, he shoots up into the air.
Robbie manages to communicate with the finkumpoops and persuades them to help him get Mannie safely back to earth. They turn a rusty old banger into a flying car and rescue Manny.
During an encounter with Captain Codswallop, Toby – a friend of Robbie's – sees his trainers reduced to ashes by the space pirate's atomic ray gun. He is disheartened by his loss until the finkumpoops create for him the neatest-looking pair of shoes ever out of a pair of old diving boots. Overjoyed, he tries them on, jumps – and lands 40 years in the past.
From Captain Codswallop (who they have captured and strapped into an electric chair) Robbie and his friends learn how dangerous the finkumpoops are. Unfortunately, by this time, the finkumpoops are on the loose and causing all sorts of mayhem in the town of Chibbleford. They end up in Boggleland, a defunct fairground, and bring the rides back to life, much to the delight of the local residents.
As Robbie and his friends bicker about what they should do next, a middle-aged man shows up claiming to be Toby. Robbie is the first to realise he isn't lying and the others soon follow suit.
Toby has spent the past forty years working on a way to defeat the finkumpoops and he thinks he's cracked it. With the aid of a woman who was also transported back through time by the aliens, he has developed the finkumtrap – a device for capturing finkumpoops.
Everyone goes to Boggleland in Toby's black van and prepare to capture the finkumpoops. Things don't go according to plan, however, and they lose the finkumtrap. It looks like they've been beaten and nothing can save the planet now.
Which is when Robbie comes to the rescue.
After a nail-biting chase on a ghost train from Hell and a death-defying leap that should have ended his short life, Robbie retrieves the finkumtrap and catches the finkumpoops.
Toby boards the alien spacecraft with the captive finkumpoops and takes off to have all sorts of adventures in outer space. Robbie then goes home where he is confronted by his irate mother who demands to know what he's been up to all day.