The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  ‘We can only pray,’ said Gandef, ‘that the Tomson twins will be able to help Frodeo and Scram.’

  ‘Help them,’ said Strudel, chuckling to himself, ‘t’win. Do you get it? To win. Twin. Yeah?’

  Gandef addressed the whole company. ‘To horse!’ he cried. ‘We must ride to the Land of Helpmi Rhondor, and there gather an army to confront Sharon’s hordes of Gobblin warriors!

  The nine of them cheered, and leapt on to their horses. Gandef himself leapt on to his horse, Shadowemail, the fleetest, most intelligent horse in all of Upper Middle Earth, inadvertently crushing it to death. ‘Oops,’ he said. ‘I forgot myself there for a moment. Damn it; it’s easily done, though, isn’t it? Damn.’ He stood, and tried to scrape the remnants of the beast from his hindquarters.

  The Lord of the Dancings Volume III:

  The Rerun of the Sequel of Thing® Part 2: Son of

  Thing® Rides Again

  Just when you thought the story couldn’t possibly have anywhere else to go, a whole new chapter opens up in the saga of the Thing®. The Rerun of the Sequel is the most spectacular Lord of the Dancings episode yet. Scaryman the Evil reveals himself – astonishingly, and to the complete and utter surprise of everybody who knew him, and who thought he was one of the good guys – to be evil, and allies himself with Sharon, renaming himself Scaryman the Evil the Evil. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard. Blimey. Then there’s lots and lots of fighting, and more fighting. Gobblins get killed in such large numbers. Finally Frodeo and Scram must don the Tap Shoes of Fate and confront the Lord of the Dancings in person – uncovering a mystery that will rock Upper Middle Earth to its very core. To its very core! I know … I know … exciting, isn’t it?

  He looked up in terror to see a Gobblin flying the air sitting astride his hideous winged mount. It was the Lord of the Seagul – the Seaguls of Sharon that struck such horror into the Armies of Good by their persistence in trying to grab bits of food from about your person, their screeching, their pooping, and the way they appear in the sky above your head even though you’re dozens of leagues from the sea …

  Have you enjoyed The Soddit? Then be sure and purchase some of Professor Roberts’s other delightful works.

  > The Garble-de-Hwaet (the 1375 recension)

  An Anglo Saxon poem of great length, subject-matter and tedium, edited by Professor Roberts in his academic years before he achieved fame as a story-teller, now reissued by his publisher with a misleading sword-and-sorcery style cover painting and ‘by the author of The Soddit and Lord of the Dancings’ under his name. Disappointment guaranteed! Buy it, flick through it, and put it on your shelf never to look at it again!

  > Lame-o! Lame-o!

  Charming and magical lyrics written by Professor Roberts, and put to music by a Fey Friend from Oxford for an evening of musical delight and a tombola in 1951. Includes such masterpieces as ‘I’ll Twist the Sense to Fit the Rhyme-O!’, ‘They Used To Write Verse This Way in the Old Days-O (It’s as if Eliot, Pound and Wallace Stevens Never Happened)’ and ‘Hark, the Tweetings!’:

  Hark, the Tweetings!

  Fair the sweetings!

  Spring is bursting!

  Sing fal-dol-yellow-yellow-up-wahey!

  The flutter-by fleetings

  Sing all the greetings

  Poetic sheetings

  Sound your zitherlings

  Sense-the-less blitherings

  Sing fal-dol-yellow-yellow-up-wahey!

  Now re-issued by his publisher with a misleading painting on the front of a dragon screaming through the night sky pouring fire and destruction on an army of foul-looking monsters beneath, but you won’t find anything one-tenth as exciting as that inside the covers, I’m sorry to say, and ‘by the author of The Soddit and Lord of the Dancings’ under his name.

  > A. R. R. Roberts’s The Soddit Companion

  Issued in exactly the same livery as all of Roberts’s other books, and with only Roberts’s name on the cover, you’ll have picked this off the bookshop shelf, paid for it and got it home before you realise that it wasn’t written by him at all, but instead by a jobbing hack called Daniel Gibbons as a cynical exercise in hasty cashing-in. Includes encyclopedia-style entries on all the main characters, monsters, place-names, but nothing quoted from the original book for copyright reasons.

  PlayGameBoxCube 2 presents

  The Soddit: Wrath of Morbore

  Combining all the challenges of a role-playing game with the excitement of a hack-and-slash fight-’em platformer, The Soddit: Wrath of Morbore is the first ever fully licensed video game based on the works of A. R. R. Roberts (excluding the games Lord of the Dancings 1, 2, 3, Return of Lord of the Dancings, Dance!; The Wrath of Morbore, SimSoddit, Metal Gear Soddit, Quake, Night of the Mutant Soddits, Soddit 1944: Assault on Normandy, Formula 1: Soddit Pony-Carts at Silverstone).

  Choose from one of any two lead characters, with different strengths and weaknesses; and choose from a list of intimidating weapons (axe, sword, spear, longer sword, sword with sort of hook at the end, nunchuk, nunchuk with a sort of hook at the end, bigger axe, a different sort of sword, uzi nine mil and sten gun). Then fight your way through an intimidating array of opponents:

  • Slash! Your way out of the Putting Dragon Inn in Hobbld-Ahoy!

  • Hack! The elves in the last homely house west of the mountains.

  • Kill! Random passers-by on the road to the east.

  • Try! To deviate from the path to explore the woods on the right, just to see what’s there, only to find that your control-pad doesn’t allow you to go past an unrealistic little wooden fence.

  • Desperately! Bash away at the fence with your sword to vent your frustration.

  • Notice! The way, however far you walk, the mountains on the horizon never seem to get any closer. Your mate Dave once left the control-pad on the floor with a heavy book leaning on ‘forward’ so that the character walked forward all night long from midnight to about ten a.m. the next day and when he came down again the mountains were still on the bloody horizon, can you believe it? They weren’t any closer at all. I mean how hard would it be to program mountains that came a little bit closer as you walked towards them? It’s not asking for the moon on a stick, is it? And then when you fight the troll at the river ford thing suddenly you’re in the mountains with the goblins underground and everything. How is that supposed to happen? It simply lacks verisimilitude, that’s what it lacks.

  • Give up! On level two, and play a racing game instead.

  ‘This is the … good … a … game ₀ under any circumstances’ – PlayGameBoxCube 2 Magazine.

  ‘Another hack ’em-wander-about game. 97%’ – PlayGameBoxCube 2 Monthly, ‘We Never Give Any Game Less Than a 90% Rating No Matter How Poor It Is’ Magazine.

  ‘A hundred uses. As a coaster, for instance, or part of an interesting mobile’ – Recycle Your Old CDs and DVDs Magazine.

  With original vocal stylings by Sir Ian McEllen

  and Lady Ellen McIan

  Play The Soddit: Wrath of Morbore with a friend, or play with yourself.

  Other Children’s Classics from NonWin Books

  WIND IN THE PILLOWS

  by Graham Wosdafree Quincy Kennethe

  ‘… teaches your children to love vermin …’ The Times.

  ‘… as yet unsurpassed, and indeed unprosecuted’ – The Times of Delhi

  In this classic children’s tale, a Rat, a Toad, a Cockroach, a Dead Sparrow Left Floating in a Waterbutt for Two Weeks, a Smallpox Bacillus and a Tory MP enjoy a sequence of magical, flatulent adventures in and out of the Wild Wood and through the Gaye Fields of Merrie Englande, Cornwalle, Walese and Eiree. In the character of Lord ‘call me Mr’ Toad, Kennethe created one of the most enduring characters in all of children’s fiction.

  In the words of Professor Roberts himself, ‘My favourite scene was the one in which the amphibian is locked away in prison and dresses as a transvestite in order to make good his escape
. So true to life. I mean, if you saw a six-foot transsexual man-toad with green blistered skin and a peerage trying to wriggle out of a barred window, would you stand in his way? I know I wouldn’t. Not after that unfortunate affair of the failed citizen’s arrest and the Marquis of Turkley’s younger son, at any rate.’

  HAIRY POTSDAM

  By J. K. ‘not from Jamiroquai’ Rollinint

  Imagine a small child, abused and neglected in his earliest years, who suddenly discovers that he has incredibly potent magical powers of life-giving and death-dealing at the emotionally unstable age of thirteen, and who decides to wreak a terrible vengeance upon all the people who mocked and cuffed him, all those who humiliated him before, who told him that he’d never amount to anything, making him sleep under the stairs, him? Treat him like dirt, would they? Well they picked the wrong boy to ***k with, the wrong boy. Let’s see how they like it when my magical force breaks every bone in their body and rips off their limbs, picking them off one by one in the shopping mall as they run, cowering and pleading – pleading! – for mercy hahahahaha! Who’s the brat now? Eh? Eh? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, I saw this on a video round at Pete’s hee-hee where they hee-hee squash this guy’s head like a grape with their telepathic powers, hee-hee. Let’s see how that goes in real life my so-called-parents, ha! Ha! Splat! I am vengeance! I AM VENGEANCE! The whole town will PAY – PAY! Oh I bet they’re sorry now, I’ll make them sorry – HAHAHAHAHA! Die! Die! Die, all of you!

  This book isn’t anything like that.

  ‘A Dorothy Parkeresque rollercoaster of wit, rudeness and girly hilarity; forget all pretenders to the chick-lit crown, the tiara belongs to …’ Daily Mirror. (This press endorsement may have appeared in earlier editions of a completely different book.)

  £3.99. Also available: exactly the same book with a moody photographic cover in black and white, £12.99.

  JAMIE OLIVER TWIST

  by Delia Dickings

  Annoying cockney scamp falls in with gipsies, tramps and thieves. Includes a forty-page supplement of Victorian Slum Recipes, amongst them ‘Lard on Bread’, ‘Stale Crust cuisine ironique’, ‘Lard on Bread topped with unrefined sugar’, ‘Grit’ and ‘Mississippi Mud Pie with Mud rather than Chocolate’.

  Includes the songs, ‘You’ve Got To Pick Enough Rocket for Two’, ‘Consider Your Shellfish at Home’, ‘Whe-eh-eh-eh-ere is Lard?’ and the barn-storming ‘Food Recipes, Gloriously Marketable Food Recipes’ (Hot Sausage and Custard, for that soursweet tang).

  ‘Most Likely to Say: “Dad, do I have to read this? Can’t I read the new Hellboy instead?” Least Likely to Say: “Please, sir, can I have some more?”’ – Guardian

  MARY POPPINS

  By P. L. Travesty

  Mary comes to the Winsbury family in Old London Town as an au pair, and transforms their lives by weeping noisily in her room, talking on the phone to Czechoslovakia for hours, eating all the ice cream in the freezer, bringing her malodorous and piercings-riddled boyfriend home to stay with her ‘just for ze two daias, pliz? Pliz?’ and him still being in the house a month later, coming up with three separate and frankly incompatible excuses to weasel out of looking after Algernon and Jasmine for one evening, for crying out loud, and Van Morrison is only playing the one night in London, it’s not as if we’ll get the chance to see him again, and – in a rousing conclusion – threatening to tell your wife that you’ve made a pass at her, look, really, it’s a misunderstanding, a culture-clash thing, it’s actually quite funny if you think about it, no really, no really.

  ‘Not so much a novel, more a (cont. p. 17)’ – Hair and Makeup Monthly

  Join the Soddit Society

  Are you ma-aa-aad! for Soddits?

  Do you live, breathe and dream of A. R. R. R. Roberts’s works, morning, noon, night and in-between times? Have worried relatives expressed gentle-voiced sentiments of concern about your neglecting homework, friends, food and play to devote all your time to what they call ‘this odd little book’? Are you prepared to sacrifice the quivering body of the one you love most on the bloodstained altar of your fascination for A. R. R. R. Roberts’s work?

  Would you like to meet people as cra-ay-zee! for soddits as you?

  Join the Roberts-robot, the fantasy-fan, the Upper-Middle-Earth-Madman and the soddit-schizophrenic in the SODDIT SOCIETY.

  For a mere £95 annual membership fee plus VAT and trauma insurance, you can join the obese, the inverted, the talk-to-themselves-in-the-toilet and the threadworm-infested to discuss the greatness of The Soddit, and mutter darkly how ‘they’ don’t understand.

  Meet your fellow SODDIT SOCIETY MEMBERS once every six months and

  • Dress up in costumes based on the world of A. R. R. R. Roberts’s World of Soddit.

  • Repeat phrases such as ‘it’s my absolute favourite book ever’, ‘my favourite part is (insert favourite part here)’, and ‘that other book, about the, like, mercenaries in fairyland, I didn’t like that nearly so much’.

  • Sigh, and look at the floor.

  As Professor Roberts himself said, ‘Fan as we know is derived etymologically from fanatic – and to this day the “fan” is an alarming figure, starbursts of madness twinkling in his eye, obsessed, possessed with madness, fundamentalist, divorced from reality, a suitable case for treatment, or incarceration in my opinion, dear me yes.’ He forgot to add ‘And having the best fun in the world!’

  Abandon the real world for this musty obsessive fantasy TODAY!

  NEW FROM NONWIN BOOKS

  The Spuddit

  Read this hilarious, light-hearted, thoroughly respectful, not-cashing-in-at-all Parody of A. R. R. R. Roberts’s classic The Soddit. There’s a laugh in every sentence, or your money back! (Offer not valid in UK, Commonwealth, North America, South America, territories above the tropic of Capricorn, or signatories of the Book Charter.) The Perfect Gift for the person who already has a copy of The Soddit, and you want to buy him a present that’s geared as it were to his personal tastes, not socks or gloves or something generic, but something that he’d actually like. The only problem is that you can’t think of anything else about him than that he likes The Soddit and he’s already got that.

  In this irreverent, brilliant parody – all the parts of the original are taken by potatoes!!

  Bingo … a marin piper

  Gandef … a King Edward

  Mori the Dwarf … a roasting potato

  Elsqare … Jersey royal

  Will Smug the Dragon get his chips??!!

  A Tatty (i.e. ‘tasty’) Treat!

  From all good booksellers – good meaning ‘wickedd’ (youth slang for ‘good’)!!

  ‘I’m prepared to say that I did laugh’ – Sir George Graham, former manager of ‘The Spurs’ (Tottenham Football Club).

  1 Attention: This is a rhetorical question. Do not attempt to answer this question. NonWin Books accepts no liability for anybody who attempts to answer this question and injures themselves in the process.

  robertski brothers

  When he’s not being Robertski Brothers,

  Adam Roberts is A.R.R.R. Roberts, who

  wrote The Soddit, and sometimes he’s just

  plain old Adam Roberts, who wrote Salt,

  On, Stone, Park Polar, Jupiter Magnified,

  Polystom and The Snow.

  Contents

  Title

  About the Author

  Part 1: The McAtrix Derided

  Prelude

  Chapter 1: Gordon

  Chapter 2: ‘I’m on the Train’

  Chapter 3: Interrogation

  Chapter 4: A Significant Choice

  Chapter 5: Waking Up Covered in Slime

  Chapter 6: Inside the Jeroboam

  Chapter 7: Virtual Training

  Chapter 8: The Orifice

  Chapter 9: Gents! Oh No!

  Chapter 10: Another Choice

  Chapter 11: Rescue

  Chapter 12: Some Peugeot 308s

  Part 2: The McAtrix Rederided
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br />   Chapter 1: When SQUIDS Attack

  Chapter 2: The Orifice Revisited

  Chapter 3: The Frurnchman

  Part 3: The McAtrix Rerederided or The McAtrix Derrida’d

  Chapter 1: The Destruction of Syon Lane

  Chapter 2: A Most Important and Final Choice

  Epilogue

  Bonus Pages

  Part 1

  Prelude

  Everything is dark. Somewhere a phone rings: brr-rr, brr-rr, brr-rr. A wintry sound.

  The receiver is lifted from its cradle. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ah, hello! Our specialist assessors happen to be in your area conducting a survey for publicity purposes. Could I interest you in a free valuation for aluminium window frames and garage fittings?’

  ‘It’s’ – wearily – ‘the middle of the night.’