62 Which is another really stupid thing to say because clogs are very uncomfortable shoes made out of wood. If they were in the slightest bit clever, they would still be trees, not chopped down and hacked to bits, ending up on someone’s smelly feet.
63 Radius was an expert on special laughs. He had dozens of them, but none of them were happy or nice laughs. In fact, the one he’d just used was his if-I-could-kill-you-right-now-I-would laugh.
64 Or that was what they thought. rRego had other ideas and had disconnected a few cameras. He then reported to Earth that they were broken beyond repair.
65 And who had each paid a disgustingly large amount of money to be there, but it was OK, because all the money was going to charity since Radius Limpfast had always said, ‘Charity begins at home’. ‘Home’ being HIS home, of course.
66 The Success Rule is the key to the huge popularity of every reality TV show. The people who love these shows are not blessed with too much intelligence but the people who are in the shows obviously have a lot less of it, otherwise they wouldn’t want to be in the shows in the first place. Therefore, it makes the viewers feel superior to the contestants. So even though most of the viewers were completely unaware of this, EVERYONE watching the Contrasts felt just that little bit more intelligent and clever.
67 T-shirts hastily produced by the Limpfast Clothing Corporation.
68 No, rRego did not make friends with Xboxes, because I am the author and controller of this book and I don’t want anything to do with Microsoft – apart from their BRILLIANT Sculpt keyboards.
69 No, they wouldn’t. Can you imagine the world giving up its mobiles and TVs? And even if they did turn it off, rRego and his allies had plans to get round it.
70 This does NOT mean they stole each other’s cheese.
71 ‘Flayving’ is a word invented by my daughter Hannah when she was about two. It means exactly what it sounds like. As we have not patented this word, please feel free to use as often as possible.
72 The ‘FIRST DOG PEEING IN SPACE’ t-shirt sold over fifteen million – or twenty million, if you include the tea towels. There was no t-shirt of Jack wetting his socks, even though a lot of people requested one. ‘We do have some standards,’ Radius Limpfast lied. The truth was that they had run out of t-shirts.
73 You don’t want to know who Barry is. Dozens of boys were in love with Primrose, and at least three of them were called Barry. The reason this footnote is here is because my editor said, ‘Who is Barry? We’ve never heard of him before,’ to which I replied, ‘No, and you will never hear of him again.’
74 There are actually lots of words that could describe the ultimate panic, but I’m not allowed to put them in this book.
Extras to the Contrasts’ Spaceship
Intergalactic Spacewear
Recipes from Limpfast Publications’ Wonderful Cookbook
The Wonderful World of Chemicals
In the Pink
Right now, I haven’t got the faintest idea how many books there are going to be in this series – it all depends on, um, er … my brain. Yes, that’s it. It all depends on my brain and you all buying lots of books.
There will be more than three – hopefully lots more – and fewer than five million and there could possiblyperhapsmaybe also be a picture book.
When I wrote The Floods, my publisher thought five was enough and then seven was enough and then eleven was enough and eventually thirteen. And who knows, one day there may possiblyperhapsmaybe be more (or not).
In the meantime …
Also by Colin Thompson
Nigel Davenport
Nigel Davenport, forty-seven, five thousand and fifteenth in line to the throne of Patagonia, has finally finished the jigsaw puzzle he has been working on for the past thirty-eight years. For twenty-three of those years he was totally unable to work out where the last piece went due to it being upside down. He blamed this delay on his colour-blindness and loose elastic.
‘There is,’ his great-aunt Spanner declared as she gave her wooden leg its annual coat of varnish, ‘more to this than meets the eye.’
Later research showed this was not the case. The forty-eight-piece jigsaw of Trinket the Pony did not, as had been hoped over the long years of puzzle incompleteness, reveal the hiding place of Captain Bloodclot’s buried treasure, but showed only a small wart in the shape of a wart on Trinket’s left forelock.
This work is fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is an amazing coincidence and if you do actually recognise yourself then you are probably living on the Planet Janet and are advised to keep it to yourself.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
WATCH THIS SPACE
ePub ISBN 9781742756219 (ebook)
First published by Random House in 2015
Copyright © Colin Thompson, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Random House book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
Random House Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Thompson, Colin
Title: Watch this space / Colin Thompson
ISBN: 978 1 74275 621 9 (ebook)
Target audience: For primary school age
Subjects: Space colonies – Juvenile fiction
Interplanetary voyages – Juvenile fiction
Dewey number: A823.3
Cover image © Colin Thompson
Design, illustrations, typesetting by Colin Thompson
Additional typesetting by Midland Typesetters, Australia
eBook production by First Source
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