Nostradamus Ate My Hamster

✍ Scribed by Rankin, Robert

• Publisher: Random House
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 136 KB
• Edition: New Ed
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0552143553

✦ Synopsis

HOLLYWOOD…BOLLYWOOD…PINEWOOD…

…BRENTFORD???

There’s a Nazi flying saucer parked on the allotments and Adolf Hitler is hiding in a shed behind The Flying Swan. There’s this great red insect creature that eats time and a man who appears to be made out of spare parts is stealing the milk from doorsteps.

Ah Brentford.

And now they are making a movie there. And it will be unlike any other. All the world famous movie stars are going to be in it. The dead ones anyway. There is this special equipment, you see, called CYBERSTAR, that projects lifelike holograms of the Hollywood greats and as soon as Russell has raised that £40 000 000 they’ll go into production.

Ah, yes, there is the small matter of the money and Russell has never been involved in the movie business before. Although he does work in a prop house. In Brentford. Fudgepacker’s Emporium, it’s called, a prop house that hires out all the really weird stuff to the film industry, the really scary stuff. Russell will do his best to raise the money, because Russell is a very nice man. Too nice really, folk take advantage of him, but he will do his best, because that is what he does.

Mind you, if Russell had not set out to track down the actual location of The Flying Swan and attempt to discover whether Pooley, Omally, Neville and the rest were actually real, Russell would never have got himself into all the trouble he is in now. What with those robots from the future after him, and that cult determined to make him sell his spine to Satan.

Robert Rankin spent five years working in the film industry. All right, like Russell, he only worked in a prop house. But he did hire out stuff for some quite well known movies. He did the skeletons for Raiders of the Lost Ark, the dressing case for The Elephant Man. And who can forget that imitation Tupperware that Luke Skywalker’s family and the aliens in the Cantina sequence of Star Wars use? He bought those at the North End Road street market!

Russell is based upon the author’s good friend Russell Meek and Bobby Boy upon himself. No prop men were injured in the making of this production. Although some of them did get rather drunk.

But that’s showbiz!

**

From the Publisher

'Classic Robert Rankin. If you've never read a Rankin before, grab yourself a handful of Nostradamus Ate My Hamster.' - SFX Magazine

What they say about Robert Rankin:

'One of the rare guys who can always make me laugh' - Terry Pratchett

'To the top-selling ranks of humourists such as Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, let us welcome Mr Rankin' - Tom Hutchinson, The Times

'A born writer with a taste for the occult. Robert Rankin is to Brentford what William Faulkner was to Yoknaptawpha County' - Time Out

'One of the finest living comic writers ... a sort of drinking man's H.G. Wells' - Midweek

About the Author

Robert Rankin spent nearly five years working in the film industry. All right, so he only hired out props, but he did hire them out for The Elephant Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Star Wars trilogy, which is pretty damn good by anyone's reckoning. His previous novels include the Brentford quartet, the Armageddon trilogy, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived, The Greatest Show Off Earth, Raiders of the Lost Car Park, The Book of Ultimate Truths and his most recent, The Brentford Chainstore Massacre, all published by Corgi Books. His latest novel, The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag, is now available as a Doubleday hardback. He is translated into a multitude of languages, including Bulgarian, Russian and Polish.