Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett
Publication: HarperCollins (2006), Paperback, 224 pages / ISBN 0552139262
Genre: Sci-Fi, YA
Rating: 
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First sentence: Johnny bit his lip and concentrated.
This was a slightly disappointing book, mostly in that it’s nowhere nearly as elegant as Nation. It’s a decent read, with an interesting plot, but it seemed heavy-handed and out of touch with modern teenage readers. Seeing that it was originally written in the early 1990′s, that’s not entirely surprising.
Summary from Amazon:
Johnny Maxwell, 12, thinks he’s a loser. People don’t seem to notice him, his parents are threatening to split up, and he’s not very good at the shoot-up-the-bad-guys computer games that he and his friends are always playing. But after his hacker buddy, Wobbler, gives him an illegal copy of Only You Can Save Mankind, strange things happen. The captain of the alien fleet that Johnny is supposed to shoot up surrenders to him–unheard of in a computer game–and soon after that all of the aliens from all copies of the game have vanished. Players looking for someone to shoot at sail through light years of empty space and return the game to the store, demanding their money back. Johnny also discovers that he is able to enter the alien ship in dreams and grows convinced that the aliens are somehow real, and are actually dying when human players shoot at them. And soon the day arrives when the humans can resume their shooting.
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