Carl Derham

During a trip to the pyramids, Oli, a party-loving sixteen-year-old drummer from London, mysteriously disappears into the heart of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. He finds himself inside a space ship, deposited there 12,000 years ago by a now-extinct race of beings called the Annenians. The ship was intended to be their legacy, handed down to the human race when they had achieved a suitable level of understanding concerning the universe and life in general. The ship’s artificially intelligent computer, Robbie, was getting a little bored of waiting.
Oli travels to Annenia, where he meets a civilisation of highly evolved parrots. He must gather equipment to stop an asteroid, set to collide with Earth if the humans haven’t come up to scratch. The asteroid presents no problem but unfortunately, Oli is followed back to Earth by the war-mongering, but slightly oafish Throgloids, who are hell-bent on capturing the ship and destroying Earth. Oli discovers that an invincibility ring and the most powerful ship in the galaxy can really boost a guy’s confidence.
He meets his friends in London for a night of partying, leaving the little ship parked in the river Thames. But the tide goes out and the ship is captured by the hapless UFO hunter, Doctor Branith.
Oli and his friends must battle their own ineptitude and propensity towards larking about, to retrieve the ship from the unfortunate doctor, defeat the Throgloids and still find sufficient time to indulge in their favourite pastime; namely partying.