Comedy Science Fiction Review - Robert Rankin - Nostradamus Ate My Hamster

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1996 – Doubleday Press spoiler alerts Shamelessly silly far-fetched fiction work by the grand-master of stretching out the most ludicrous plots possible and making them work. The outrageous title derives from a notorious real-World tabloid headline, ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ when a scurrilous newspaper falsely claimed a controversial comedian ate someone’s pet hamster. In Rankin’s novel, Nostradamus Ate My Hamster is the movie some amateur film makers are creating in Brentford, using hologram generating technology stolen from the future. The film is going to star all the great dead movie heroes. Russell, the mild-mannered innocent hero, finds that the tech was stolen off time travelling Nazis including Hitler himself and the movie crew are actually Satanists hoping to use subliminal imaging to make the audience sell their spines to Satan – he apparently prefers spines to souls. With the Nazis coming to get their devises back by force, all sorts of chaos looms. Poor Russell only stumbles into all this trying to find out if a pub, The Flying Swan, featured in many other Rankin novels, really exists. The pub and its crazy inhabitants do appear in the story in a clever cameo prologue and again later on. With lots of puns and constant apologies for ripping off movies like Terminator and Back To The Future this is typical and laugh out loud to the point of embarrassing yourself reading it on the bus work. If you haven’t read any Rankin before, this is a good one to start with. I particularly love the footnotes decoding Hitler’s German variations on Cockney Rhyming slang. Arthur Chappell