The Leaky Establishment - Softcover

Langford, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903468000 ISBN 13: 9781903468005

Publisher: Big Engine, 2001

"I'd rank this book alongside Michael Frayn's The Tin Men, another neglected classic. I've wanted for years to see it back in print. It is one of those books you end up buying several copies of, because you just have to lend it to friends. It's very funny. It's very real." - from the introduction by Terry Pratchett

Smuggling plutonium out of a nuclear research centre is surprisingly easy. The difficult part is smuggling it back in again ...

The Leaky Establishment is an atomic farce whose author David Langford once worked in the gentle radioactive glow of Britain's nuclear weapons industry, and who hilariously satirises it from the inside. Black comedy overtakes the unfortunate defence scientist hero Roy Tappen when a "harmless" theft of office furniture lands him with his very own doomsday nuclear stockpile at home. Chain reactions of comic escapades follow, with disaster piled on disaster, leading the increasingly desperate Tappen to the borders of science fiction as he seeks a way out of the mess.

Review:

A comic novel with both verbal wit and comedy of situation. -- Mary Gentle, Interzone

A splendid send-up. -- Daily Mail

An agreeable romp. (AWRE News, house journal of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (since renamed), Aldermaston, Berkshire, England) -- AWRE News

An agreeable romp. -- AWRE News, house journal of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment

I'd rank this book alongside Michael Frayn's The Tin Men, another neglected classic. I've wanted for years to see it back in print. It is one of those books you end up buying several copies of, because you just have to lend it to friends. It's very funny. It's very real. -- From the introduction by Terry Pratchett

The Leaky Establishment concerns the trials and tribulations of one Roy Tappen, a scientist at the Nuclear-Utilization Technology Centre at Robinson Heath, who discovers that sneaking the plutonium core of a nuclear warhead out of the centre is easy enough; the problems arise when he tries to sneak it back in. It's either a gloriously absurd farce or a sober record of The Great British System disguised as a gloriously absurd farce: whichever way round it's the kind of book you can give to spouses/partners who can't stand SF. -- Andy Sawyer, British SF Association, Paperback Inferno

From the Publisher:

The Leaky Establishment was the first title I signed up for Big Engine. I had read it at university and found it frighteningly funny -- it’s more than just a knockabout farce in the nuclear industry, it’s plausible too, from its opening blurb of genuine British Admiralty bureaucratese (“...it will be seen to that the bottom of each warhead immediately be labelled with the word TOP”) to the closing line. Then I graduated and grew up and moved out into the real world, and found further proof of its reality at every line.

Part of Big Engine’s ideal is to keep the classics, the works that people need to read, in print. This is one such book. Anyone who grew up in the Reagan/Thatcher era can read it and thank their lucky stars they are still here today. Anyone from a younger generation, read it and see what your elders and betters went through ...

Ben Jeapes,Big Engine

• Publisher: Big Engine
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1903468000
• ISBN 13: 9781903468005
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256