Drone Racer
by Andy Briggs
Interest age: 9 to 12
Reading age: 9+
Published by Scholastic, 2018
About this book
Carson and his friends are into drone racing: the hot new trend of racing remote-controlled flying drones. As the youngest team, the 12-year-olds find themselves outclassed by the older kids with more expensive tech and less regard for the rules.
However, when the Carsonators come across a discarded drone in a junkyard and power it up, it’s way faster than anything else they’ve seen. Plus, it talks!
Unfortunately, the drone is in fact the Vanta Hawk, a classified, high-level and strictly experimental weapon – and the military want it back.
There’s something brilliantly filmic about the fast pace and rolling action of Drone Racer, perhaps because author Andy Briggs has written for the Marvel franchises as well as other film studios. Themes of the problems of sentience and morality in artificial intelligence are explored intelligently, but never sacrificing story for technology. Trix, the black girl engineer, is a delight, and the government military are satisfyingly shady in true science fiction/conspiracy genre style.
This book has broad appeal for boys and girls and anyone looking for an unputdownable read.
This extract is to be accessed on the BookTrust website only and not for downloading or sharing.
About the author
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