and the Dog Star

Illustrated by Andy Parker

(7-9 years old)

It is midnight at Stardust Space Station.
Captain Comet, Captain Stella and Spanner
the robot have just finished watching a scary
film when the scanner picks up a mysterious
spaceship. Spanner thinks it is a ghost ship,
but Comet is not so sure.

Oxford University Press

UK Paperback • ISBN: 9780198460930

This book is part of the Treetops Series for the Oxford Reading Tree

Dingles & Company

US Hardcover • ISBN: 9781596469044
US Paperback • ISBN: 9781596469051

Illustrations © 2007 Andy Parker. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

If you’ve read my author comments on the first Captain Comet book, you’ll know that it was always intended as the first of a series, so I was delighted when my editor, Alison Sage, asked me to write a follow up.

I had the idea for this second story, while writing the first story. It’s really a bringing together of two different ideas for possible sequels. One was the idea of Comet discovering a ghost ship and the other was the idea of Comet coming up against space pirates.  I started off thinking about the ghost ship story. Having discovered the ship, I wondered if it was really a ghost ship and how it got to be abandoned – and that’s where the space pirates, Draco and Nova¹, came in.

The story was originally going to be called Captain Comet and the Ghost Ship, but Treetops were publishing another story called The Ghost Ship, so the title was changed to the ship’s name, the Dog Star², instead.

Andy Parker has produced another great set of computer modelled illustrations for the book.  When I wrote the story, I’d envisaged that Draco and Nova were human, but Alison Sage briefed Andy to make them look like “the sort of characters you’d expect to see in a bar in Star Wars” – an inspired suggestion and one that Andy has realised in an appealing way.  This story ends with the two pirates being taken to a prison planet, but - if I’m asked to write any more Captain Comet stories – there’s a good chance that they’ll be back!

Draco and Nova are both astronomical terms, as are all the names in the story except for Spanner the Robot.  Draco is a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, while a Nova is a star that suddenly becomes brighter as the result of a nuclear explosion.

The Dog Star is another name for Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which can be seen from almost every inhabited region of the Earth’s surface.