Project X-Calibur

by Greg Pace

Overview

Ben has been an underdog his whole life. But when he meets Merlin—the Merlin—the wizard delivers devastating news: a vicious band of aliens are approaching, and Ben could be the champion Earth desperately needs. 

Soon Ben joins the Round Table Reboot, where legendary heroes are training a new generation to battle the deadly threat. They have a secret weapon: X-Calibur. But this time X-Calibur is not a sword -- it's a spaceship -- and only the right kid can awaken its powers.  All Ben has ever wanted is to be a hero…but is it in the stars for him?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101603291
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	10/31/2013
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	902 KB
Age Range:	10 Years

About the Author

Greg Pace has been a lifelong creativity junkie. From drawing and putting together models of classic movie monsters, to playing guitar in an Atlanta based heavy metal band , to performing stand-up comedy throughout Los Angeles and selling movie scripts to Hollywood, Greg's life has often been his very own action adventure. But it's his love of horror, sci-fi, and his number one passion -- writing -- that makes this first book so satisfying and exciting for him. Greg currently lives in Los Angeles.    

Read an Excerpt

The curves of the tunnel ended at two enormous steel doors in front of us.

“What do you keep in there?” Tyler asked, mouth agape. “Godzilla?”

“Maybe you can wrestle it,” Kwan joked.

An electronic scanner glowed red at the side of the door. Pellinore leaned down and smiled, letting the device get a read on his teeth. The glow turned green and the massive doors slid open, revealing an empty room the size of two football fields, with a hundred-foot high ceiling.

Eyes twinkling, Pellinore turned and shouted into the vast space. “Reveal X-Calibur!”

Nothing happened. The five of us looked at each other, confused. Had Pellinore and Merlin gone senile in their old age? There was a hiss in the center of the room, along with the faint whirr of gears turning below the floor. A section of the ground split in two.

My hands clenched and unclenched at my sides. As I took a step forward, my mind raced back to the stories Dad would tell me about the most famous sword ever crafted, and how it had been kept in an underground cavern before rising up from a magical lake to reveal itself to King Arthur.

As the floor opened wide, something rose up on a steel platform. My jaw dropped.

X-Calibur wasn’t a sword at all. It was the most kick-butt spaceship I had ever seen.

Editorial Reviews

2013-10-01
The Sword in the Stone meets Ender's Game, with most of the suspense and all of the logic sucked from both. Pipsqueak Texas teen Ben Stone is recruited by Merlin, a little boy who doesn't talk like one and claims, with patent absurdity considering what follows, that "there's no such thing as magic." He finds himself joining four (later five) peers at a secret British base run by the ageless Percival Pellinore, last surviving Knight of the Round Table. Their mission? To become instant spaceship pilots and defend Earth from the alien fleet that will be arriving in a week. Their weapons? X-Calibur, an ancient spacecraft of alien manufacture that will, conveniently, allow only a child to pilot it, plus four inferior copies of the craft kitted up like cargo-cult models from images of the original. Having had his butt repeatedly kicked (an expression of which Pace is inordinately fond) in practice games against sword-wielding practice robots and his fellow candidates, Ben seems like a failure until he demonstrates reckless courage and leadership qualities. So when the aliens arrive early, he takes charge and blasts off in X-Calibur (with the original sword, which was made centuries ago from a strip of hull metal) to battle their leader. There are no surprises here. "Don't think," says Ben unoriginally. "Do." That seems to be Pace's modus operandi too, but here, the Force is definitely not with him. (Science fantasy. 10-12)

Kirkus Reviews