Johnny Maxwell is a fictional character in a series of three children's books by Terry Pratchett. He is a young boy (twelve in the first book, but a teenager in the later ones) living in the (fictional) typical late-20th-century English town of Blackbury (also the setting of Pratchett's Truckers). Johnny has a difficult home life. Over the course of the three books his parents split up and he and his mother move in with his grandfather. This may be why he starts seeing things no one else sees, including an alien surrender party, ghosts and a time travelling bag lady. On the other hand, it is possible that he sees them because they are actually there and he lacks the filters that stop most people noticing how amazing the world is (a favourite theme of Pratchett's). Apart from this tendency Johnny is almost unnaturally normal. His friend Kirsty often gets exasperated by his tendency to simply accept that strange things happen to him, rather than doing something about it. He has a strong sense of fair play, which leads to him fighting for what's right even when he has no idea what's going on. Pratchett has said that Johnny is based, very loosely, on an idea of what Richmal Crompton's Just William character would be like in a 1990s setting. The Gang Johnny has a sort of a gang consisting of the kids who hang around with each other because they don't fit into any of the school cliques. They are: Stephen 'Wobbler' Johnson. Johnny's best friend and the second main character in the book. He is overweight and heavily into computers, an expert at piracy. He wants to be a nerd, but they wouldn't let him join. It is his considered opinion that Johnny is mental. His real name is Stephen Johnson in the books, although the television adaptation of Johnny and the Bomb gives it as Walter. In Johnny and the Bomb Wobbler got stuck in 1941- due to the gang's actions in the past accidentally changing history so that he was never born and therefore couldn't return to the future where he didn't exist- and grew up to be a billionaire calling himself Sir John (Sir Walter in the TV version) but, due to the time travel and multiple timelines involved, where and if this happened is questionable. Certainly a Wobbler returned successfully from 1941. Simon 'Bigmac'