But no! The blade in question is not made of steel, but of willow, and the Bonaventure in question is a hardworking young man named Clyde St Joseph Bonaventure, who works at a computer science institute in London during the day, but is secretly busy on a side mission.
He works on his company’s £2 million computer, feeding it cricket statistics. Not the usual batting and bowling averages, though. It’s data collected from instrumented bats and speed-sensing balls, which are fed into the computer in the hope that it will generate a program that will enable even the most hopeless team to win cricket matches.
Science fiction and cricket? This is surely the subgenre to top all subgenres. But back to our intrepid programmer, whose team called the Bonaventures thrillingly thrashed a superior team and ushered in the arrival of a brave new world of computer cricket. Here’s a scene from a game that, in hindsight, seems remarkably prescient:
“Peter and Simon were greeted with cheers, boos and whistles as the crowd saw that they were wearing new pads and skirted jackets not unlike a Robin Hood doublet. The same bubble wrap, coloured belt and badge, with a coloured collar around the neck – to conceal a throat microphone. In addition, each batsman wore a tiny receiving device in his ear, but this was invisible to all except those who knew where to look.”
What follows is a fair dose of Cold War nonsense, including our hero’s kidnapping by dastardly corporations, double agents and even two Soviet agents intent on introducing cricket to Russia. But fear not. It turns out our protagonist has a formidable uncle to step in when the going gets tough – none other than the very good Sir Garfield St Aubrun Sobers, aka Gary Sobers, the undisputed GOAT in the world of cricket. The year before, in 1966, the West Indies had toured England in the summer to play a 5-Test series. Sobers, the team’s captain, scored three incredible hundreds, including one at Lord’s where he featured in one of the most famous rearguard partnerships with David Holford. But cricket wasn’t all the famously versatile Sobers did. In 1965, Pelham Books published Sobers’ first book, Cricket, Advance! In the summer of 1966, the same company had published his Cricket Crusader. And the following year, for the third year in a row, Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade appeared, with Gary Sobers’ name on the cover. Did Sobers really write a science fiction novel about cricket? Or did he just lend his name to the work of an unknown scribbler? In 2001, sportswriter Will Buckley went to interview Sobers, armed with a copy of the extremely rare first edition. (At the time of writing, not a single copy is available for sale online.) “Sir Gary recoils, examining the dust jacket as if it were a picture of Alan Knott in his underwear,” wrote Buckley.
It turned out that this was the first time Sir Gary had actually seen a copy of the book, but he said afterwards: “I think I’ve read it.” Of course, we know what happened in a parallel universe: buoyed by the success of computer cricket, Clyde St. Joseph Bonaventure came on the scene a year later with his magic bat and blasted six sixes out of a Swansea stadium.
