Cakes in Space is a Children's Book by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre, the first of their Not-So-Impossible Tales series.
Astra is a little girl who's family is moving... to a whole new planet. Said planet will take 200 years to reach, so they're all going into hyper-sleep until the journey is over. Before she and everyone else do that, though, Astra decides she'd like a nice dessert. So she asks the food replicator aboard the ship, named Nom-O-Tron, to make her one. Not just any old dessert, though. Astra would like the ultimate dessert. So, the replicator complies.
Some years later, Astra is awoken from her hyper-sleep a year early, and makes a startling discovery. The ship has veered off course because sentient cake monsters have infested it. It seems that Nom-O-Tron has been spending the last one hundred ninety nine years trying to fulfill Astra's request to make the ultimate dessert, something scarily delicious, and also brilliant, and has been churning out living, and hostile, desserts as a result.
Now, with the help of a ship's robot caretaker, Pilbeam, Astra must save the ship from the cakes, get the ship back on course, and if that weren't enough, deal with alien looters called Poglites who've come on board to take all the ship's spoons.
The book was released on September 4th, 2014.
Cakes in Space contains examples of:
- Anthropomorphic Food: The cake monsters.
- Cyber Cyclops: Pilbeam is a non-villainous example. He has one eye, and is a caretaker for the ship transporting all the humans to their new planet.
- Extra Eyes: The Poglites, and quite a few cake monsters, have lots of eyes.
- Eye on a Stalk: The Poglites' eyes stick up from their torsos on these.
- It's All My Fault: Astra says this when she realizes Nom-O-Tron has been trying to fulfill her request for the ultimate dessert for the last century, and has flooded the ship with monstrous cakes.
- Kid Hero: Astra, who has to save a ship from sentient cakes, veering off-course, and alien spoon thieves.
- Name-Tron: Non-O-Tron, the food replicator.
- Non-Indicative Name: The Nameless Horror, a living black mass of strings, is actually quite a very friendly fellow.
- Robot Buddy: Pilbeam, who helps Astra to save the ship.
- Starfish Aliens: The Poglites are basically living tube creatures with tentacles all over their bodies, and various numbers of eyes sticking up out the tops of their... torsos.
- Starfish Language: The Poglites' native language, when Astra turns off her translator, sounds like belching.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Astra. She simply asked Nom-O-Tron to make her a dessert that was "so delicious it's scary" and "brilliant". She never thought Nom-O-Tron would take her request so literally and infest the ship with living cake monsters.
