Update: this book is called The Vandarian Incident, by Martyn Godfrey. All credit to /u/Futurebot from the Tip Of My Tongue subreddit. Story of finding this book here.
Don’t you hate it when you can’t remember the name of something? Of course you do. Everyone does.
I’ve been looking for the name of a book for a number of years now. Every now and again, I Google a few things about a plot in the vain hope that I’ll be able to find something that will point me in the right direction, but because I can’t remember anything specific such as names of characters or places, or anything that would lead me to a title or ISBN, I don’t ever find anything.
Still, I Google.
What’s even more frustrating is that even though I can describe the plot is great detail, everywhere I’ve asked hasn’t been able to name the book that I’m talking about.
I don’t really care about the book itself. Even if I did find the title I probably wouldn’t be able to buy a copy. The only physical copy that I did read was probably destroyed, or exists in a place I no longer have access to. But still, it grates that I can remember everything about the plot, but nothing about the actual book.
I’m looking for the name of a book that I read in my childhood/early teens in the early 2000s, but the copy that I read was second hand and relatively old, so it was probably published in the late 90s. It was a sci-fi/adventure book for kids/young adults (thin, probably only a hundred pages or so in the standard novel form-factor), with the cover depicting the mostly desert landscape of the planet the book was set on, with a “moon-buggy type” vehicle with large wheels (also mentioned in the book) jammed halfway in a small dust valley.
TL;DR: it’s the story of a human male training to become a pilot at a prestigious space academy on a desert planet that’s attacked by another non-human race gearing up for a major battle. The main protagonist and another cadet save the day with a little help from his mentor.
About 80% of the plot follows below (sorry, this is long), but for the life of me, I can’t remember any specific details that would make it more Google-able, just what the storyline was. Plot follows, (other details in brackets), “quotes for almost-quotes/terms/phrases from the book itself”.