If you took a couple of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quotes and stuck one of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quotes on the top of the other The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quotes, then attached another few The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quotes to the end of the punchlines of the first The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quotes and wrapped the whole business up in a snazzy embossed softcover you would then have something which didn’t exactly look like And Another Thing…, but which those who had read it would find hauntingly familiar.
It was lengthy and it wandered.
There are of course many problems connected with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, of which some of the most popular are Why are the jokes in base 13? Why has new sequels ceased? What on God’s green earth does this man have against digital watches?
Many many months ago a gaggle of Golgafrincham-descended book publishers and marketers got so fed up with the constant bickering about the bleakness of the fifth book which used to interrupt their favourite pastime of Paperback Reissuing (a curious game which involved the movements of small green pieces of paper) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.
This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of its readers as it ended was Oh no, not again.
But did you like it? Do you recommend it to Adams fans who were perfectly happy with the dark, bleak ending of the last book?
By Adam · 2009.12.09 02:05
Yes, I did like it. It was remarkably stylistically like a book Douglas Adams would have written, and other than an unfortunate minor stereotype shoehorning centered around Random Dent (who gets it made up for her in spades), no one acts out of character.
The story for the longest time looks like it doesn’t know where it’s going and suddenly converges in something, a bit like Life, the Universe, and Everything, only it seems a bit more planned, and after five books by Douglas you may find that a strange approach.
Colfer did a bundle. An absolute bundle has absolutely been done by Colfer. He did better than I expected him to. He got very few things wrong, and at this point it comes down to whether you like the direction, whether you like the execution, and in all honesty if one would have liked the end result if only Douglas Adams had written it. In some aspects, he wouldn’t have written the exact same book, since some effort is spent establishing that this is a man who knows how many Triganic Ningis make a Triganic Pu.
There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.
By Jesper · 2009.12.09 07:38
I think I’ll pass nevertheless. I like Adams as is. It was the same with the new James Bond novel, it doesn’t matter how well you market the book, it’s still just formaised fan-fiction.
By Adam · 2009.12.10 13:06
A perfectly valid opinion.
By Jesper · 2009.12.10 21:16
Although I’ll say that marketing didn’t play into it. It was the whole authoring thing, and its end product, that was interesting.
By Jesper · 2009.12.10 22:17