But a little thing like that has never stopped a Publisher from making a bit more money from a writer. JRR Tolkien and L Ron Hubbard have written more books since they died than they did when they were alive. Sherlock Holmes shows up in new books all the time. Remaking movies and bringing back all but forgotten characters is a Hollywood way of life.
So it was not completely shocking that there would be a new Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy book, I was a bit surprised that it was written by Eoin Colfer of Artemis Fowl fame. My own personal choices for a new Hitchhiker author would have been Christopher Moore or Terry Pratchett. Both funny writers and one of them is English. One of the great things about Douglas Adams was his British sense of humor. Eoin Colfer is Irish, which brings to mind more Angela’s Ashes than Monty Python.
Douglas Adam’s last book was The Salmon of Doubt. This is a partial manuscript and a collection of essays. In one of the essays he talks about a Publisher who wants to print an unfinished book by P.G. Wodehouse. P.G. Wodehouse was a brilliantly funny British writer-one whose genius was in the rewrite. Douglas Adams talked about how it was impossible to make this book funny without conjuring the ghost of Wodehouse to edit it. So it was an interesting inclusion in a book featuring a large fragment of a Dirk Gently novel-one that was not notably funny.
Which brings me to And Another Thing. I read everything that Douglas Adams wrote, but it has been a while. So picking up Part Six of Three I was a bit lost as to who these people were and what they were doing in a Hitchhiker’s Guide book. Oh I remember a few things like a Rain God showing up and a bunch of Galactic bad buys that looked like Cricket players, but I seem to have totally forgotten Random and Fenchurch. The small and nearly infinite cast of minor characters are part of the charm of Douglas Adams works, but Eoin Colfer’s minor characters seem pretty major.
There is also the problem of Originality, or more precisely, the complete and total lack of originality. Eoin can’t resist saying things like It hung in the air in exactly the way a brick doesn’t and filling every page with random excerpts that are meant to be from The Hitchhiker’s Guide that are trying way to hard to be funny, and well, end up reading like an excerpt from a travel guide.
I miss Douglas Adams in ways that I will never miss Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is the important part of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Douglas Adams is the important part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy stories.
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