You need not have read any of those before this. The characters are stick-figure stereotypes with a tendency to fall into lust at the slightest drop of perfume, the alien cultures are warped caricatures of humanity, the robots are psychotic, and the starship itself is unrelentingly superlative – in short, a spin-off in the spirit of Hitchhiker’s Guide books. Their two styles were compatible, and this novel was released in 1997, just a few years before Douglas Adams’ death. Not being able to work on both in the time demanded by his publisher, he handed off the novel to Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame. At the time, he did nothing more with the idea, but a decade later he started basing both a novel and a text-based software game on it. One of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide books has a toss-off joke about the Starship Titanic undergoing Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. Adams describes it as a "majestic and luxurious cruise-liner" that "did not even manage to complete its very first radio message - an SOS - before undergoing a sudden and gratuitious total existence failure 2018 Ένα βιβλίο για το οποίο έχεις μεγάλες προσδοκίεςĭouglas Adams first imagined the Starship Titanic in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third entry in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, where it is briefly mentioned in the book's 10th chapter. ![]() It does have its share of good humour and cool scenes, but ultimately it falls far, far short of what you'd expect when you hear the name "Douglas Adams."ī.R.A.CE. The book is a quick read, and isn't terrible, but don't expect to be wowed by it. But since there are clear echoes of things that are Adams' ideas, the fact that it is written instead by Jones makes it almost feel like a sub-par fanfic. Terry Jones isn't a horrible writer or anything, but he lacks the hilarity, whimsy, and humanity that Adams put into all of his works. It's Douglas Adams's idea hashed out by someone else. One of the big problems is definitely that this book isn't really a "collaboration," despite what the description says. It's predictable and somewhat blasé- the books it's spawned from are hilarious and unexpected, and Starship Titanic feels like a pale mockery of that. ![]() The whole idea of the Starship Titanic was a one-off joke in the Hitchhiker's novels, and so while this book is 250-ish pages, it reads quickly and feels more like a short story. ![]() ![]() Or else that it would be somehow similar to that episode of Doctor Who with Ten, although that's probably because I've been re-watching the series on Netflix. I absolutely adore my compendium of the Hitchhiker's saga (is saga the right word?), and was hoping that this would be a nice little addition to the world Douglas Adams created in that. I have to say I was kind of disappointed in this book.
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