The only person I can imagine who could even attempt to write a Hitchhiker's book and still retain that Douglas Adams vibe would be Terry Pratchett. Maybe.

I believe this is the reason why the phrase EPIC FAIL was invented. Or, perhaps, Fail Backwards.

Why don't you give it a chance and quit whinging. That snippet doesn't bode well, sure, but you can't judge a book by it's cover.

I have a morbid curiosity about this, but I'm afraid that my reading it would tarnish the others. So I'm staying far away.

"The only person I can imagine who could even attempt to write a Hitchhiker's book and still retain that Douglas Adams vibe would be Terry Pratchett"

That is exactly what I said about Discworld, only the other way round, when Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Except that obviously wouldn't work....

Also, I spend most of my days whinging.

@Tonberry2k: I'm sure you have a great time. But why is this site so cynical? I'm fine with bashing things that have already happened, (crappy movies, crappy game bonuses, whatever) but a book, that came out today, that we know nothing about except for the fact that it's being written by a different author? That's like a baby having a tantrum because they didn't have the right colour lollipop at the counter. It's still a friggin' lollipop. At least try it.

Posthumas works are always fickle in my opion. How can anyone be sure that this was part of his vision? Like Rob mentions, is it a cash grab situation for his estate? Whose responsible this? Whose gonna be responsible for the eventual 7th part of this trilogy if this book is a smash?

I would have been much happier if there was unpublished or partially finished works released instead of a re-imagining by another author (isn't that just fan fiction then?)

"The only person I can imagine who could even attempt to write a Hitchhiker's book and still retain that Douglas Adams vibe would be Terry Pratchett"

Agreed. Terry Pratchett is my favorite writer. If there was anyone who could come close to writing like Douglas Adams it would be him. It's a shame about the Alzheimer's though. But just reading that snippet makes me irritated. Normally I reserve my judgement until after reading (with the exception of Twilight) but this just seems like the person was trying to hard.

*gasp!*

I didn't know Pratchett had Alzheimer's. That makes me infinitely sadder than I ever would have been. Time to re-read Mort, so I can be at least slightly comforted when the man eventually passes.

As for complaining about this book, sight mostly un-seen... It's basically the same thing that LOTR fans, Dunes fans, and Wheel of Time fans have complained about in the past. And, generally, they weren't wrong. But, DoctorSmashy is certainly right in theory.

I can't speak for everyone here, but I am personally for bashing this thing because it has nothing to do with art and everything to do with commerce. This is, as Rob points out, nothing more than a cash grab by the Adams estate.

For the record, I actually enjoyed enjoyed the radio series for "Life, The Universe and Everything", "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" and "Mostly Harmless"--minus the alternate happy ending--that were released after Adams' death. So I am not compeletely against any revisiting of the Hitchhikers saga.(Likewise I feel that the rumored TV remake of HHGG is a great idea, especially if they cast David Mitchell and Robert Webb as Arthur and Ford). I'd love to see a properly done stage revival and CD reissue of the Hitchhikers/Restaurant LPs as well.

The less said about the movie the better, as I am trying to subdue my nerd rage here.

Ultimately, my point is that Colfer is a hired gun who appears to be aping Adams style. (I read a chapter and it was very grim). So I will be bashing "And Another Thing" whenever anyone mentions it to me. As far as I am concerned, it is fan fiction driven by greed. I'm not too wild about the Hitchhiker's reissues with new intros either. To quote The Smiths, I get a real "reissue, repackage, repackage" vibe from the whole enterprise and it makes me uneasy. Adams is dead and I love the books he left behind. That's enough for me. In my mind, Dent et all died at the end of Mostly Harmless. At the very least they did with Adams...

Poor Eoin Colfer. He got in way over his head with this commission. He probably had high hopes for himself, but it sounds like it was an epic fail. He should stick to his Artemis Fowl books, I guess.

Sigh. I'll buy it. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't.

Sigh. Poor Eoin Colfer....noob. I loved Artemis Fowl when I was younger. His latest books have been shit, and now he's shitting on Adams' trilogy. I am depressed.

(sigh) I withdrew my wish of a new Hitchhiker book. And I was gonna give it a chance, too.

@DoctorSmashy

I'm not a real cynic, but I play one on TV.
Let's call it cautious interest. I'll wait until someone else reads it to give it a shot. I'm not the hugest HHGG fan, but I've read them and I enjoyed them and I know a cash-in when I see one.

Can it really be any more boring then the actual Hitchhikers series? I know I'm speaking nerd blasphemy, but I personally never found the books to be all that witty or side-splittingly hilarious. It always felt as if he was trying way to hard to be silly and nutty, never felt organic.

*Braces for flame wave*

Also, this could have been much worse;

Stephanie Meyers's: Vampire's Guide to the Galaxy

Yes, damn that cash-grabbing wife! How terrible of a widow who I'd assume lost her main form of income in addition to her husband to allow someone to continue a beloved series of books and try and make money.

What a terrible human being.

Oh, i'm sure that if Adams were still alive today and wrote this exact same book, word for word, you'd all be fucking slobbering and lining up around the block to praise it.

This, truly speaks to the true nature of ignorant, cynical, jaded fanboys. POSTHUMOUS HITCHHIKER BOOK! FANBOY NO LIKE! FANBOY MUST SMAAASH BAD BOOK!!

Don't you people think that this mentality is just a tiny bit... oh, I dunno... pathetic, when you really look at yourselves?

If not, then, well... I sincerely wish you luck making it out of your homes with your eyes shut so tightly.

I will not stop whinging, because it is my favorite nerd past time.
Also this book is an abomination. Hitchhiker's was awesome, restaurant, pretty good, Life was kind of grating but readable, and So Long, well that shouldn't have happened, and Mostly harmless was obviously a money grab.
So I am not in favor of this book, when Adams couldn't write a good follow up, why would anybody else think they could. Money grab (For the family), and attention grab for the author. That is all.

I dealt with the Dune sequels because I wanted to know how the story ended, plus Herbert's son was writing them. But the HHGG didn't really have loose ends and wasn't a highly plot driven work and definitely doesn't need someone else writing more books.

Although now I do have the urge to re-read the originals.

I don't mind that this books exists. I'm not running out to buy it, but I don't think it tarnishes Douglas Adams' work in any way.

What I think could have been better, if they had a sort of anthology. Get a whole bunch of different authors to add a snippet to a Hitchhiker's story. At least then it wouldn't be like one person was trying to fill Douglas Adams' shoes. I find the sturm and drang directed at the book to be kinda silly.

I can see from that quote that it does sound like someone trying to imitate Adams' style. It's reminiscent of the story of the Pogrels or the plummeting Sperm Whale. I'm still keen to give the book a read, I doubt it could be worse than the lifeless last book Adams wrote in the series.

I didn't like Mostly Harmless. I don't think I'll like this one. I almost gave up after Life, the Universe, and Everything Else, but So Long and Thanks for All the Fish brought Adams back for me. I agree with Rob, I really don't want another Guide book unless it was all Adams or at least they just released his notes so that readers could judge for themselves what the author's intent was.

I'll read it out of curiosity, but I'd still prefer to read the original working manuscript.

I still don't get why people care about this. Robert E. Howard's Conan stories have be re-hashed hundreds of times by other writers and while none of them are REH, they were still fun and successful. Why is Adams any different?

@RobP: Pratchett has had Alzheimer's for a long time. It was in the news! There was a BBC show about it and everything, how did you miss it?!? Luckily he's managed to get out two books since (Nation and the brand new Unseen Academicals).

@ Karma

I gotta say that's not the point. Had Adam's written it, word for word as you suggest, then it would be Adams' in totality. His series from start to finish. As it is now, it is only a work by one who presumes to know how the deceased would continue his work. All books written by individuals as continuations of a series after the creator's death are just glorified fan fiction.

I only liked the first two books, I did read them all. Except for this new one, of course. The first two books were fun, because the whole gang still was together. When it all became that one guy and sometimes Ford I became annoyed. He changed the perspective continuesly and, in Mostly Harmless deleted the new character in So Long and thanks for all the fish, just for plots sake.

This new book just gotta be sucky!

DoctorSmashy said:
. . .but a book, that came out today, that we know nothing about except for the fact that it's being written by a different author?

Except we know that it's being almost universally panned by critics. I have seen so many bad reviews the last two weeks, I didn't even know it wasn't out yet.

An open letter to everyone who says the people against this book need to just stop their fanboy whining or give the book a chance on its' own merits.

I think our collective rage (or, in my case at least, my annoyance - I'm not honestly angry about this) is less about fanboyism ("Oh no! Some suit is doing something with something I love and it's going to suck!) and more about what this says about the creative process in general.

This is about creative works being viewed as commodities to be exploited - not treasures to be appreciated. This book only exists because of the mindset that creative people are expendable and that once you have a property, any idiot can play with the toys, so to speak.

Granting that a lot of media is based around this concept (i.e. The comics industry, the endless film remmakes), literature has always been fairly free of this sort of thing. And to suggest that anyone could be brought in to write a sequel to the work of an author who died fairly recently... well, I would say it's like a filmmaker trying to remake Psycho... but they already did that. :P

@Slurpy: I hate films that reviews have raved about, and loved films that have been panned. Ditto books, games, whatever. I'm not saying it looks good for the book, but we can't judge yet.... It was dumb and childish of TR to post this without having read it.

Great, now all the atheists on the block are gonna start copy-pasting that excerpt like it's great.

Great, now all the atheists on the block are gonna start copy-pasting that excerpt like it's great.

I for one, think a HHGTTG sequel is really disrespectful of Douglas Adams' legacy.

As for all you people who say "Oh, there's nothing wrong with what Cofler is doing by continuing a story that the original author concluded before his untimely death", I ask you this:
Would you consider it disrespectful if someone finished "The Salmon of Doubt", keeping the few chapters that Adams wrote intact? Because writing a new HHGTTG book is basically the same thing, in my eyes.

Incidentally, that question is mostly directed at you, Karma. I hope someone messes with one of your favourite franchises.

I figured the trolls would be out in force for this one.

I would only add that, actually, yes, you CAN judge a book by its cover nowadays. Or at least the back cover and perhaps a couple of pages just inside. As with most publishing, the first couple of pages of a book are intended to grab you so you don't put the book down.

Personally, I'm just of the impression that when someone dies, they should let their stuff be. But it doesn't work that way. Dune Guy (can't really be bothered to look up the name again), Adams, Tolkien, Jordan, none of the new stuff has the quality of the originals and never will. But as long as there are people who figure they can take over, they try. Not like it's going to stop either.

Ah well, such is life.

@CChaos: You make a good point, but when I said you can't judge a book by its cover I meant it in the sense that TR was judging a book by its author, reviews, an excerpt etc. It was a figure of speech.

I'll find a way to read it for free, and i'll give it a chance. I really don't think it will be that bad.

Honestly, i don't.

@DoctorSmashy

I realized that, don't worry.

And, in turn, I fully believe that Rob has every right to judge if he thinks the book is going to suck. I mean, hey, like I said...when was the last time you saw decent quality from a franchise when the author is already dead and someone else is trying to take it over? To the person's deep set fans, you might as well exhume the corpse, hook it to some strings and play Pinocchio for a while.

I think people need to understand that fans come in different flavours. Every single person out there is a fan or something, be it a TV show, a book or what have you, a gaming console or what have you. Just imagine that whoever makes the stuff you like has decided to do something that is horribly inane or an affront to the original style and intent of the original. One shall find that nobody is immune to fandom rage, it's just not always that obvious.

What's the point of this book? If I want to read something boring, aimless, smug, and overwrought, I'll just reread the originals.

@CChaos: I know what you mean, and I am a fan of many, many nerdy things.... many.... *sigh*

But people should try and approach something neutrally, open-minded even, unless it is REALLY obviously going to be awful, like, say a Transformers movie directed by Michael Bay featuring robotic testicles and.... oh, wait. Okay, what about a Super Mario Movie with real people and a velociraptor Yoshi and.... wait a second. I see a pattern here.

I guess I'm being hyprocritical (I became nerd Hulk when I heard about those things) but I just think this HHGG matter is different. Especially since it's a book and is more open to interpretation, and you don't have trailers or screenshots or anything to fairly base an opinion on.

Like I always say: Never trust a man whose name starts with three vowels in a row.

I think the people who are saying give this book a chance, are forgetting that the last two books were boring and pointless. And now somebody is going to try and make some new boring pointlessness and maybe he'll throw in some pretense just to round out the whole thing.

The book is being read on Radio Four in about 45 minutes time.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n4z16

@Karma: No. If Douglas Adams wrote that snippet, I'd feel that he'd completely lost his touch. Not to mention that religion has ALREADY been talked about in his books and that's pretty far off the mark for how Adams dealt with the matter in his writing!

actually when the author was asked to do the book he turned it down for he was afraid that he would not live up to douglas work. and even if its a cash grab by adam's estate at least the adventure still lives. even if its bad

Honestly, I don't know how to feel about this. I do like Artemis Fowl, for the most part (although the most recent one have sort of lost something from the first couple), and I think Eoin Colfer is a pretty decent writer, but... taking over for Adams? I agree with a lot of people in the Pratchett is probably the only one who could pull that off.

On the other hand, I've only ever gotten through Mostly Harmless once, just because it's such an obvious "I don't want to have to write this anymore" by Adams. I really do want to see the series have a better end, especially because that's apparently what Douglas wanted.

*shrug* My hopes for a more satisfying conclusion are sort of tied with my disgust for someone as ill-suited for this gargantuan challenge as Colfer taking a stab at it anyway. I think I want to read it, if only from morbid curiousity, but I'm not going to pay for it. All I can hope for is that that excerpt isn't emblematic of the book as a whole.

I was about to post that I would have been excited about it if Terry Pratchet had written it. I see that I am not alone

"I still don't get why people care about this. Robert E. Howard's Conan stories have be re-hashed hundreds of times by other writers and while none of them are REH, they were still fun and successful. Why is Adams any different?"

The popularity and near universal acclaim of the restored versions of REH's Conan stories and the comparative scarcity of L. Sprague de Camp's versions should tell you everything you need to know about why that was a bad analogy.

And the less said about Conan stories by other authors, the better.

"The Salmon of Doubt" outlined the reasons for continuing the series past "Mostly Harmless", and it wasn't due to a cash grab, as the author of this article concludes. There's an interview of Adams by a Matt Newsome starting on page 197 of the U.S. paperback edition, where Adams talks about how some then-new ideas he had originally intended for a third Dirk Gently book would work better for a Hitchhiker book.

Adams: "So, there will come a point I suspect some point in the future where I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book. But I kind of want to do that in an odd kind of way because people have said, quite rightly, that 'Mostly Harmless' was a very bleak book. And it was a very bleak book. The reason for that is very simple--I was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons I don't want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And guess what, it was a rather bleak book!"
"I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number."

In brief: Adams himself wanted to continue HHTG because he regretted ending it on a bleak note. Adams's widow most likely commissioned the sixth novel to fulfill this wish of her husband's. (Note that neither she or the replacement author planned a whole new series of HHTG books - they just produced one new, concluding volume.) The wisdom of the decision is debatable, indeed, but I don't think it was made with ill intentions.

(Seriously, I thought Adams's dissatisfaction with "Mostly Harmless" was well-known. No one in the thread, save for CaffeinatedWriter, knew about it? Really?)

Eh, I'll probably read this. If it turns out to be good, then it'll be a fitting conclusion to a brilliant series. If it's not, I'll try to convince myself that it never happened.

I will admit to a certain feeling of apprehension, though.

For all those defending the idea of this book, imagine how you would feel if Yoko Ono approved Oasis doing Revolver II. This is just so wrong in so many different ways.

If some faker wants to ride on Adams' coattails, that sucks and it is the responsibility of those that know better to rip it to death.

the End.

When I first found out about this book back in February, I was more than a little bit displeased. I went and ranted in my journal and even managed to make myself late for class.

When the first half of the novel was released to publishers, I read the available snippets, trying to keeph an open mind, but each one made me more and more unhappy.

For me, the magic of Hitchhiker's has always been tied to Douglas Adams. I've read nearly everything he ever published (the main exception being The Meaning of Liff - I can't find a copy!) and thoroughly enjoyed it all, from the smallest guide entry to the essays in The Salmon of Doubt. My personal favorite of his works is actually Last Chance to See, which you should definitely check out if you haven't already.

So the idea of H2G2 may have drawn me in, but Adams' writing made me stay. There have been other incarnations of the series where different writers took over in Adams' absence and it's always obvious.
The movie is an obvious example, but I prefer to point out the newer phases of the radio show. After Adams died, books 3-5 were adapted into their own radio series. They were even named in the same manner as the original two phases. I bought, I listened, and I wasn't drawn in. If writers couldn't manage to capture the H2G2 magic when they had Adams' words right in front of them, how could anyone else do it from scratch?

If Douglas had lived long enough to write another H2G2 book, I would have loved it. But this...this isn't Douglas Adams. It's publisher-sanctioned fan fiction written by an author whose works I've never felt the need to explore.

When I want more H2G2, and more Douglas Adams, I'll just read the actual books again. And again. And again =)

" Tonight on Clamp Classic Movies - Casablanca. Now with new, improved and happy ending..."

Well, I knew that Douglas was unhappy with the way he'd ended the series and wanted to go back and end on a more update note.But that's an entirely different thing to getting some other author in to do it.

If Adams had done it, it would have been generated from his mind, would have taken years in which he sweated blood trying to work out what he wanted to write and more importantly, how he wanted to write it. It would have been the product of an author who put so much thought into how his universe worked that he had crippling attacks of anxiety on every page, solved only by long baths and longer Greek meals.

This, however, has been bashed of in about six months by an writer brought in to create another Hitch-Hiker book that the publishing world can get excited about, market to fans of various shades of intensity and those of us who want everyone in the HH Galaxy to live happy and fulfilled existences will be satisfied.

But, wait, ask yourself - what if this book sells massively ? Do you think they really will stop it there ? After all, 007's been plagued for years with various writers of various literary abilities from Raymond Benson to Kingsley Amis writing follow-on novels, but who reads Colonel Sun these days ? And Holmes may well be box-office poison now due to various misguided attempts to revitalise/revisit/reincarnate him - we shall see when the Ritchie/Downey Jr/Law movie comes out.

Put it this way - imagine that when you reach page 42 Colfer gives you The Question...will you accept it ?

I was going to come on today to ask why anyone would even care about this. Adams has been ruining his own legacy since book 3. Alas, it appears I've been beaten to the punch by a few others here.

In general, I would be against new authors leeching off of the hard work of others to continue a story solely in pursuit of a dollar or two. But, objectively, this series was mediocre at best (and, at it's nadir, significantly less than that).

@DoctorSmashy: I honestly hadn't heard that about Pratchett. Or, if I had, I blocked it out of my memory. I've been away from Discworld for a while. It started with college and then I just haven't gotten back to them, yet. Plus, I'm almost not sure where to get back in, with all the new books and re-printings of older books that were OOP when I was reading 10-15 years ago. Any advice?

Returning to the topic at hand... The question of "should" another writer continue a deceased author's work, posthumously? Clearly, there is a certain balance of yes/no to this question that everyone here has already addressed. Yes: He wanted to finish the work, his wife is fulfilling those wishes, it's been done in the past. No: HE wanted to finish the work, it's easily perceived as a "cash-grab," it's been done in the past and always to the detriment of the new writer and the older works. This, inherently, makes the question of "should" it be done completely and utterly moot. It isn't a moral question, or even a question of wisdom. It's about art and artistry. The question really ought to be "can" another writer complete a deceased author's work? The answer to that, almost always, is inevitably... No.

"Re-imaginings" or whatever you want to call them, works that use an original source material as a jumping off point, are fundamentally different than completing a series. We need only look at Star Trek to see how this plays out. Gene Rodenberry is the mastermind behind ST:TOS. Everyone loves it (now, at least), and it's considered a classic. Gene Rodenberry also creates ST:TNG, albeit with less direct control and, clearly, he didn't get to finish it. But TNG is still well-regarded, in part because Rodenberry was there to continue his vision. And then Brannon Braga and Rick Berman took over. Each one of their Trek projects became progressively worse the more they wanted to take the series in "new directions," re: away from Rodenberry's original vision. It was only until J.J. Abrams came on board with his re-visioning in the new Star Trek movie that finally righted the ship. Why? Because J.J. isn't continuing on where Rodenberry left off, he's starting from square one, using what Rodenberry left as a way to tell his own version of the story.

Sorry for the rant. Try not to hurt your eyes reading all of my asinine text.

the only way it could be worse is if the book's cover blurb was that it was Ed and Bella's favorite book.

I loved HG2G because of how lightly it took itself. I didn't care that it wasn't always a great book, but it was always entertaining, at least to me.
I liked the movie too, as unpopular as that may be, but I thought it did what it needed to. Didn't like the substory with what's his face the millipede, but the POV gun and the thinking slappers were brilliant. I just wish they could've kept a bit more of the "lack of a story" from the books that I felt.
Anyway, we'll see how this book goes. I don't expect much, but I'll try it out. Hopefully at a library.
And now as I write this I see a TV commercial for the book. Meh. We'll see, but I feel like "Part 6 of 3" isn't as good as something like "the 6th book in the trilogy". Too blunt.

It may be Nerd Blasphemy, but the books have been shit for some time now and DNA is a real hit or miss writer. The first one = Brilliant! The second one = Really good. Third = Meh, I've read better. Fourth = A struggle to get through. Five = Please Douglas, just stop.

Meanwhile his Doctor Who scripts are uneven too. Pirate Planet = Meh, City of Death = Brilliant, Shada = meh. And The Dirk Gentley book have all be dreadful, unreadable shit. So yes, he has his moments of wit that I would murder to have a tenth of, but a bad HHG2tG book is nothing new to me.

Nothing to see here, move along.

I'm buying this book just to piss off every that hates this idea off. And yeah, I enjoyed the first few books too, but that last depressing POS "Mostly Harmless"? I felt like ripping it to pieces and feeding it personally to the still living Adams with hot sauce. It was like hey, do you love Hitchhiker's? Well, sorry, all those books after the first one were LIES, SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE CASH SUCKERS! So, if this can fix the very broken series, I'm all for that...

So sad! I thought this would be great, but it has nothing of the greatness in Douglas Adams HHGTTG!

Don´t buy it! I did, and all I got for it was a bad memory of a book that should never have been written!
Somewhere in a pan-dimensional universe Adams and his team just lost a game of Brockian Ultra Cricket because of the news that this book was released...

actually, i've read all of these books and the only writer who i've read that has come close to in writing style and humour is-dave barry. i laughed my ass off when i read "big trouble", they eventally made a movie based on it but both of their books are very similar because they make fun of the human condition on a grand scale..

I just finished reading it - having loved and reread each of the originals countless times - and I think he did an admirable job considering the insurmountable task.

No, it's not Adams (I doubt Adams the atheist would be as obsessed as Colfer is over gods), it's not a classical hitch-hikers book (which tended to go off in a completely different and exciting direction in each new book - the meaning of life, krikit, multiple universes etc) but rather a very skillful mashup of everything Adams created with a few small side-stories that are Colfer's original ones (the guide notes which don't rehash the original stories). But the way he combines the characters is interesting, the new guide stories are generally amusing, overall it's an enjoyable read (just had to hold the bile down everytime Zaphod acted like a hero) - just like the new testament was never written by the original authors but still managed to garner some attention, give this a chance as an amusing sci-fi book with DA's characters and universe, you'll find you get entertained as there's far too few books like this out there.

I didn't read these comments until tonight after trying very hard to read this book, but after almost 50 pages I just can't take it anymore. And another thing is as bad as most of the people predicted. He tortured the prose to sound like Adams without a tenth of the talent I never read Artemis Fowl, but I sure hope it is better than this or he will be spending much future time in the soup line. I had had hopes when I saw somebody wrote this book and each page was worse than the prior.

The h2g2 review liked it, on the whole.

Eoin Colfer isn't Douglas Adams and, to his credit, doesn't try to be. His Benny books are good, probably better than the more famous Artemis Fowl series.

TRiG.