Slashdot Mirror
New Douglas Adams Book Planned
Cabby writes "The BBC and the Independant on Sunday have the news that all the remaining Douglas Adams material is going to be published later on this year, including the unfinished novel 'The Salmon of Doubt' and the proposed screenplay for the Hitchhikers Guide movie"
Come on, people! There are many great and famous works which have been left unfinished by the death of the author or artist, later to be distributed posthumously:
The Aeneid - Vergil
Requiem Mass - Mozart
The Art of Fugue - Bach
Pieta (Florence) - Michelangelo
"Unfinished" Symphony - Schubert
Tenth Symphony - Mahler
The Silmarillion - Tolkien
Some other famous works were complete but not published until after the author's death:
The Prince - Machiavelli
Billy Budd - Melville
Of course, not all posthumous works are great, but they are at least useful in understanding the work of the artist, and there really is the occasional masterpiece.
Sure, Adams' estate will profit from this, but that is no reason to be disappointed or jaded.
Death does not mean you can stop selling crap... at least not in our culture. Why, I saw John Wayne hawking Coors Light just yesterday on that there TeeVee!
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Well. It would have been nice had Slashdot SPELT HIS NAME RIGHT in the heading... "Douglas Adam" indeed.
(Same to all the stupid people who write phrases like "Douglas Adam's" or even "Hitchicker". Christ on a bicycle, have none of you ever read anything!)
The Salmon of Doubt. It would actually be interesting if all the drafts are present. It originally began in the early 90's (93?) as the third 'Dirk Gently' novel. Then the character of 'Dirk Gently' was written out. Some time later, it reappeared as the seventh Hitch-Hiker novel. Then it vanished altogether. Amazon were accepting orders for it for some time and ZZ9 were constantly having to tell people that no such book had been published!
Now it would be very interesting to see if any of this change survives.
It may seem like grave-robbing, but I'd rather they did this than have some hack finish off Adams' ideas in a faux-HitchHiker style. I'm very glad to see Ed Victor saying there is no question of having someone finish ideas off.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"