Colfer Asked To Write Sixth HHGTTG Book

clickety6 writes "Eoin Colfer, the Irish author of a number of books (including the popular children's book series 'Artemis Fowl'), has been directly approached by Douglas Adam's widow, Jane Belson, to write a sixth book to continue the (even more) increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy."

Comments

NO NO NO

[jacquesm]

Enough Douglas Adams milking already, please for the love of - insert deity here - do not destroy the legacy of this great author.

Sorry for the rant, have just watched the movie...

Re:NO NO NO

[jacquesm]

Douglas Adams was one of the bigger obstacles in the way of making a movie, and I don't think it would have ever had his blessing. The script sucks (random rearrangements, insertions of 'new' but irrelevant stuff all over the place, and deletions of essentials elsewhere).

Of course, it made money so who am I to complain, but it left me with a definite unhappy and disappointed feeling.

When hearing the radio play and reading the book you get a definite mental image of the kind of universe that Douglas Adams wanted you to see, and most of the movie contradicts that mental image.

There is a joke about that:

A man walks into a movie theater and sees a donkey standing in the aisle.

He walks up to the row behind the man with the donkey and whispers in the guys ear: "Wow, how amazing, he's really looking at the movie, isn't he?"

Yes, says the guy with the donkey, sure is. But he like the book better...

Re:NO NO NO

[Abcd1234]

random rearrangements, insertions of 'new' but irrelevant stuff all over the place, and deletions of essentials elsewhere

ROFL, while I have my own critiques of the movie, this is probably the *last* reason to dislike the script. If you read the books and listened to the radio plays (or played the Infocom game), you'd know that DNA was quite happy to alter the HHGTTG storyline in order to fit the medium. The fact that the movie diverges from the books should be *expected*, not derided, given DNA's approach to the material.

NO.

[Rob T Firefly]

A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and for ever, it was now all, finally, over.

Let's just leave it at that, shall we?

Nope, sorry

[mcgrew]

Not going to read it, and I say that as a dedicated Douglas Adams fan - I have the omnibus edition of HHGTTG (thanks to my daughter), the movie on DVD, the BBC TV series on VHS, and am still after the radio play (which I've been told is the best of the lot).

If Asimov's widow asked someone to continue his Foundation series I wouldn't read it, either, and Asimov was my favorite author.

It wasn't the story that made it great, it was the writing. Without Douglas Adams it can't possibly be the same. It will be to the original what margarine is to butter. I can't imagine a writer with integrity taking the job.

Re:Nope, sorry

[SatanicPuppy]

Bear, Brin, and Benford are all talented, but there is a difference between extending Foundation and extending HHGTTG.

The problem with extending the Hitchhiker universe is that it's driven by character interaction and DA's sense of humor.

The first Foundation book was basically short stories, each with new characters, new settings, etc...Very easy to extend, just write a short story of your own. Make up your own characters, your own planet, whatever...All you have to do is genuflect toward psychohistory, Hari Seldon, and the fall of the empire. It's a historical backdrop that can accommodate any number of stories.

Now imagine someone else trying to write dialogue between Ford and Arthur.

Yea. It's like that.

Re:TELL HIM NO

[bigmouth_strikes]

Very brave. Using an anonymous account posting someones private contact information. Very brave.

You should have posted his official contact information, where he can deal with the responses during office hours, instead of whenever random /.er calls.

Re:What?

[meringuoid]

I don't get the hate for Christopher Tolkien. Without his work, we would have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - nothing else at all. We would know the Elder Days only through the fragments of half-forgotten legend we hear in the Third Age - occasional cryptic references to the Eldar of the West, to Numenor, to Gondolin and the swords they made for the wars with the goblins, to Beren and Lúthien... We'd never have heard the full tales.

Christopher Tolkien isn't producing cheap cash-ins on his father's legacy. He compiled the Silmarillion, then spent decades writing and publishing detailed analyses of the reams of notes and fragmentary manuscripts that lay behind the legends, and finally tidied up the Narn i Hîn Húrin to a publishable form. And I for one am very glad that he did so.

OK I guess.

[T.E.D.]

I suppose I don't have a problem with this, as long as its crystal clear that this is Colfer's book, set in the HHG universe. If there is any implication whatsoever that this is a new Douglas Adams book, I have a big problem with it.

He's not pinin' for the fjords. He's dead. Let him go.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's a fair assessment, since for the most part he was acting as organizer and editor of material that was already written. The others, however, are merely riding on their parents coattails.

Bingo - that's the difference

[Weaselmancer]

Read the introduction to The Silmarillion. That's all Christopher was doing. Collecting his father's early stories and trying to figure out what was closest to canon. The early stories have discrepancies in them that make them mesh poorly. It was a monumental task to figure out each story and put them into the most coherent framework.

But Christopher took the time out and figured it all out and came up with the most coherent version of the early work and made what wound up being my favorite book in the whole Tolkien series. Without him, we never would have heard about the Music of Arda, or Feanor, or any of it.

He wrote nothing, changed nothing, and brought more of his father's work to the world. He has my eternal gratitude.

Now, let's contrast that with Brian Herbert. Spoilers ahead.

I got through House Atreides. And halfway through House Harkonnen before I gave up in disgust. They're not even as good as fan fiction. They're simply dismal. Having RM Mohaim be the mother of Jessica? Get serious. You know you're in deep shit if you're stealing plot ideas from George Lucas.

And the writing itself is simply awful. It's like he took a dartboard with his father's wonderful mythology on it and threw darts at it. The characters have zero depth and sound like they're doing Dune impressions. He goes too far out of the way to have everyone use words from the original works.

It's really awful. Penny Arcade said it best.

Re:What?

[joelwyland]

I don't get the hate for Christopher Tolkien. Without his work, we would have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - nothing else at all.

Amusingly, I think you answered your own question here. The Silmarillion was a horrible book. The scattered notes, often contradictory, were not finished nor meant to be published. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was what should have been published. Nothing else.

Re:No. Finish the Infocom Sequel

[Drooling Iguana]

I played a lot of text adventures when I was a kid, but these days I can't stand anything more primitive than The Secret of Monkey Island. I'm sorry, but endless "guess the verb" sessions are not my idea of a good time.