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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."
I'd rather see the Infocom HHGTTG Sequel completed/released.
The mice will interfere if need be.
.: Max Romantschuk
How about Brian Herbert, Todd McCaffrey or Christopher Tolkien? Or is it too hard pulling them off the graves and/or shriveling bodies of their parents?
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
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...
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...42, obviously.
Douglas Adams himself mentioned that Mostly Harmless was too dark and wanted the series to finish on a more upbeat note (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mostly_Harmless#Adams_on_Mostly_Harmless ). So it is quite plausible to believe that his widow would want to make her husband's wish true.
Those responsible for this will be Sacked, and probably the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Who run Barter Town?
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?
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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.
Free Martian Whores!
I will NOT have my preciousness desecrated by non-canon material! He might introduce story arcs that don't fit with the carefully woven future history Adams so painstakingly built... wait, what was with the sandwiches again?
hurt just thinking about it. Humans, I'll never understand them, you don't even need a brain the size of a planet to know this won't work.
I just finished reading the 2003-updated edition of Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I have to say that I don't believe anyone can really emulate Adams' particular style of writing. And unless they've found a treasure trove of almost-finished manuscripts (unlikely) the best that we have from Adams' writing before his death is mostly compiled in The Salmon Of Doubt, and there was just the merest inklings of a beginning of a truely Adamsian epic tale in there...
Besides, we all know the only person who could write HHGttG properly is Terry Pratchett, and he is ONLY allowed to write Discworld books until he's unable to write or they cure Alzheimer's Disease. And someone sure as hell had better cure it.
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.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
After taking numerous readings of the tastes of the audience, he will produce a book that is almost, but not-quite entirely unlike HHGTTG.
GO STICK YOUR HEAD IN A PIG.
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.
Oddly enough, there were exactly 42 comments when I first saw this article. Perhaps this might turn out well...
She'd probably make more money if she just set up a website where we can all contribute $5 to keep her from publishing a new book.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
...and go read Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series.
Hilarious, geeky (lots and lots of literary allusions), british as well, /.ers), ...
includes special features online (good for us
...though I probably won't read it. I think that Douglas's style was inimitable - and it's painful when people try. Some people love the books for the story though, and before he died Douglas himself said that he might write another lighter sequel - that he was in a bad place when he wrote Mostly Harmless and that it was too dark as a result.
He left a wife and daughter and I presume he would have wanted them to be ok; why shouldn't his wife do this? The works he was directly involved in are still there and will be no less enjoyable. I disliked the film, but it's still better to have the original stuff and a film that some people will like than just the originals so I feel the same way about this proposed sequel.
People are too precious about these things. If you don't want 'em don't buy 'em. I'm with you. But don't try to tell the heirs about their responsibilities to a dead man if they're not suppressing anything.
By all accounts Eoin Colfer is a good author. It's up to him to make something worthwhile of the new book regardless of whose footsteps he's following in.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
I just put down Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and frankly I wish there were more books from that Adams' series rather than HHGTTG.
Don't get me wrong, those books are pure gold, but Gently is more my style right now. Mixed feelings though about anyone but Adams having a hand in anything like this...
Precisely, no Trilogy should contain more than, say, 5 books.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I don't see why so many people see this as such a great problem - this kind of stuff has been going on for years.
What about the countless Star Trek books that have been written over the years, generally by authors who never had anything to do with writing for any of the original TV series or movies?
Or how about the additional Star Wars books? It could be argued that a few books from the "X-Wing" series of books would have made much better movies than the dire Episodes 1 to 3.
Or what about the newer James Bond books written by the likes of John Gardner, Raymond Benson & Kingsley Amis?
I've read selections of books from all the above and some are very good and others not so good.
So just leave it at that - if it gets written, decide when you read it. As far as I'm concerned, as a huge British HHGTTG fan, it can't be any worse than that Americanised piece of trash adaptation that hit the cinema screens a few years ago!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Will this one be a another middle finger to the fans that kills off all the rest of the beloved characters?
The way the HHGTTG universe works is basically what it would be like if god (or multiple gods) had a really warped sense of humour and loved a good joke. From what I remember there are not so many points in the books where something happens that contradicts our experience but without a backstory. When Adams talks about small green pieces of paper that are, on the whole, not the ones that are unhappy, well, this is because the small green pieces of paper are just projections onto our universe of some 10-dimensional hyper-intelligent lego brick. The universe is set up to allow more or less anything, as long as it has some kind of purpose.
The infinite improbability drive, for example, even though it is a bit ridiculous, plays on some of the more bizarre aspects of quantum mechanics, and it isn't so far from being plausible, if you imagine Zarquon has a surreal sense of humour.
In comparison, videos leaving a residue sounds, by itself, a bit dumb. Adams would have invented some reason for them to leave a residue, even if it was just something like they were echoing cries of pain from of a previous universe where videos were used as a weapon of mass destruction. (Yeah OK so I'm not DNA. But hopefully I managed to convey the point?)
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I believe this goes against Douglas Adams' wishes. "Mostly Harmless" seemed a deliberate effort by Adams to kill the series. (Spoiler: Everyone dies. The end.) I had an amazing opportunity to talk to Adams shortly before his death, and it seemed like he was deathly tired of the whole Hitchhiker thing.
As far as I'm concerned, the series ended with So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. It's a good ending. No other novels were or are necessary.
What I would much rather have seen is a third Dirk Gently novel. Although I have mixed feelings about someone else attempting it. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul was a work of art. I don't see another author producing anything near as good that adhered to the spirit of the original.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.