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. Finish the Infocom Sequel

[fyrie]

I'd rather see the Infocom HHGTTG Sequel completed/released.

Re:No. Finish the Infocom Sequel

[achacha]

The question is: are people willing to use their imagination when they are force-fed every feature directX 10 has to offer (shading, tons of light sources, fog, environments, shadows, physics engine, ragdoll physics) at insane resolutions.

While I grew up playing almost every Infocom game out there and I still have the Atari 8-bit versions ready-to-play via emulator, I have yet to find anyone under 30 that thinks it's fun.

For many, text adventure games are akin to a wheel made of stone, great in the day but with vulcanized rubber why would anyone use a stone wheel except in a museum...

On a positive note, there is a counterculture of writers that still use the Z-Engine (Infocom text game engine) to write games based on their original works. So all hope is not lost :)

To date no game was more memorable than Station Fall, when Floyd died, it broke my heart and to this day I feel sad for him and wished there was a way to save him.

Re:No. Finish the Infocom Sequel

[geoffspear]

I agree. Eoin Colfer should definitely devote his time to programming an Infocom game instead of writing a book.

Don't panic

[Max Romantschuk]

The mice will interfere if need be.

Re:Don't panic

[petes_PoV]

The mice are underwriting the next book - they want to know what'll happen, too.

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

[ari_j]

Are you saying that the movie destroyed his legacy, or that you are more sensitive because the movie glorified his legacy and you don't want that feeling taken away?

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Chapter One

Turning from the rain-streaked window, Trillian's teary gaze searched pensively around the room and came to rest on the silver-framed photograph on the mantelpeice. She sighed, her heart heavy with unshed tears. It seemed so long ago - the good times she had shared with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. Could it have been a thousand years? As she remembered one of the good times, a single tear, like a frozen diamond, spilled down her cheek and splashed quietly on the white marble floor. Unable to restrain herself, she collapsed against the floor, hands to her face, and sobbed uncontrollably.

A tiny hand reached up and tugged her sleeve.

"Mommy?"

"Oh Ford Junior!" Trillian sobbed. "You remind me so of your father, and the good times we shared so very long ago.. but they're both dead now, and ypu're all I have left to remember them by."

"That's right, forget about me as usual!." grumbled a familiar voice suddenly.

"Oh Marvin!" she laughed "You know I would never forget about you - after all you're all that I have to remember them Arthur and Ford by. I see you're still your grumpy old self!"

She paused with grief as the full meaning of this hit her, and she shuddered and started to weep again, like a pure white nightingale whose eggs have been stolen and eaten by a fateful cat.

Oh sorry. I see now.. don't ruin the legacy. Gotcha.

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

[petes_PoV]

Enough Douglas Adams milking already, please for the love of -

• insert deity here

- do not destroy the legacy of this great author.

That would be Zarquon - but he's running late

Re:NO NO NO

[kalirion]

what a waste to do that anonymous :)

Would you have preferred that "ecolfer" post as himself here?

Re:NO NO NO

[Molt]

Ford should be knowledgeable and a man of the world, not an bumbling idiot, just odd

A man of the world? A man of the galaxy I'd have hoped, or at least the parts where respectable journalists can get respectably drunk on a utterly disrespectful salary.

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.

Re:NO NO NO

[cerberusss]

From the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2008

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay -- the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

Shannon Wedge, New Hampshire

Please, PLEASE read the rest of the entries. Hilarious.

how many books planned in the franchise?

[RMH101]

...42, obviously.

Sounds reasonable

[prayag]

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 resposible

[ObitMan]

Those responsible for this will be Sacked, and probably the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

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

[TheThiefMaster]

I have a shock for you. It's called the "Second Foundation Trilogy":

After his death, the Asimov estate, at the request of Janet Asimov, approached Gregory Benford, and asked him to write another Foundation story. He agreed, and at that same time suggested that it should form part of a trilogy with Greg Bear and David Brin writing the other two books, which they agreed to do.

Re:Nope, sorry

[dkleinsc]

So in other words, this will be almost but not entirely unlike Douglas Adams' writing?

No!

[amdpox]

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?

All the diodes down my left side...

[Bilby Baggins]

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.

Re:All the diodes down my left side...

[ConceptJunkie]

I've been reading the Discworld books since "The Light Fantastic" was new. Frankly, (and I know I'm going to generate some real hating from this), I thought Terry Pratchett was more or less imitating Douglas Adams in the first two books, with their more-or-less meandering plots and fairly random happenings (plus lots of excellent writing and humor), but then he got BETTER. Much BETTER. [Don't get me wrong, I love Adams' stuff and my copies of his books are all dog-eared and well-worn... I even used to read them to my kids (they totally love the BBC TV version and the revent movie, but their consensus is that the BBC version is better, which makes me proud), and I play the radio shows on CD when we are in the car.]

Pratchett gets the details the way Adams would... tons of really clever jokes (the guy even puns in Latin for cryin' out loud) and great dialog, the outrageously bizarre creations, the fantastic imagination of it all, but to that he adds incredible characterization and detailed plotting, stopwatch-perfect pacing, and some of the best satire ever written. I can get more of a "feeling" for, more inside the minds of, Commander Vimes or Granny Weatherwax or Tiffany Aching or even the Librarian from one chapter than I can get from Arthur or Trillian or Ford from 5 books. Out of places I've never been, Anhk-Morpork is more real and detailed to me than London, Paris or San Francisco.

And the stories... they are huge, sprawling and often very abstract working on many different levels, while remaining very cohesive, and we never lose the little details that make the Discworld perhaps the "realest" imaginary world ever created, more detailed in many ways than Tolkien, stranger in many ways than Wonderland, and yet it's really just a funhouse mirror that casts an exaggerated, but very, very true reflection of our real world and our complex, wonderful and insane nature as human beings.

Adams universe was just a vehicle for delivering his exceptional writing style and brilliant humor, but it never had a sense of being a "real place". The Discworld is carried by four elephants on the back of the great A'Tuin the star turtle, and yet feel more real than the most hardest of hard science fiction and the most scrupulously detailed of fantasy worlds.

Plus, Nanny Ogg. Anyone who could create Nanny Ogg (or really, discover her and reveal her to the world!) is a hero in my book.

Share and Enjoy!

[datajack]

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.

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.