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New Hitchhiker's Guide Book "Not Very Funny"
daria42 writes "An early review of part of the Eoin Colfer-penned sequel to Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series has panned the book as not being very funny. If you read Hitchhiker to have a good laugh, maybe you're going to be disappointed," wrote Nicolas Botti, on his Douglas Adams fan site earlier this month."
They said the same thing about the Hollywood movie, and look how that turned...
Oh, CRAP!
I only found the first two books funny. The rest... not so much.
No matter what author at any level of talent that had picked up the books and decided to continue them would be met with heresy or at very least a review of "not as good as the original".
As a writer I know how to mimic the words of others, but it doesn't mean that a person with a significant and highly educated fan base wouldn't pick up on the subtle differences, because no matter how good someone try's to imitate another person, in writing, it's just not the same.
Besides the fact that the expectations, especially those of slashdot's community, are so high you have little chance of being honored with anyone other than "mainstream" media who may have water on the brain, but enough money to throw at people to make them happy, even if slashdot or many fans don't approve.
Ave Molech Setting
Adams was a genius and having someone else pick up where he left off with anything makes no sense. If they are that good - they should be writing their own stuff.
I'll never forget the night I was baby-sitting some neighbor kids. They were in bed and I was watching PBS. A show came on and it was hilarious - that's how I found out about HHG - and once I got the books it was all over - I loved reading everything he wrote, even the unedited bits published after his death.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
You didn't read Discworld, then? Is not that the entire books means to be funny, but have a lot of good laughs, and that in a story interesting enough that have a bit of everything. When i have to classify the secondary genre of those books, i doubt between fantasy, terror, sci-fi, philosophy and others, but the first one is humor definately.
I don't understand what drives people so crazy about the ending of Mostly Harmless. Even Adams said he didn't like the bleak ending. Am I alone in thinking this was the best ending of a book I have ever read?
Sure it's bleak. I don't care. Nearly every other novel I've read that I enjoyed the ending always has seemed abrupt. I get attached to the characters and now the story just 'ends'. Mostly Harmless fixed that. Their dead. The Earth is gone. All of them. There are no 'what now?' questions left. The end of Mostly Harmless had closure - somthing I have failed to find in any story since.
Now comes this crap, off to ruin it.
Well, it's not like 'Mostly Harmless' was very funny either.
If you think Eoin Colfer isn't a comedy writer, then you've clearly never read any of his stuff.
> A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Normally I would agree with you, except Douglas Adams was the guy who introduced me to the pleasure of laughing. After all, he was the guy who figured out humour for the geek.
While I am a huge Artemis Fowl fan, I'm not surprised that Colfer isn't able to pull off the Hitchhiker's universe as well. Adams and Colfer just have a completely different style of writing, and Colfer's does not fit the Hitchhiker's universe.
I realize there is plenty of dry and black humor, in the most British sense of the words, but the triumph, in my opinion, was that he told a compelling story in spite of that, not because of it. Obviously if you found them humorous as well, then that probably lent something to the subjective quality of the novels. But the HHGTTG series had a much wider audience than British comedy does, so clearly it wasn't the humor alone that drove the popularity, and I think that focusing on that alone is missing the appeal of the books. It's missing the forest for the trees, the way George Lucas did with his prequels, assuming that the popularity of the series had something to do with the special effects, when they were really just a footnote in a story and universe (ok, galaxy) that we loved.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I always found humor in literature overrated. A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Humor in literature is in fact vastly underrated because a lot of insecure people have the primitive feeling that if it is fun, then it can only be inferior art. Humorous books aren't wall-to-wall jokes, but often subtle literary works employing a wide array of literary devices to convey the authors intentions. Joseph Heller's "Catch 22", Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Svejk", Franz Kafka's "The Castle", Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are all humorous works of the highest literary grade.
Try a funny book someday, you may like it.
--
Regards
People get all bent out of shape about other authors stepping in and writing works in a dead (or sometimes living) authors 'universe', but I don't understand how the Colfer guy writing a book makes Adams's books any less good than they already were? Nothing this guy can do can hurt Adams's legacy, so just go sit down, and maybe take some valium or prozac or something.
Seriously, if you want more Adams humor, and haven't done so already, go read "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and the sequel "The Long, Dark, Tea-time of the Soul". H2G2 isn't the only great series Adams made.
They are great books, and probably way better than anything in this new book.
Really,
What was left unsaid, unexplored, unpadded, etc. in the original Doug Adams volumes? As a series, they were one book too long as it stood, really.
The creme was in the two BBC radio series, and the material was presented it its most delightful and appealing way in this format.
The books were little more than these programmes, padded with the narrative required to contextualize in written form. It's my belief that they suffered under this treatment. Certainly, they labored the humor - without the excellent timing and auditory cues, which were integral.
So. A good author now contributes a mediocre and unnecessary addition to an entertaining body of work, derived with some encumbrance from a superior and lively original radio play. To reiterate my original question, what had not yet been mined from that vein? What had not yet been wrung and worried from that corpus?
Oh, yes. More publishing revenues.
I think the Python's were quite good at satirizing this sort of thing - and Adams would have a good turn at it, himself: "The Contractual Obligation Beyond the Reasonable End of the Universe", or so.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Funny, geeky, fantasy.
He told me he was a page. "Go on," I said, "You ain't no more than a paragraph!"
Prolific British writer and comedian Adams
Is this the same Douglas Adams we're talking about?
Absolutely. Everyone's crazy except you.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Look, when I was 12 (in 1984), I though the first 2 books were funny. The third wasn't. The fourth was terrible. I didn't bother with the rest.
And you know what? Not even the first 2 books are funny anymore. They haven't held up. At the time of their publication, they were fairly ground-breaking, but that style of humor just hasn't aged well at all (which tends to happen to all kinds of humor). It's juvenile and obvious, really. Nothing wrong with that, but it means the books have a shelf-life, and the HHGTTG books are about 20 years past their expiration date. They are cultural artifacts, not "classics".
Humor in literature is in fact vastly underrated because a lot of insecure people have the primitive feeling that if it is fun, then it can only be inferior art.
Cue the Calvin and Hobbes comic contrasting 'high art' and 'low art':
Calvin: A painting. Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime. "High" art!
Calvin: The comic strip. Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work. "Low" art.
Calvin: A painting of a comic strip panel. Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging. "High" art.
Hobbes: Suppose I draw a cartoon of a painting of a comic strip?
Calvin: Sophomoric, intellectually sterile. "Low" art.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I have never said this before but...Boy I wish I had mod points. (I might have but I don't think so). Calvin and Hobbes is by far one of the most insightful things I have ever read. Yet to most people it is still 'low art' and the same goes for the Guide. It is smart, funny, and so obviously about humanity that if the Vogans showed had little tags that read 'post office' or 'DMV' it would go quickly from funny to sadly real. Anyway, +5 insightful
We are the Borg...
Fuck you, you highbrow fuck.
I never found HHGTTG to be funny, or "humor for the geek." Stanislaw Lem, however...
Also, the new /. appearance is very confusing. Why would you put a separation line *before* the link to the comments?
That's intentional?! I thought it was a layout screwup!
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Maybe not terror, but every single Vimes novel was a classic Noir thriller - often dipping or diving into the realms of pastiche, homage or parody, but a full-bodied detective thriller nonetheless.
Meta will eat itself
Disclaimer, I gfot an A in an English exam on the book of Hitchhikers, the question on the peper was write about someone who finds himself in events over which he has no control, goodbye Huck Finn, hello Arthur Dent
Irony - Stating one's success in an English exam within a sentence containing several spelling errors.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Hmm. I'd say they started that way - Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic were clearly just parodies of "high fantasy" - but the order changed over time. I think he started focussing on Humour after about the 4th book, which contained a healthy dose of misanthropically insightful philosophy (since this is the source of most of his humour.) Eventually he seemed to move on to using humour to tell us things about the world, with fantasy being just a backdrop.
Compare the focus of Colour Of Magic with something like Monstrous Regiment. They're all set in the same world, true, but the latter was primarily about people, society, attitudes, culture-shifts, and held up a big mirror to it all in order to say "look how daft we all are!" It speaks volumes that, as his books became more about satirising people than literary style, they became both funnier and deeper, which goes to show how much he developed as an artist of his medium.
We could go on for hours dissecting Pratchett though, which in itself probably says more about his work than we ever could. The truth is, he is a warmly humanistic, satirical genius whose works will be considered as classic as Mark Twain's in the years to come, and I'm deeply saddened by his onset of Alzheimer's.
Meta will eat itself
To quote the man himself,
"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
Hmm. I'd say they started that way - Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic were clearly just parodies of "high fantasy" - but the order changed over time. I think he started focussing on Humour after about the 4th book, which contained a healthy dose of misanthropically insightful philosophy (since this is the source of most of his humour.) Eventually he seemed to move on to using humour to tell us things about the world, with fantasy being just a backdrop.
It's become less satire of existing fantasy, and more insights about our own world, culture and history, but it's still fantasy. It's just not fantasy about fantasy anymore, it's now fantasy about our own world. The humour was already there in the first books. It's a less sophisticated humour, but it's definitely intentionally funny.
But even later books occasionally satirized fiction rather than reality. Many of the Witches books are about fairy tales, for example. It's just not about Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey and Lovecraft anymore. But most of his modern audience has probably never heard of those names anyway.
I agree he has grown a lot over the years. I still love his earlier books (even his pre-Discworld books like Strata and Dark Side of the Sun), but some of his later books (Thud! and Going Postal are just so amazingly awesome I just can't find words for it.
I consider him the best writer of this day (but I'm sure many will disagree).