The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released...

[spocksbrain]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

A copy of the review I posted on Amazon's page. One star, under the title "Just Plain Terrible":

Let me begin by saying that I suffer from OCD. One of my "things" is that I never stop reading a book mid-way. Even when something is awful, if I start it, I have to finish it. That being said, this book was just so bad that it became the first book I ever stopped reading halfway through.

Even being truly objective and not comparing it to the other books in the series (i.e., taking the author and his writing on their own), it is putrid. The characters are thinly written (in fact changing their basic personalities from what they should be) with no depth, the story is SLOW and not particularly interesting, Colfer's writing style is pretty bad (I guess it's okay for his usual young adult stuff, but he doesn't write well for adults) and the worst feature is that he inserts "guide notes" (they're supposed to be similar to the guide entries from the previous books) every other page or so, breaking up the story constantly with completely irrelevant and non-funny "notes" (which typically take up half a page or more).

It is tempting to pull out a thesaurus so that I can list all of the synonyms for "bad" in reference to this book.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Pretty much I only have three main beefs with this book.

1. Colfer wastes no opportunity to throw in silly sounding words. He can't stand to let an opportunity pass to name-drop some sort of silly sounding planet, person, or swear word. Douglas Adams generally only did it when the plot, or his point, needed it. It was not gratuitous. With Colfer it's very gratuitous and overdone.

2. The guide entries are mostly pointless, and generally suck with the lack of funny.

3. Colfer is trying so hard to BE Douglas Adams, that the difference is jarring. I'd have much preferred a style utterly different from Adams, as long as the characters were the same and the story was clever and funny.

All that said, I still like it more than the last two by Douglas Adams.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

2. The guide entries are mostly pointless, and generally suck with the lack of funny.

Along with the dialogue, this is would be a big problem for me. One of the things I loved about the novels were how the Guide entries more times than not had an important part to play in the overall story. That and they were damn funny.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

I'm hoping that someone can tell me that this book gets better. I'm, oh, about 1/4 of the way through it, and so far, I am not impressed. At all. I haven't laughed even once, and while I've smiled now and then, we are not talking about a laugh riot here. We aren't even talking about a chuckle riot. We aren't talking about a riot of any size, shape or description.

If it's not a riot, what is it? An irate but orderly queue up to the complaints window?

Please God, let him have brought Graham Chapman back with him!

As long as we're dreaming, I hope he brought back John Lennon and George Harrison back, too.

And Phil Hartman. Or is the American Heaven different from the British Heaven?

 

[USS Triumphant]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

1. Colfer wastes no opportunity to throw in silly sounding words. He can't stand to let an opportunity pass to name-drop some sort of silly sounding planet, person, or swear word. Douglas Adams generally only did it when the plot, or his point, needed it. It was not gratuitous. With Colfer it's very gratuitous and overdone.

YES. All of this.

2. The guide entries are mostly pointless, and generally suck with the lack of funny.

I won't criticize The Guide entries quite as much - I found most of them at least a little amusing - when they are "in character" for The Guide. But I will say that Colfer confuses the segments that Douglas wrote that began "The Hitchhiker's Guide says..." with the segments that were simply the narrator, and on a few occasions attributes things that should be the narrator commenting on something to The Guide - which doesn't make any sense when it means that The Guide (which had ALL of Earth listed as "Mostly Harmless") is now commenting on specifics of Arthur Dent or Trillian Astra's lives. A few of the more valid seeming Guide entries comment on Earth matters, too, which still seems a little off.

3. Colfer is trying so hard to BE Douglas Adams, that the difference is jarring. I'd have much preferred a style utterly different from Adams, as long as the characters were the same and the story was clever and funny.

Right. It's a little frustrating because Colfer actually nails impersonating Adams part of the time...and then it isn't long before he flubs it again. It's almost like a repetition of "Here's the author you like, and then here's the author you like....on crack."

All that said, I still like it more than the last two by Douglas Adams.

I'm putting it on par with Mostly Harmless so far (I'm halfway through AAT), but not quite up to par with SLATFATF. I admit, though, that since when I read the Hitchhiker's books originally SLATFATF was already out and thus to me it has never been anything other than part of the original "trilogy", my opinion may be skewed.

 

[Pindar]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

To quote the guide "It's ok but it smells a bit."

The guide entries are weak, overall it's about as good as Mostly Harmless.

Wasn't Mostly Harmless a reworked Dr Who script?

 

[iguana_tonante]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

I tried reading the first Artemis Fowl novel and I got so disgusted with it, that I threw the book across the room.

I don't want to derail the thread, but can I ask you why the strong reaction? I managed to read the Artemis Fowl series some times ago and, while not high literature, I find it quite amusing.

 

[biotech]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Having now finished the book my biggest problem with it is the side-lining of Arthur and Ford for most of the story, they feel like extras in what should be a book about them, not Wowbagger, Random, or some Vogon we've never heard of.

The main characters we love are hardly in it, and the main characters that are in it are acting so out of character, they might as well not be.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

I'm not quite half-way through, but I feel this book is seriously lacking for the non-presense of Marvin. If Colfer can undo the ending of Mostly Harmless, he could've undone the end of SL&TFATF as well.

 

[HappyDayRiot]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Could someone show me how they're all out of character? I'm never going to champion Colfer's handle on them, but I didn't think anything was massively out of place. Arthur is being a dad and suffering the loss of his girlfriend and his planet yet again, which we've not seen before. Ford and Zaphod I thought were pretty consistent with their previous appearances. Trillian... all right she's not perfect in this I didn't much care for her part in the plot. Random we've only got a half a book to go with her prior to this so I don't see what there is to judge her on - she's still a whingy adolescent, except she has the memories of a life of politics now so has delusions of grandeur as well.

Book did need more Arthur and more Ford and fewer Guide notes though. I laughed at enough of those for them not to bother me, although Sideshow Bob does make some good points about those.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

To quote the guide "It's ok but it smells a bit."

The guide entries are weak, overall it's about as good as Mostly Harmless.

Wasn't Mostly Harmless a reworked Dr Who script?

Nope. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" was based on "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen".

 

[JustKate]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Could someone show me how they're all out of character? I'm never going to champion Colfer's handle on them, but I didn't think anything was massively out of place. Arthur is being a dad and suffering the loss of his girlfriend and his planet yet again, which we've not seen before. Ford and Zaphod I thought were pretty consistent with their previous appearances. Trillian... all right she's not perfect in this I didn't much care for her part in the plot. Random we've only got a half a book to go with her prior to this so I don't see what there is to judge her on - she's still a whingy adolescent, except she has the memories of a life of politics now so has delusions of grandeur as well.

Book did need more Arthur and more Ford and fewer Guide notes though. I laughed at enough of those for them not to bother me, although Sideshow Bob does make some good points about those.

Arthur was OK - at least for me. Not perfect but OK.

Trillian I also didn't mind. She never was a well-developed character anyway until Harmless when she was two sort-of developed characters, so what Colfer did with her was fine and fairly consistent with Harmless. Same thing with Random.

The big problems, I think, were Zaphod and Ford, who just...weren't really Zaphodish and Fordlike. Zaphod acted...well, more like Ford that Zaphod, I thought, and Ford had so little ink that I can't say what was wrong with him. He was pretty much a prop rather than a character, and that ain't right.

And the overall problem was that they just didn't talk like themselves - none of them. And the reason is that Colfer didn't - and probably can't, dialogue being one of Adams' strengths - write dialogue the way Adams did. I don't think I expected the narrative parts to read as though Adams had written them, but I did (perhaps unreasonably) expect the characters to sound like the characters I know, and they didn't. And that's a problem that I simply couldn't seem to get past.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Wasn't Mostly Harmless a reworked Dr Who script?

Nope. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" was based on "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen".

And Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was based on the unfinished Doctor Who story "Shada." Oddly, for an incomplete story, "Shada" has shown up in many forms over the years. Although production on it was canceled midway through due to a BBC technicians strike, BBC video did release the stuff that they shot on VHS with Tom Baker narrating the missing bits. One of the scenes they shot for "Shada" was used to incorporate the otherwise reluctant Tom Baker into "The Five Doctors." They also turned it into some sort of web animated audio adventure or something with Paul McGann.

 

[biotech]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Some elements seemed to me like he was basing the characters from the film rather than the books, one headed Zaphod, the descriptions of the vogons, ect.

I read before that he was offered the notes of Douglas Adams, yet rejected them in order to make his own notes.

Seems to me that he really should have taken that offer.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

^^^ It's funny, I read that he did indeed accept the notes. It's amazing the differing stories you get in the news/media/gossip/your brother's neighbor/etc.

 

[HappyDayRiot]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Some elements seemed to me like he was basing the characters from the film rather than the books, one headed Zaphod, the descriptions of the vogons, ect.

I didn't mind the one-headed Zaphod/Left Brain/computer stuff. At least he did have two heads and decided to get rid of one, as opposed to that bullshit head-in-a-neck crap from the film.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Ford had so little ink that I can't say what was wrong with him. He was pretty much a prop rather than a character, and that ain't right.

I've always felt that way about Ford. As soon as Zaphod appeared, Adams didn't know what to do about the character.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

I liked this book...up until it got to the bit with that Hunter guy and the group of humans he managed to save from the Earth (courtesy of his deal with Zaphod). At that point it all came to a grinding halt. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOring.

And what's this with Wowbagger being some sort of suave and debonair type? In the original, I got the impression that he was rather ugly and caustic.

Oh, and Random is a whiny bitch whom I hope gets her ass kicked by the end of the novel (I haven't finished the whole thing yet - I've just got to the part where the ship she bought on Ebay/Ubid arrives at the colony). Although that is probably the point.

Also, what happened to Eddie the Shipboard Computer?

Edit: Finished the book. A lot better ending than the last book did, I'll say that much! And it turns out that Random wasn't so bad after all. Only one nitpick, though: Arthur vanishes from the transport because he is from a Plural Zone and supposedly bad things happen to people from Plural Zones when they travel in hyperspace. But how, then, did he survive the trip to Nano in the first place? Didn't they take hyperspace to get *there*?

Oh, and what does the phrase "The end of one of the middles" mean? Does Eoin Colfer plan to write more HHGTTG novels?

 

[biotech]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

Of course Trillian was from the plural zone too, and spent years travelling the universe as a reporter.

 

[HappyDayRiot]

Re: The long awaited sequel to A Hitchhiker's Guide is being released.

I thought the Plural Zone thing simply made it a bigger risk for inhabitants to travel in hyperspace - it's not inevitable they get plucked across the universe because of it.