New 'Hitchhiker's Guide' novel to be published

This is interesting, not quite sure how this will turn out.
Possibly the only good thing that came post-Adams that was Hitch Hiker related was that Books 3-5 were made into the radio series. And damned good at that.

 

Terrible, terrible idea. Cofler doesn't seem to be able to write well. His books are...bad.

 

Benford's Foundation's Fear was a piss-poor take on Asimov's universe.

Bear's Foundation and Chaos and Brin's Foundation's Triumph were better than anything Asimov had done in years.

Of course, better even than these are Allen's Caliban robot novels.

 

Pretty sure Randy was being flippant.

 

Hey!

 

Yes, but will it sell better than the "Freeloader's Companion to the Cosmos"?

And will it earn the publishers more money that the Encyclopedia Galactica?

 

Life is my favourite too and always has been. Mostly Harmless is brilliant as well. So Long is easily the worst, save the chapter about Arthur's life (does he, in short, fuck?)

This new book sounds like an awful idea on every possible level.

 

It sounds like a real bad idea. About the only that it has going for it is that it will hopefully retcon the ending of MH. I liked the rest of the book, but that ending was a big WTF.

 

Sorry. I meant mostly wretched.

 

^^ Ending was WTF, yes. Ending was also fracking cool. That pesky bird.

 

I liked the Caliban series. Also, what little I've read of Tiedemann's series seems okay. Neither is Asimov, but they're nice spinoffs.

But the trilogy by the "Killer B's" was a big failure in my opinion. It's not that they were badly written (that could hardly be the case). They just failed to capture Asimov's dynamic, and they played too fast and loose with the setting. For example, there were no (public) robots in the Foundation Era; calling them TikToks doesn't get around that. And their explanation for the all-Human galaxy was an amazing idea, but totally inappropriate for the Foundation series.

 

The tiktoks are from Fear, though, and the sequels pretty much ignored that, just as they ignored the wormholes.

The best part of that trilogy was the look at how the Empire functioned... I loved the Grey Order.

 

They all kind of blur together for me now. The serial genocide thing is in all of the books, I think. Anyway, I think they just should have gone the Psychohistorical Crisis route and done a pastiche instead of a "re-imagining." Or better yet, not done it at all.

Although I do think there is some merit in the idea of actual sequels-- and there are writers who could do it.

 

If you haven't heard it, track down the radio version of Mostly Harmless (HHGttG: Quandry Phase), which takes the ending and twists it into somethign very different (having earlier managed to find a way to have the second radio series, the TV series and the books all fit into the radio continuity. Sort of.)


It'd be interesting to know if the new book is going to be entirely original, or if it'll use any material left over by Adams. For instance, when he was talking about the possibility of a sixth book in the mid-90s, he said there was material in the second radio series which he hadn't liked at the time, and hence didn't use in the second book, but which he'd now come back to and found he rather liked and wanted to resurrect (presumably, the Lintilla problem, the birds and the Shoe Event Horizon).

 

That pretty much sums up my feelings on this. I think I'll be skipping this one.

 

I liked the new ending for Mostly Harmless. But I hated the way they reconciled the second radio series with Life, The Universe, and Everything, basically by retconning the whole thing into a hallucination. I thought of a much better way they could've done it. All they had to do was alter the beginning of LTU&E a bit, start with Arthur off by himself sulking after the revelations of the second radio series and then have Ford track him down, and then have them get sucked into an eddy in the space-time continuum and end up at the cricket tournament.

 

I always thought of Mostly Harmless, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python, as a "contractual obligation book". His heart sure wasn't in most of it. I tell people not to read it if they haven't, actually.

This actually sounds worse!

 

The Shoe Event Horizon is great.

Anyway, didn't all the events of the second series happen... just in Zaphod's pocket universe?

 

^^According to the radio adaptation of book 3, yes. But that was just a VR simulation, so it doesn't constitute "really happening." I think that retcon does an injustice to the second radio serial, which is a damn sight better than the recent radio adaptations that "decanonized" it, so to speak.

Part of the problem is that the new adaptations were too slavish to the books. Adams himself never hesitated to tell the story differently in different media. The LTU&E adaptation was particularly weak because of its overly literal adherence to the novel, making for a very wordy and narrative-driven serial. It just wasn't written like a radio play.

 

Quintessential Phase, actually.

Tertiary Phase = Life, the Universe, & Everything (My favorite of the books and radio stories.)
Quandry Phase = So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish
Quintessential Phase = Mostly Harmless