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| By Nathan Chantrell, on October 24th, 2009  As improbable as it seems, seventeen years after Mostly Harmless and eight years after Douglas Adams’ untimely death, a new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book is upon us once again. Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer bravely steps into a rather large pair of shoes to bring us And Another Thing…, the sixth episode of the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s trilogy. I wasn’t sure about this on several levels, Hitchhiker’s has such a loyal following and had been a huge influence on my life from an early age so for someone else to carry it on seemed a bit like sacrilege and just cashing in on its success. I didn’t think anyone could continue in anything like a similar style either. I’d never heard of Eoin Colfer before but he is obviously a well known and liked author (albeit of children’s books) and Douglas Adams’ widow Jane and his daughter had approved of his continuation of the H2G2 legacy so that was something positive to hang onto.
Having just finished it I am pleased to say that it is a much better than I expected, Douglas Adams it is not but Eoin Colfer has managed to take a lot of his style and successfully make it his own without trying to mimic it completely. The original characters seem authentic and there are lots of references for aficionados to pick up on, even if some seem a little crowbarred in at times, and on the whole the story isn’t bad. My biggest criticism would be that the “guide notes” sometimes seemed awkwardly placed, breaking the flow of the story and often weren’t good enough to justify the interruption. It’s not got the depth of irony or humour that the originals had either but Douglas had a unique writing style and, certainly in the early days, was renowned for his way of rewriting and rewriting, reducing what might have originally been enough for a chapter or more down to a few powerful lines of dialogue. So while it might not be as good as Douglas at his best I am pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It can’t be easy trying to write in someone else’s style so all credit to Eoin Colfer for what I think is a worthy addition to the world of The Guide, he’s one froody dude and it was great to have the guys back again. All Hitchhiker’s fans should give it a go. By Nathan Chantrell, on July 10th, 2004 The new radio episodes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I mentioned in November will air on Radio 4 on Tuesday 21 September 2004 at 6.30pm. Previews and more information here. Also, the long awaited DVD release of Series 2 of “Terry Nation’s Survivors” has been given a provisional release date of 4th October. By Nathan Chantrell, on November 6th, 2003 There will be a new Hitch Hiker’s radio series out in 2004 – yes you read right! According to the BBC, the Tertiary Phase of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will be aired on Radio 4 next year. First off is a 6 parter of Life, the Universe and Everything due in spring 2004 followed by an 8 part adaptation of So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless. Hopefully it comes out OK without the oversight of Douglas Adams or Peter Jones as the voice of The Book, they’ve got a lot to live up to. Douglas himself will be playing the part of Agrajag… thanks to some recorded book readings. By Nathan Chantrell, on May 18th, 2002 The Salmon Of Doubt arrived this week. Of course I dived straight to page 199 and into the story itself and IMHO it doesn’t suffer from being unfinished at all, just drives it home what a great loss DNA was. I’ll probably get round to reading the rest of the ‘filler’ stuff this weekend. By Nathan Chantrell, on January 20th, 2002 The BBC are due to release The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy on DVD on the 28th January. It includes a good set of extras listed here. I’ve ordered mine! I can finally retire my ageing ‘taped off the telly in the 80′s’ VHS copy. By Nathan Chantrell, on December 13th, 2001 Wow! An update! It has been a while, so whats been happening since October? Well, I finally upgraded my main machine to a 1.4GHz Athlon with 512Mb DDR RAM so there has been much installation and testing of new software going on. It’s running Redhat 7.1 with an upgraded KDE 2.2.1, KDE really is impressive these days, much more so than Gnome in my opinion and the faster hardware makes such a difference. Also, with the extra power I have now switched to Mozilla as my main browser and have found 0.9.5 and 0.9.6 to be extremely stable. In the past I have mentioned IBM’s Linux watch project, it seems that Citizen have now joined up with them on this and it looks like it is really coming on. I still don’t think we’ll be seeing these in the shops anytime soon though.
Another thing I have mentioned before is the forthcoming Douglas Adams book, well some more info surfaced on this last month. It sounds really interesting and I can’t wait to read it. In November Alexa launched the Way back machine which is an archive of the web from 1996 to present day, not everything is there of course but it kept me entertained for hours reliving some of the pages I used to visit. On a similar note this week Google expanded its Usenet archive to cover the last 20 years and there are some fascinating posts linked to from their timeline. Is this what history will be like in the future? By Nathan Chantrell, on June 10th, 2001 By Nathan Chantrell, on May 12th, 2001 Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy died yesterday at age 49. This is so sad, he was without a doubt, my favourite author, I first heard THHGTG on the radio as a kid and it and the five books in the trilogy have had a huge influence on my life. Only last month I listened to the whole cd set of the radio series and still enjoyed it like the first time. I hope he remembered his towel… By Nathan Chantrell, on March 28th, 2001 There is a transcript of last weeks live chat with douglas adams available. By Nathan Chantrell, on March 21st, 2001 Douglas Adams is doing a live chat tonight at 20:00 GMT on BBC online. | |
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