And Another Thing… (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Book 6) by Eoin Colfer (MOBI)

Description

And Another Thing … will be the sixth novel in the now improbably named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Eight years after the death of its creator, Douglas Adams, the author’s widow, Jane Belson, has given her approval for the project to be continued by the international number one bestselling children’s writer, Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl novels. Douglas Adams himself once said, ‘I suspect at some point in the future I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book. Five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number.’ Belson said of Eoin Colfer, ‘I love his books and could not think of a better person to transport Arthur, Zaphod and Marvin to pastures new.’ Colfer, a fan of Hitchhiker since his schooldays, said, ‘Being given the chance to write this book is like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice. For years I have been finishing this incredible story in my head and now I have the opportunity to do it in the real world.’ Prepare to be amazed…

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐First things first: I enjoyed this 6th book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy. And, despite it not having literally been written by Douglas Adams, it absolutely has some of his touches to it.And- not but- at the same time, it also feels like more of a tribute to Adams than anything else. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy “And Another Thing…” since I absolutely did. But another writer can more be Douglas Adams than another writer could be Thomas Pynchon.

⭐A couple of preliminary comments before the review proper.First, after resisting any inclination to buy this for 2 to 3 years, I thought maybe I could get the “cheap” edition for my new Kindle Fire. $12.99 for the Kindle edition, $10.40 for the hardcover? What? Why? So I got the hardcover. Maybe they’ll lower the price on the Kindle version when they’ve gotten rid of all the unsold hardcover and paperback copies. Maybe they’ll raise it.Also, I’m assuming that nobody would buy this book unless they were familiar with the earlier Adams books. If I’m wrong, and you don’t want to any spoilers for the earlier books, then don’t read this review. No spoilers here for Colfer’s book, however.”Mostly Harmless” had a total downer of an ending that worked. Earth definitely destroyed, no reason to hope that Arthur, Ford, Trillian, Random, or Tricia would survive. Fenchurch’s fate a loose end which might never be tied up. I took Arthur’s experience on Bartledan earlier in the book to be a hint that maybe this really was the way it ended. So you don’t like it, so what? Personally, I’d thought that the relatively happy ending of the fourth book “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” would have been a better place to stop the series, even though “Mostly Harmless” was a better book on its own merits. It appears that Adams really did intend to continue the story somehow, if he had lived. That was enough to justify seeing how Colfer would wrap things up.Colfer makes a game effort to adopt Adams prose style, which works intermittently. He uses sufficient detail from the earlier books to put this believably in the Hitchhiker’s universe, without being afraid to introduce some ideas and elaborations of his own. He has the courage to give us a story line that works, sort of, on its own terms, without necessarily giving the majority of the fans what they want to see. So A for effort, if nothing else.Unfortunately, the execution is a bit off. The prose often seems forced, and things begin to drag, although this is not a long book. Then there are the characterizations, they all just seem slightly wrong. Zaphod and Ford are little more than caricatures of their earlier selves. Arthur has the ineffectual and socially awkward part down, but is missing the quietly despairing irony and intelligence. Thor? Well, maybe we never knew exactly who he was, but somehow I didn’t think it was this. Is the bit about Wowbagger something that Adams himself might have come up with? Well, you decide.I’m not really sorry I got this; I would have wondered about it if I hadn’t. Who knows, Adams himself might have done something similar, just more entertaining to read. Keep your expectations low, and “And Another Thing” will give you a kind of closure for this story, there’s even an apt statement on this at the beginning of chapter 12. With this 6th book, however, there’s no point in taking things any further. If Colfer comes out with “But Wait, There’s More…”, I’ll skip it.

⭐Douglas Adams was a unique person with a style that so far has not been replicated. Terry Prachett and many others created their own voice (even J.K. Rowling with her magic spells) that has similarities to various aspects of his style, but they are all different. I knew Mr. Adams and used to meet him approximately annually when he visited Seattle where I was fortunate to know some British pub crawler geeks (the geeks were British, not the pubs, some of those were Irish).After reading the reviews I approached this book with caution and low expectations. And I enjoyed it. Mr. Colfer is not a resurrection of Mr. Adams, nor should I rightly expect that. But his version of the breezy dialog, Germanic compounding of the English language, and evolution of unlikely situations worked for me. Yes, the Guide has more references than usual and at one point even becomes oddly animate, the characters stay well within their boundaries established in Book 5, but let’s face it, those are flip sides of the same coin: I sympathize with an author surrounded by peril at every hint of change from canon — you’re damned if you do (e.g., make an animate Guide) and you’re damned if you don’t (e.g., keep the characters pretty much the same.) As such, the author’s ability to continue or resolve the situations in Book 5, or to further develop characters, is limited and those are the most challenged parts of the narrative. Personally I wasn’t a fan of the development of Random or Zaphod or Trillian, but neither did he do great disservice to the characters.Fortunately the large time-space continuum within which the series operates gives Colfer ample room to create new absurd but thoughtful situations “in the style” of Mr. Adams, which I believe he does. Whether it’s the politics and process of hiring a god or the evolution of the role of Vogons in the universe, I found the story worth the read. Of course YMMV.Enjoy.

⭐To be honest I was prejudiced against this book before starting it. I was a first generation devotee of the original in all its 3 formats the radio, tv and books. As the series grew into a 5 part ‘trilogy’ the cracks were already showing. The original radio/tv/2 volumes told a complete story that came to a tidy end with a clear point, it was clever, funny, reflective and refreshing. The subsequent volumes of the series struggled a bit with a coherent story, the fantastical plot twists in multi-dimensional-space-time were often too forced for comfort and some sequences were a bit long and tortuous (the Krikit Wars in particular). But Adams had a personal style of writing, the characters were his and told in his voice retained their humour and reflection, that was enough to make great reading.Over 15 years after the last part of the ‘trilogy’ and a shortly after the death of Adams any new book written ‘from Adams’s notes’ was always going to look suspiciously like something done for financial gain by the publishers rather than for any artistic merit. And so it was. There is nothing terribly wrong with it but nor is there much to like about it either. Zaphod Beeblebrox needs to be written in the Big A’s voice anyone else writing the character, irrespective of their qualities, just isn’t going to feel like the real thing; the same is true of Arthur, Ford and Trillian. There is also the issue of the missing Marvin, come on if you’re going to do swan song you need the full cast.Eoin Colfer was never going to win here, if he had tried to keep to Adams’s style it would have looked fake but imprinting his own dents the characters – a lose, lose situation (unless you are counting the cash). The strength of Adams’s work was always his characters and here they are not the same, Zaphod is smarter, Ford more hedonist, Arthur has become competent (even wise), Marvin is missing and Trillian – actually I wasn’t especially happy with the Trillian character by end of ‘Mostly Harmless’ the only female characters (Trillian and Random) in the series were less than positive images of womanhood (okay the males are hardly great representatives of maleness but they are utterly likeable in way that Trillian wasn’t in the end).If you’re a devotee I guess you ought to read it but set expectations low and you won’t be too disappointed. I did after reading this try Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books and I can see why he was chosen to have a go at this gig, I know I’m a bit old for them but I am enjoying them, a lot more than ‘And Another Thing’ which really ought not to be a thing at all. It is however only a book and can’t do much harm.

⭐After the disappointing fifth Hitchhikers book Mostly Harmless I hoped that this would be some kind of improvement. Sadly however, it wasn’t. Colfer seems to think that in order to write a Hitchhikers book you have to unneccissarily include almost every single character and almost every single reference from all five of Douglas Adams books. The result is nothing more than fan-fiction and I read it right to the end just to get an accurate representation of it although I wished I hadn’t. One-off one-joke characters such as Wowbagger and also the Major Cow (or rather a whole herd of them) get major speaking roles which make them out as the one-dimensional single-use characters Adams knew they were. Wowbagger particularly is given a lead role in the book and Colfer tries to make him into a likeable character but fails and resorts to writing him out before the end of the book by claiming that he has married Trillian and gone on a honeymoon with her. Frequent Hitchhikers guide entries that don’t actually read like Hitchhikers entries but rather unneccessary explanations of something that doesn’t need explaining break up the narrative and make it run as smoothly as a car with a dodgy engine and three wheels missing! Special features at the end of the book also give revelations about Colfer himself. He seems to think that an adult book is a kids book with ‘a lot of fart jokes and a lot of crass humour’ which it isn’t. As for the non-appearance of Marvin he arrogantly tells one person in the special features at the end of the book ‘Marvin is dead, get over it!’ He never questions the fact that Marvin is around 35 times older than the universe itself due to time travel and the characters could have bumped into one of the time travelling versions of the android. All in all it’s a kids book by a kids author that has been badly adapted for adult readers.

⭐Three stars in Amazon means ‘It’s OK’, and I think that does sum up this book.As a massive H2G2 fan, I was dubious about this book coming out – did it really need to be written? I’m not so sure, though it is based on notes and plans made by Douglas Adams (as you will see if you read the Salmon of Doubt – highly recommended incidentally).Eoin Colfer is a very gifted and able writer, but his main area is teen fiction, and unfortunately that shows in this book. There are some clever ideas, but the humour never really gets beyond the adolescent, which is a big let-down for Adams fans. It is this that is the major let-down, rather than the storyline, which holds up reasonably well but drifts into subject areas that as a Hitchhiker’s reader, you’re not totally comfortable with.In short, it’s an OK book, and I suspect most H2G2 fans will purchase to complete the set. Did it need to be written? By Adams, perhaps, but anyone else? No.

⭐Sorry but this just didn’t work for me. About three quarters of the way through I could see a story falling into place but then it just fizzled out. It was a bit like a spin-off from a great sit-com but didn’t work because of the absence of too many key elements: Arthur Dent was barely featured; Ford had lost many of his more “endearing” features; Random was unrecognizeable; no Marvin; no real Fenchurch…I began to think that I must have misunderstood the earlier parts. Just a lack of consistency – or maybe I’m getting too old and just don’t get it.All credit to Eoin Colfer for keeping the whole thing alive but I think Douglas Adams was the only person who could get the balance just right.I was part of the radio audience for the first ever transmission of the first episode and enjoyed every second of all 5 phases. Perhaps my expectations were too high but this didn’t inspire any of the delight I found in phases 1 – 5

⭐Somehow it wasn’t quite up to the standard of the trilogy. Maybe it didn’t have the feeling of originality on each page, or perhaps it was that some of the new character names were almost annoyingly simplistic – more expected in a Harry Potter novel than a Douglas Adams follow up.It follows on from the five-part trilogy and ties in well.Despite my reservations it is an excellent read and I would recommend it.

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