I am about to commit what many people would see as blasphemy...

I liked this installment of Hitchhiker's better than the last two Adam's wrote. I think Colfer did a fantastic job (with one or two exceptions, things that seemed a little out of place, like the Cthulu thing, for example).

I hope he writes more. I missed the world of Hitchhikers and I think Adams would be pleased with what Colfer has done. Color me impressed. ( )

http://endami.blogspot.com/2009/12/an... ( )

A fun read, if a bit heavy-handed on the similes. Mostly harmless.

I have to admit before starting here that I went into this book without high hopes. I have no previous reading experience with Eoin Colfer, being that this is his first adult novel and I was really too old for the Artemis Fowl books when they came out. Further, while the ending to Mostly Harmless was depressing, it was still a pretty solid ending, and I couldn't really see a way to either (1) get around it or (2) plot a story away from it.

To Colfer's credit, he does manage the first reasonably well; my suspension of disbelief was not overly taxed by the way he got around having almost all the main characters die in the previous book (uh, spoiler alert, I guess); at least, it was not that unbelievable in the context of the series.

However, this does not stop the book from being terrible, or at least terribly mediocre. To start with, Colfer fills the book with a ridiculous and ridiculously annoying number of references to the previous books, as if to say, "Hey guys! I read the other books! And you can tell I did because I know what a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is and what type of gases the Blagulon Kappans breathe!" In fact, it reminds me of nothing so much as the fourth season of Family Guy. For the uninitiated: Family Guy ran for three seasons before being canceled by Fox. However, it sold so well on DVD that, several years later, it was brought back, albeit with mostly different writers. This fourth season, especially the first episode of it, was notorious for bringing back one-time joke characters (like the Greased-Up Deaf Guy) for no good reason except to say to the audience, "See? We watched the other episodes!"

I think the worst case of this in AAT is when a being shows Ford and Friends a countdown on a digital readout. Ford murmurs, "Humans think digital watches are neat." Besides not being funny, this makes no sense since the person showing them the readout is not human and it's not in any way relevant -- except as a way of saying, "Look! I read the books!"

In fairness, this sort of thing does settle down after the first fifty or so pages, though it never entirely goes away.

The "Guide Notes" are also rather irritating. These are bits that are supposed to be from the Guide which literally take you out of the narrative -- they even have line breaks before and after them to indicate that they're not part of the story. Often they don't even make sense as Guide entries and are really just narrator asides. Worse, they occur all the time -- there are actually sections where you'll have two or three "Guide Notes" in the space of a page or two. It is really hard to care about the novel's plot when the book itself cares so little about it.

Furthermore, none of the characters really sound like themselves -- with the exception of Random, I suppose, who is even more of a brat than in Mostly Harmless. (You'd think a hundred years of simulated reality would've calmed her down some, but no.) Ford and Zaphod seem more or less the same, but somehow more detached, like they're both stoned off their asses the whole time and couldn't really give a damn about what happens. (This is literally true of Ford for one chapter of the book.) Trillian seems to have shed her earlier personality of a warm, highly-intelligent woman for shrill mother and man-chaser (who winds up marrying possibly the most unlikely person in the universe).

The character who really gets derailed, though, is Arthur. It's not just that he becomes, like Ford and Zaphod, a lot more detached from reality; it's also little things in the way he talks. For instance, how many times do you recall Arthur calling someone "mate" in the previous books? I'm rather sure the number is zero, but that doesn't stop him from doing it all the zarking time in this book. And for that matter, who does this quote sound like?:

"Ah, the infinite multitudinous possibilities of my home planet. The things I might have seen on another Earth, just down the probability axis. I might have made myself a nice cup of tea."

Does that sound like Arthur to you? I think if the Arthur from the first book heard someone say that, he would just goggle at him like he were speaking Mongolian.

(Incidentally, another extremely minor thing that probably annoyed me more than it should have: The number of times "frood" and related words are used. It's dropped more times in this book than in the entire rest of the series put together.)

Credit where it's due, though: Once I made it through the first fifty pages, the book progressed from bad to merely mediocre, and though I cringed through some parts, there were even a few good moments that made me laugh out loud.

That said, I'm not even really sure who this book was written for. I can't imagine HGTG fans enjoying it, with the annoying references-for-the-sake-of-references I mentioned and the total recharacterization of Arthur and, to a lesser extent, Ford, Trillian and Zaphod; and I can't imagine new readers enjoying it because half the time they wouldn't know what the fuck was going on, and the in-jokes would be completely lost on them.

In the end, Colfer gets an A for effort here, but a solid D on execution. It just reads too much like the sort of thing you'd see on fanfiction.net. ( )

The humour is there, and is very good. However, it seems to be less "social commentary" at the same time. More simple silliness. ( )

A fine enough attempt to pair a new writer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. The writing style by Eoin Colfer is similar but not exactly like Adams, which is both good and bad. It's not like Adams was perfection for every word (especially in Hitchhiker's novels, the Detective Gentley novels were a little more polished), but not everyone can pull it off. I found myself scanning a lot to get through awkward and/or boring scenes.

I think my biggest problem were the characterizations. Something felt very different or even wrong with both Trillian and Arthur. Maybe they were lost in the teeming amount of new and returning characters, or maybe I am influenced by the rather enjoyable film from 2005. Other issues: not enough time on Heart of Gold, a little too much detail on the Vogons, and while it was nice to have Thor pop over from Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, he was a completely different guy (god?). Zaphod's Left Brain thing was just weird. I did like the fleshing out of Wowbagger quite a lot, but points must be lost as (another reviewer pointed out) no Marvin!

I also really began to dislike the "Guide Notes" which were not as random or fun as Adams' asides. For one thing, why would the Guide be commenting on the actual people in the present story? And just too many of them. ( )

Quite obviously, Colfer has taken Adams' penchant for throwing everything into the mix to see what sticks to heart. The pages of And Another Thing... are teeming with the absurd asides that were the hallmark of HG2G's style. Admittedly, such tangents can get tiresome, and Colfer arguably uses a few too many funny words and silly noises, but Adams was hardly above a bad pun or two himself.

Not a lot of Colfer's plot makes any sort of linear sense, but the series has always had a great deal of fun playing with notions of time and space anyway. And it's rather wonderful to be with old friends again, especially the terminally unlucky Arthur, pining for his lost love Fenchurch; as Random succinctly puts it, "I'm sure you'll bring doom down on us all presently. It's your destiny to be a cosmic Jonah." I also enjoyed Colfer's attempts to better humanize Trillian, a character Adams never fully explored and who came across initially as flighty and later as just plain unlikeable. If there's a real fault with Colfer's attempt, it's in his trying to cram too much in; there's too many nods to past novels, too many inside references, too many bloody characters doing too much at once.

Read the rest of the review here. ( )

Better than I expected. A pleasent enough romp and very nice to see the old characters return. But does come across more as a bit of fan fiction than anything else. DNA may have wanted to write another one, but I doubt it would have been this, fun though it is.
Won't put me off reading other Eoin Colfer though. ( )

Summary: By the end of Mostly Harmless, Arthur Dent had finally made it back to Earth - well, an Earth, if not exactly his Earth. However, his being back on Earth made it that much easier for the Vogons to complete their mission of destroying the Earth and all of its inhabitants, in the name of a hyperspace bypass and bureaucratic completeness. Arthur, Trillian, their daughter Random, and Ford Prefect are saved once again, and set out on yet another journey across time and space, meeting up with some old friends (Zaphod), enemies (Vogon Captain Prostetnic Jeltz), gods (Thor, along with the rest of the Norse pantheon), kneebiting jerks (Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged), and tackling new challenges, like overzealous real-estate-developers-slash-cult leaders, the terrors of dark-matter enhanced love, and a giant wheel of cheese (Gouda... or maybe cheddar.)

Review: When presented with And Another Thing..., the obvious first question is "Can you really have a Hitchhiker's book without Douglas Adams?" And the answer, I'm happy to report, is "on the 'mostly' end of 'sort of'."

That waffly statement is a result of the patchy nature of the book. There were individual scenes that are funny enough to compete with Adams at his best, and then there were bits that just didn't work for me at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the parts that worked best were the parts where Colfer took Adams's characters and ran with them in his own direction, and the parts that felt the most labored were the parts where Colfer was trying to match his humor exactly to Adams's style, and to cram in as much continuity as possible. For example, in the asides (here set off as "Guide Notes" and in different font), Colfer seemed determined to bring back every random (not Random) alien species Adams ever mentioned, without realizing that the reason those bits were so funny was because they were thoroughly unexpected and unconnected one-offs.

On the other hand, I absolutely laughed out loud more than once, was giggling constantly, and at one point in the middle I caught myself thinking "Man, I like Adams's books so much better when they involve the Norse Gods."... before it dawned on me that And Another Thing... was not actually written by the same man who wrote The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. That's pretty high praise. Colfer undeniably had some huge shoes to fill, and while they don't quite fit him perfectly (...yet; he did seem to get more comfortable inhabiting Adams's universe as the book went on), neither did he trip over them and fall down the stairs. Besides, any book that starts with quotes from Douglas Adams and Tenacious D, and uses the word "sarcastigating" in a sentence gets a thumbs up from me.

But, sadly: No Marvin. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: If you go into this book expecting a Douglas Adams book, you're probably going to be disappointed. But if you go in expecting an Eoin Colfer book written in the Hitchhiker's universe, then it's a fun, enjoyable, and mostly harmless read. (Heh.) ( )

After overcoming a slow start, the author of Artemis Fowl turns this into a pretty interesting story. It's not as funny as H2G2 volumes 1-4, but it has its moments. ( )

It is always hard to fill someone elses shoes. In the case of Douglas Adams I guess we can safely assume that it is almost an impossibility. Yet, Adams’ wife gave permission to Eoin Colfer to write the sixth book in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy. The book was published in early October 2010 and it is… Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Firstly I have to say that I have not read any other of Colfer’s books, though I have been told that the Artemis Fowl books are actually quite good and sell well, I guess this was why he was given permission to write the sixth book.

On second thought though, high book sales numbers do not necessarily equate with a talent in writing, I am looking at you Dan Brown.

“And another thing…” picks up more or less where the last book left off and tries to bring the story to an end. I am saying here tries because the end is still somewhat open and it would be conceivable that someone else could be tasked with a third trilogy… But let’s hope not.

The problem with Colfer’s book is not so much his writing. He is a fine wordsmith in his own right, but he cannot escape the comparison to Adams’ writing wit and his unique style. This is exactly where Colfer’s book falls short. The way Adams saw and the way he described it was unique to him and Colfer’s attempts at copying them are, to me, cringe inducing.

This isn’t necessarily Colfer’s fault. As I said, he can write well and if this wouldn’t be the sixth book in a series that was established by a different writer over the course of almost 30 years it would come off as a rather decent, at times even funny book.

The problem though is that the book is based on a series of five books that has been around for close to 30 years and that people are very well acquainted with it. It is hard to conceive anybody would start the series by reading “And another thing…” first.

The book reads and feels more like a homage to Adams and “The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” than a continuation. It is a bit like the new Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams, the movie did not bring anything new to the Start Trek franchise, instead it rehashed the tired and old story elements, put some new shine on it and added some explosions for excitement. It was for all intents and purposes a fan movie with a mega budget.

“And another thing…” is the book version of this fan movie approach, but it lacks the shiny images and the explosions. Instead it is just a somewhat half-hearted retelling of former elements of the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy and, unfortunately later on of the Dirk Gently, but it never really reaches the level of either of them.

I know this is unfair towards Eoin Colfer, but the book is really one that should not have been written. it is not funny if you know the previous books and there isn’t enough of a “Oh, I remember that” moments in the book that would make it amusing for the fans of the series. All it did for me was asking myself “Why?” and feeling the urge to go back and re-reading the original books (which I briefly did after I was done reading and I had more laughs in the first two chapters than I did in pretty much all of Colfer’s book).

If you like Adams work I suggest that you re-read him and avoid this last (latest?) book in the trilogy, the book should have never been written, much less been published. ( )

Colfer does a good job of recreating the feel of Adam's original characters and humor, and there is an interview with Cthulu that made me chuckle. But overall I was dissapointed with this follow-up to the Hitchhikers Guide series. The story didn't really go anywhere, and seemed to be just a back drop for the characters to spout humorous one-liners. That said, Colfer didn't do any worse than Adams did towards the end of his own writing. ( )

It has to be said that I approached this with some trepidation. Was it really possible for another author to capture the world of Arthur, Ford and the Babel fish? I need not have feared. Eoin Colfer has triumphed in capturing the language style, the heart of the characters and the sheer implausibility of plotting pioneered by Douglas Adams. There is a nice balance of continuity with the previous books in the series with innovation and exploration of the multiverse.

In the background of this review is the fact that I thought that the fifth book in the series was one too far. I loved "So long and thanks for all the fish" and felt satisfied at the resolutions found there. Fenchurch and Arthur warmed my heart, Marvin's eventual release, and God's final message to creation seemed to provide a consistent and satisfying conclusion to the Guide. Resurrection for "mostly harmless" seemed cruel and unnecessary. Colfer has redeemed some of this for me, though, all things considered, I wish that the series stopped at IV, but given that it didn't, I'm glad that VI was written. ( )

With a full cast of tea drinkers, gods, uncouth immortals, small furry creatures and even the odd dragon or two there’s plenty of entertainment in this welcome return of the Guide. Many things are familiar: the Earth gets blown up, Arthur almost snogs Trillian but she flies off with a better looking alien anyway and the Vogons still have all the social skills of a dog-fouled paving slab. Just for a change, Ford Prefect is mostly inebriated and Zaphod is in two minds about everything but not necessarily co-located with them both. Worshippers of cheese will feel briefly vindicated, and ... what do you want, the whole plot? Just read it. You know you want to. ( )