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I've been listening to Douglas Adams read the Hitch-Hiker books in sequence. This involved, of necessity if I was going to do it properly, listening to Mostly Harmless.
I find Mostly Harmless a bad book. Not that it's not well written; of course it is. Not even that it's not funny; again, that practically goes without saying. It is, however, the book you write when you have been writing about the same characters for years, or even decades, and are thoroughly miserable and pissed off with the characters, the publisher, and the idiotic readers who won't let you do anything else. It is a "do not ask me again" book, a book tainted with ill-feeling. As such, well, not to get spoilery, but if you are a Hitch-Hiker's fan who is (a) prone to depression, (b) not in tune with the current of thought that really and incomprehensibly gets off on bleak, black, hopeless downbeat stories in which the bad guys finally and irrevocably win and everyone you love dies (and if you are in tune with it, then the previous four books, and the fourth one especially, will probably seem intolerably saccharine and unrealistic to you), then this book, well-written and funny though it be, is probably not for you.
Thank gods for the BBC and Dirk Maggs, who adapted the last three books for radio and had the good sense to change the ending. I am now working backwards through the radio series, though I'll probably stop at number three.
I feel sure I've either read,or listened to, Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing, which was I think a continuation of the story, but it has completely slipped my memory, which the original author's stuff never does.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention it.
EDIT: in the scripts book, Dirk Maggs pours scorn on the idea that the fifth book was tainted by "a strange sort of authorial spite," but also reveals that Douglas later regretted the abrupt ending to the series and might have done more had he lived. One pays one's money and one takes one's choice. I only know how it made me feel.
I find Mostly Harmless a bad book. Not that it's not well written; of course it is. Not even that it's not funny; again, that practically goes without saying. It is, however, the book you write when you have been writing about the same characters for years, or even decades, and are thoroughly miserable and pissed off with the characters, the publisher, and the idiotic readers who won't let you do anything else. It is a "do not ask me again" book, a book tainted with ill-feeling. As such, well, not to get spoilery, but if you are a Hitch-Hiker's fan who is (a) prone to depression, (b) not in tune with the current of thought that really and incomprehensibly gets off on bleak, black, hopeless downbeat stories in which the bad guys finally and irrevocably win and everyone you love dies (and if you are in tune with it, then the previous four books, and the fourth one especially, will probably seem intolerably saccharine and unrealistic to you), then this book, well-written and funny though it be, is probably not for you.
Thank gods for the BBC and Dirk Maggs, who adapted the last three books for radio and had the good sense to change the ending. I am now working backwards through the radio series, though I'll probably stop at number three.
I feel sure I've either read,or listened to, Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing, which was I think a continuation of the story, but it has completely slipped my memory, which the original author's stuff never does.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention it.
EDIT: in the scripts book, Dirk Maggs pours scorn on the idea that the fifth book was tainted by "a strange sort of authorial spite," but also reveals that Douglas later regretted the abrupt ending to the series and might have done more had he lived. One pays one's money and one takes one's choice. I only know how it made me feel.