TERRY JONES - "DOUGLAS'S ADAMS STARSHIP TITANIC" (PAN)

 

Around the time when Douglas Adams set to designing "Starship Titanic" (the game) he was also more or less required to write a novel to support it. Because his duties as a designer disabled him from spending time on a book, Terry "Monty Python" Jones was contacted. Jones consented, on condition that he be allowed to write the book in the nude.

Basically, the novel tells a story parallel to the game, a story where the main character isn't you, but a group of earthlings onto whose prospective hotel project the Starship Titanic has seemingly and quite spontaneously crash-landed. It tells their quest to fight Starship Bureaucracy, find the main shaft of Titania's mighty brain, relocate the galaxy's Most Reknowned Genuis Leovinus (stuck on earth), and generally wrap things up in an orderly manner that could be described as a 'happy end'.

The book has occasional flashes of humorous brilliance and is a leisure read for a few evenings, but doesn't go much beyond that. Although Jones is no doubt a very funny man, all through the novel the feeling becrept me that Adams might have done a better job.

Released 1997, ISBN 0-330-35446-9

RK

 

Written September 1998

 

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