Colfer Asked To Write Sixth HHGTTG Book

clickety6 writes "Eoin Colfer, the Irish author of a number of books (including the popular children's book series 'Artemis Fowl'), has been directly approached by Douglas Adam's widow, Jane Belson, to write a sixth book to continue the (even more) increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy."

No. Finish the Infocom Sequel

I'd rather see the Infocom HHGTTG Sequel completed/released.

Re:No. Finish the Infocom Sequel

I agree. Eoin Colfer should definitely devote his time to programming an Infocom game instead of writing a book.

Re:No. Finish the Infocom Sequel

The question is: are people willing to use their imagination when they are force-fed every feature directX 10 has to offer (shading, tons of light sources, fog, environments, shadows, physics engine, ragdoll physics) at insane resolutions.

While I grew up playing almost every Infocom game out there and I still have the Atari 8-bit versions ready-to-play via emulator, I have yet to find anyone under 30 that thinks it's fun.

For many, text adventure games are akin to a wheel made of stone, great in the day but with vulcanized rubber why would anyone use a stone wheel except in a museum...

On a positive note, there is a counterculture of writers that still use the Z-Engine (Infocom text game engine) to write games based on their original works. So all hope is not lost :)

To date no game was more memorable than Station Fall, when Floyd died, it broke my heart and to this day I feel sad for him and wished there was a way to save him.

Don't panic

The mice will interfere if need be.

Re:Don't panic

The mice are underwriting the next book - they want to know what'll happen, too.

NO NO NO

Enough Douglas Adams milking already, please for the love of - insert deity here - do not destroy the legacy of this great author.

Sorry for the rant, have just watched the movie...

Re:NO NO NO

Are you saying that the movie destroyed his legacy, or that you are more sensitive because the movie glorified his legacy and you don't want that feeling taken away?

Re:NO NO NO

Douglas Adams was one of the bigger obstacles in the way of making a movie, and I don't think it would have ever had his blessing. The script sucks (random rearrangements, insertions of 'new' but irrelevant stuff all over the place, and deletions of essentials elsewhere).

Of course, it made money so who am I to complain, but it left me with a definite unhappy and disappointed feeling.

When hearing the radio play and reading the book you get a definite mental image of the kind of universe that Douglas Adams wanted you to see, and most of the movie contradicts that mental image.

There is a joke about that:

A man walks into a movie theater and sees a donkey standing in the aisle.

He walks up to the row behind the man with the donkey and whispers in the guys ear: "Wow, how amazing, he's really looking at the movie, isn't he?"

Yes, says the guy with the donkey, sure is. But he like the book better...

Re:NO NO NO

random rearrangements, insertions of 'new' but irrelevant stuff all over the place, and deletions of essentials elsewhere

ROFL, while I have my own critiques of the movie, this is probably the *last* reason to dislike the script. If you read the books and listened to the radio plays (or played the Infocom game), you'd know that DNA was quite happy to alter the HHGTTG storyline in order to fit the medium. The fact that the movie diverges from the books should be *expected*, not derided, given DNA's approach to the material.

Re:NO NO NO

Ford should be knowledgeable and a man of the world, not an bumbling idiot, just odd

A man of the world? A man of the galaxy I'd have hoped, or at least the parts where respectable journalists can get respectably drunk on a utterly disrespectful salary.

Re:NO NO NO

Chapter One

Turning from the rain-streaked window, Trillian's teary gaze searched pensively around the room and came to rest on the silver-framed photograph on the mantelpeice. She sighed, her heart heavy with unshed tears. It seemed so long ago - the good times she had shared with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. Could it have been a thousand years? As she remembered one of the good times, a single tear, like a frozen diamond, spilled down her cheek and splashed quietly on the white marble floor. Unable to restrain herself, she collapsed against the floor, hands to her face, and sobbed uncontrollably.

A tiny hand reached up and tugged her sleeve.

"Mommy?"

"Oh Ford Junior!" Trillian sobbed. "You remind me so of your father, and the good times we shared so very long ago.. but they're both dead now, and ypu're all I have left to remember them by."

"That's right, forget about me as usual!." grumbled a familiar voice suddenly.

"Oh Marvin!" she laughed "You know I would never forget about you - after all you're all that I have to remember them Arthur and Ford by. I see you're still your grumpy old self!"

She paused with grief as the full meaning of this hit her, and she shuddered and started to weep again, like a pure white nightingale whose eggs have been stolen and eaten by a fateful cat.

Oh sorry. I see now.. don't ruin the legacy. Gotcha.

Re:NO NO NO

what a waste to do that anonymous :)

Would you have preferred that "ecolfer" post as himself here?

Re:NO NO NO

Enough Douglas Adams milking already, please for the love of -

• insert deity here

- do not destroy the legacy of this great author.

That would be Zarquon - but he's running late

how many books planned in the franchise?

...42, obviously.

Sounds reasonable

Douglas Adams himself mentioned that Mostly Harmless was too dark and wanted the series to finish on a more upbeat note (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mostly_Harmless#Adams_on_Mostly_Harmless ). So it is quite plausible to believe that his widow would want to make her husband's wish true.

Those resposible

Those responsible for this will be Sacked, and probably the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

NO.

A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and for ever, it was now all, finally, over.

Let's just leave it at that, shall we?

No!

I will NOT have my preciousness desecrated by non-canon material! He might introduce story arcs that don't fit with the carefully woven future history Adams so painstakingly built... wait, what was with the sandwiches again?

All the diodes down my left side...

hurt just thinking about it. Humans, I'll never understand them, you don't even need a brain the size of a planet to know this won't work.


I just finished reading the 2003-updated edition of Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [amazon.com] and I have to say that I don't believe anyone can really emulate Adams' particular style of writing. And unless they've found a treasure trove of almost-finished manuscripts (unlikely) the best that we have from Adams' writing before his death is mostly compiled in The Salmon Of Doubt [amazon.com], and there was just the merest inklings of a beginning of a truely Adamsian epic tale in there...


Besides, we all know the only person who could write HHGttG properly is Terry Pratchett, and he is ONLY allowed to write Discworld books until he's unable to write or they cure Alzheimer's Disease. And someone sure as hell had better cure it.

Re:All the diodes down my left side...

I've been reading the Discworld books since "The Light Fantastic" was new. Frankly, (and I know I'm going to generate some real hating from this), I thought Terry Pratchett was more or less imitating Douglas Adams in the first two books, with their more-or-less meandering plots and fairly random happenings (plus lots of excellent writing and humor), but then he got BETTER. Much BETTER. [Don't get me wrong, I love Adams' stuff and my copies of his books are all dog-eared and well-worn... I even used to read them to my kids (they totally love the BBC TV version and the revent movie, but their consensus is that the BBC version is better, which makes me proud), and I play the radio shows on CD when we are in the car.]

Pratchett gets the details the way Adams would... tons of really clever jokes (the guy even puns in Latin for cryin' out loud) and great dialog, the outrageously bizarre creations, the fantastic imagination of it all, but to that he adds incredible characterization and detailed plotting, stopwatch-perfect pacing, and some of the best satire ever written. I can get more of a "feeling" for, more inside the minds of, Commander Vimes or Granny Weatherwax or Tiffany Aching or even the Librarian from one chapter than I can get from Arthur or Trillian or Ford from 5 books. Out of places I've never been, Anhk-Morpork is more real and detailed to me than London, Paris or San Francisco.

And the stories... they are huge, sprawling and often very abstract working on many different levels, while remaining very cohesive, and we never lose the little details that make the Discworld perhaps the "realest" imaginary world ever created, more detailed in many ways than Tolkien, stranger in many ways than Wonderland, and yet it's really just a funhouse mirror that casts an exaggerated, but very, very true reflection of our real world and our complex, wonderful and insane nature as human beings.

Adams universe was just a vehicle for delivering his exceptional writing style and brilliant humor, but it never had a sense of being a "real place". The Discworld is carried by four elephants on the back of the great A'Tuin the star turtle, and yet feel more real than the most hardest of hard science fiction and the most scrupulously detailed of fantasy worlds.

Plus, Nanny Ogg. Anyone who could create Nanny Ogg (or really, discover her and reveal her to the world!) is a hero in my book.

Share and Enjoy!

After taking numerous readings of the tastes of the audience, he will produce a book that is almost, but not-quite entirely unlike HHGTTG.

GO STICK YOUR HEAD IN A PIG.

OK I guess.

I suppose I don't have a problem with this, as long as its crystal clear that this is Colfer's book, set in the HHG universe. If there is any implication whatsoever that this is a new Douglas Adams book, I have a big problem with it.

He's not pinin' for the fjords. He's dead. Let him go.

Re:Nope, sorry

I have a shock for you. It's called the "Second Foundation Trilogy":

After his death, the Asimov estate, at the request of Janet Asimov, approached Gregory Benford, and asked him to write another Foundation story. He agreed, and at that same time suggested that it should form part of a trilogy with Greg Bear and David Brin writing the other two books, which they agreed to do.

Re:Nope, sorry

So in other words, this will be almost but not entirely unlike Douglas Adams' writing?

Re:What?

I don't get the hate for Christopher Tolkien. Without his work, we would have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - nothing else at all. We would know the Elder Days only through the fragments of half-forgotten legend we hear in the Third Age - occasional cryptic references to the Eldar of the West, to Numenor, to Gondolin and the swords they made for the wars with the goblins, to Beren and Lúthien... We'd never have heard the full tales.

Christopher Tolkien isn't producing cheap cash-ins on his father's legacy. He compiled the Silmarillion, then spent decades writing and publishing detailed analyses of the reams of notes and fragmentary manuscripts that lay behind the legends, and finally tidied up the Narn i Hîn Húrin to a publishable form. And I for one am very glad that he did so.