New Hitchhiker's Guide Book "Not Very Funny" 410
daria42 writes "An early review of part of the Eoin Colfer-penned sequel to Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series has panned the book as not being very funny. If you read Hitchhiker to have a good laugh, maybe you're going to be disappointed," wrote Nicolas Botti, on his Douglas Adams fan site earlier this month."
Oh, come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
They said the same thing about the Hollywood movie, and look how that turned...
Oh, CRAP!
Surprise? (Score:1, Insightful)
it doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter what author at any level of talent that had picked up the books and decided to continue them would be met with heresy or at very least a review of "not as good as the original".
As a writer I know how to mimic the words of others, but it doesn't mean that a person with a significant and highly educated fan base wouldn't pick up on the subtle differences, because no matter how good someone try's to imitate another person, in writing, it's just not the same.
Besides the fact that the expectations, especially those of slashdot's community, are so high you have little chance of being honored with anyone other than "mainstream" media who may have water on the brain, but enough money to throw at people to make them happy, even if slashdot or many fans don't approve.
stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Adams was a genius and having someone else pick up where he left off with anything makes no sense. If they are that good - they should be writing their own stuff.
I'll never forget the night I was baby-sitting some neighbor kids. They were in bed and I was watching PBS. A show came on and it was hilarious - that's how I found out about HHG - and once I got the books it was all over - I loved reading everything he wrote, even the unedited bits published after his death.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
The ending? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand what drives people so crazy about the ending of Mostly Harmless. Even Adams said he didn't like the bleak ending. Am I alone in thinking this was the best ending of a book I have ever read?
Sure it's bleak. I don't care. Nearly every other novel I've read that I enjoyed the ending always has seemed abrupt. I get attached to the characters and now the story just 'ends'. Mostly Harmless fixed that. Their dead. The Earth is gone. All of them. There are no 'what now?' questions left. The end of Mostly Harmless had closure - somthing I have failed to find in any story since.
Now comes this crap, off to ruin it.
Continuing the trend (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, it's not like 'Mostly Harmless' was very funny either.
Re:stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. I'm going to record the next Jimi Hendrix album AND paint the next Picasso.
The reason these guys are so successful is that their views of the world are so skewed from everyone else's and we love them for it.
Re:Bad choice really. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you think Eoin Colfer isn't a comedy writer, then you've clearly never read any of his stuff.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
> A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Normally I would agree with you, except Douglas Adams was the guy who introduced me to the pleasure of laughing. After all, he was the guy who figured out humour for the geek.
Not Surprised (Score:3, Insightful)
The originals were funny? (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize there is plenty of dry and black humor, in the most British sense of the words, but the triumph, in my opinion, was that he told a compelling story in spite of that, not because of it. Obviously if you found them humorous as well, then that probably lent something to the subjective quality of the novels. But the HHGTTG series had a much wider audience than British comedy does, so clearly it wasn't the humor alone that drove the popularity, and I think that focusing on that alone is missing the appeal of the books. It's missing the forest for the trees, the way George Lucas did with his prequels, assuming that the popularity of the series had something to do with the special effects, when they were really just a footnote in a story and universe (ok, galaxy) that we loved.
Re:stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it would have been for the best had we not had the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
I always found humor in literature overrated. A few funny bits in any book is fine, but to read an entire book that was suppose to be funny. I dunno I can't see myself enjoying it that much. Even if the jokes were intelligent and witty.
Humor in literature is in fact vastly underrated because a lot of insecure people have the primitive feeling that if it is fun, then it can only be inferior art. Humorous books aren't wall-to-wall jokes, but often subtle literary works employing a wide array of literary devices to convey the authors intentions. Joseph Heller's "Catch 22", Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Svejk", Franz Kafka's "The Castle", Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are all humorous works of the highest literary grade.
Try a funny book someday, you may like it.
--
Regards
Re:Oh, come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's more pertinent to point out that one person has said that he didn't find it funny. Now, call me old-fashioned, but since when did it warrant an entire Slashdot story based on one person's opinion of a book that hasn't even been released yet? Maybe I'm not with the times.
So, in a bit of an experiment, I did try and tell the BBC that I watched a pre-release version of 'Avatar' and I thought it was average, but oddly enough they didn't want to screen my interview...
Doesn't hurt Adams' (Score:3, Insightful)
People get all bent out of shape about other authors stepping in and writing works in a dead (or sometimes living) authors 'universe', but I don't understand how the Colfer guy writing a book makes Adams's books any less good than they already were? Nothing this guy can do can hurt Adams's legacy, so just go sit down, and maybe take some valium or prozac or something.
Re:Oh, come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
Read Dirk Gently if you want more Adam (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, if you want more Adams humor, and haven't done so already, go read "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and the sequel "The Long, Dark, Tea-time of the Soul". H2G2 isn't the only great series Adams made.
They are great books, and probably way better than anything in this new book.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Really,
What was left unsaid, unexplored, unpadded, etc. in the original Doug Adams volumes? As a series, they were one book too long as it stood, really.
The creme was in the two BBC radio series, and the material was presented it its most delightful and appealing way in this format.
The books were little more than these programmes, padded with the narrative required to contextualize in written form. It's my belief that they suffered under this treatment. Certainly, they labored the humor - without the excellent timing and auditory cues, which were integral.
So. A good author now contributes a mediocre and unnecessary addition to an entertaining body of work, derived with some encumbrance from a superior and lively original radio play. To reiterate my original question, what had not yet been mined from that vein? What had not yet been wrung and worried from that corpus?
Oh, yes. More publishing revenues.
I think the Python's were quite good at satirizing this sort of thing - and Adams would have a good turn at it, himself: "The Contractual Obligation Beyond the Reasonable End of the Universe", or so.
Mark Twain (Score:5, Insightful)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Funny, geeky, fantasy.
He told me he was a page. "Go on," I said, "You ain't no more than a paragraph!"
Re:Surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
I only found the first two books funny. The rest... not so much.
Third was pretty good. Not as good as the first two, but pretty good (in my opinion).
The fourth was OK. Definitely a "OK, here's your damn book, get off my back." The best parts seemed self-referential - the supposedly final book is "so long, and thanks for all the fish?" Cute move.
The fifth was hilarious in a way because it seemed to be a genial "fuck you" to forces that insisted on a new book. He closed the book in a very clever way that resulted in the main character being killed off.
Then of course he died himself, which if he could have written it would have been hilarious. I mean no disrespect, but I think he'd have appreciated the symmetry.
Re:stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
I hear there are some pretty good Star Wars books that weren't written by George Lucas. I also hear there are some good Star Trek books which weren't written by Gene Roddenberry. Go to any bookstore, and you will find a whole shelf full of Forgotten Realms books, by a cadre of different authors, and they seems to be, for the most part, well received by fans of Forgotten Realms.
There weren't any good Star Wars books written by George Lucas, nor Star Trek books by Gene Roddenberry. As for Forgotten Realms, as novels they were conceived as a sort of shared world. I'm not a Douglas Adams fan, but none of the Star Wars, Star Trek or Forgotten Realms books are in the same class as The Hitchhikers' Guide series.
Prolific? (Score:4, Insightful)
Prolific British writer and comedian Adams
Is this the same Douglas Adams we're talking about?
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely. Everyone's crazy except you.
Series was NEVER that funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, when I was 12 (in 1984), I though the first 2 books were funny. The third wasn't. The fourth was terrible. I didn't bother with the rest.
And you know what? Not even the first 2 books are funny anymore. They haven't held up. At the time of their publication, they were fairly ground-breaking, but that style of humor just hasn't aged well at all (which tends to happen to all kinds of humor). It's juvenile and obvious, really. Nothing wrong with that, but it means the books have a shelf-life, and the HHGTTG books are about 20 years past their expiration date. They are cultural artifacts, not "classics".
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Humor in literature is in fact vastly underrated because a lot of insecure people have the primitive feeling that if it is fun, then it can only be inferior art.
Cue the Calvin and Hobbes comic contrasting 'high art' and 'low art':
Calvin: A painting. Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime. "High" art!
Calvin: The comic strip. Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work. "Low" art.
Calvin: A painting of a comic strip panel. Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging. "High" art.
Hobbes: Suppose I draw a cartoon of a painting of a comic strip?
Calvin: Sophomoric, intellectually sterile. "Low" art.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:meh (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:meh (Score:2, Insightful)
I never found HHGTTG to be funny, or "humor for the geek." Stanislaw Lem, however...
Re:Oh, come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
I liked the movie actually.
It wasn't really the guide, though what the guide is is a little bit fluid, there's the tv mini series, the two different radio series, the books in print, the books on tape read by Adam's himself, as well as the movie. They're all very different, and all funny in their own way. A bit like Monty Python in a sense, the best sketches were done so many times and always involved at least some improvisation so those lines embedded in your brain may not actually be in the version you read/watch.
It was however, at least I thought, in the spirit of the guide. It's a little less bitter and twisted than the originals were, but if Douglas Adams himself was a lot less cynical and bitter towards the end so that's not really all that surprising. My understanding is that the whole thing started because Douglas Adams used to make a tv show where the world exploded at the end of every episode and he wondered what it would be like to start a story with the world exploding instead. The Douglas Adams of later years was not that same person.
The biggest problem with the movie was that most people seem to only believe that one of the many formats is the true guide. Some people don't even know there was a radio drama, or a tv mini series, and they don't realize that the universe was different every single time, and so they expect the movie to be the books, but on film, which it wasn't and wasn't supposed to be. The fact that Douglas Adams died before the movie was released, just adds to things because those same people can blame Hollywood for ruining the story, when the reality is that Douglas Adams was heavily involved with the process and the result would likely have been very similar had he survived.
Re:meh (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, the new /. appearance is very confusing. Why would you put a separation line *before* the link to the comments?
That's intentional?! I thought it was a layout screwup!
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Irony (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer, I gfot an A in an English exam on the book of Hitchhikers, the question on the peper was write about someone who finds himself in events over which he has no control, goodbye Huck Finn, hello Arthur Dent
Irony - Stating one's success in an English exam within a sentence containing several spelling errors.
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm. I'd say they started that way - Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic were clearly just parodies of "high fantasy" - but the order changed over time. I think he started focussing on Humour after about the 4th book, which contained a healthy dose of misanthropically insightful philosophy (since this is the source of most of his humour.) Eventually he seemed to move on to using humour to tell us things about the world, with fantasy being just a backdrop.
Compare the focus of Colour Of Magic with something like Monstrous Regiment. They're all set in the same world, true, but the latter was primarily about people, society, attitudes, culture-shifts, and held up a big mirror to it all in order to say "look how daft we all are!" It speaks volumes that, as his books became more about satirising people than literary style, they became both funnier and deeper, which goes to show how much he developed as an artist of his medium.
We could go on for hours dissecting Pratchett though, which in itself probably says more about his work than we ever could. The truth is, he is a warmly humanistic, satirical genius whose works will be considered as classic as Mark Twain's in the years to come, and I'm deeply saddened by his onset of Alzheimer's.
The man himself said it best (Score:3, Insightful)
To quote the man himself,
"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm. I'd say they started that way - Colour Of Magic and Light Fantastic were clearly just parodies of "high fantasy" - but the order changed over time. I think he started focussing on Humour after about the 4th book, which contained a healthy dose of misanthropically insightful philosophy (since this is the source of most of his humour.) Eventually he seemed to move on to using humour to tell us things about the world, with fantasy being just a backdrop.
It's become less satire of existing fantasy, and more insights about our own world, culture and history, but it's still fantasy. It's just not fantasy about fantasy anymore, it's now fantasy about our own world. The humour was already there in the first books. It's a less sophisticated humour, but it's definitely intentionally funny.
But even later books occasionally satirized fiction rather than reality. Many of the Witches books are about fairy tales, for example. It's just not about Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey and Lovecraft anymore. But most of his modern audience has probably never heard of those names anyway.
I agree he has grown a lot over the years. I still love his earlier books (even his pre-Discworld books like Strata and Dark Side of the Sun), but some of his later books (Thud! and Going Postal are just so amazingly awesome I just can't find words for it.
I consider him the best writer of this day (but I'm sure many will disagree).