Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started life as a BBC radio series 30 years ago, spawning novels, more radio and a spectacularly unsuccessful film and, as they say, achieving cult status.
[Guide Note: “Cult status” describes the commodification of a writer’s characters and ideas, and the practice of “conventions” (q.v) where inadequate obsessives parade around in expensive prosthetic green skins, pointed ears, or in the case of The Guide, dressing gowns and additional heads. Cult status reached its apogee on the resort planet Florttlequist (q.v.), where attendees at a convention celebrating a cannibalistic culture featured on Star Trek all ate one another, the last marketer strangling himself in the entrails of the — still-living — last celebrity chef.]
It was the Adams estate that selected Eoin Colfer — Irish author of the wickedly funny Artemis Fowl children’s fantasy series — to pick up the late writer’s quill and keep the franchise going with And Another Thing (Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Part Six of Three) (Penguin Michael Joseph). He has done a very decent job of it.
The Guide never fitted securely within the science fiction/fantasy genre. It belongs rather in the much older tradition of English absurdism, gently sardonic and quite barking mad, with The Goon Show and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Adams also occasionally wrote scripts for the Flying Circus.
Interplanetary bad-luck magnet Arthur Dent still centres the plot. With a deft pan-dimensional holocaust, Colfer has eliminated the increasingly irritating device of parallel Dents in alternate universes — although impossible reincarnations are one of the series’ recurring plot motors. The silly names and genuinely stylish use of language remain — though Colfer’s meticulous writing is sabotaged by a subeditor wrongly rendering “expatriate” as “ex-patriot” on page 189.
[Guide Note: “Subeditors” are a fugitive group of marginally evolved Vogons (q.v.) who conceal their presence on other planets, notably Earth (q.v.), by hiding in publishing houses, a context where their race’s lack of any feeling for words, coupled with pedantic arrogance, finds ready employment. The motto of this subgroup translates as: “If it ain’t broke, we will fix it.”]
But Colfer’s satire is often far more rooted than Adams’s in its — our — time and place, as in his vicious deconstruction of the fake-Irish magnate Hillman Hunter: just select the relevant press baron or airline boss.
Yet how many readers below 40 would even grasp that pun? The brand’s central trope, like the venerable family saloon, feels dated. The first Guide prefigured Wikipedia; now that even the least geeky grasp the layered nature of online information, the Guide Notes feel laboured — not helped, in this edition, by pedestrian layout and typography.
Equally dated is the book’s gender perspective. Dent was a certain kind of Englishman: totally inept around women. So the remarkably few female characters to emerge from several universes were either cardboard caricatures — Trillion, Random, Fenchurch — or red-faced schoolboy jokes — Eccentrica Galumbits. It’s disappointing that the creator of the feisty Holly Short hasn’t at least done something about that.