Terry Jones, "Douglas Adams�s Starship Titanic"
This is why computers are evil. See, I got this book sometime in the year 2000, priced for $7.50 before my employee discount, for a hardback first edition. Of course the first edition didn�t matter to me, and neither did the hardback. But now we have another first edition of the same book, selling for $19.99, because we realized how much other stores were charging for the same book. As it stands, our copy is cheaper than most others.
Yes, I realize that without computers and the Internet, I wouldn�t have found every issue of Daredevil for as cheap as I did (I certainly never expected that I would ever possess a copy of the first issue, which I now have). And yes, without the MST3K website I wouldn�t have built up my collection like I have, missing only around 35 episodes from its ten-year run. But the Internet can drive prices up in a lot of cases, this being one of them.
Okay, enough about that. Terry Jones is probably my least favorite member of Monty Python, although my least favorite, it still means I really like him. There are no memorable skits from the show that featured him that stick in my mind. (No wait — he was the annoying rat faced git.) His movies that he directed since Python have pretty much uniformly sucked. From what I read in other Python biographies, he seemed to be the hardest to get along with.
When I was in England I saw a documentary with him as the host and it looks like he�s been doing nothing but eat for the past 20 years. And so it is with this knowledge that I didn�t hold much hope for this book. But actually, being as this is the third novel I�ve read by former Python members (the others being by Eric Idle and Michael Palin), this has got to be the best of the lot, hands down.
Apparently, the idea was taken from a video game that Douglas Adams was working on which Jones supplied the voice for, so there�s a lot of Adams�s influence here. But really, can being influenced by Douglas Adams ever be a bad thing? Didn�t think so.
There are a lot of similarities between characters in this book and the Hitchhiker trilogy that spanned five books, most obviously being the robots that are equipped with human personalities, but I didn�t mind and I laughed out loud several times while reading this. I�m actually considering going out and buying the game even though I bought a game last week and I only played it once because of all the reading I�m trying to finish.
But in the meantime, anybody want to start the bidding on a first edition hardback book that�s in great condition? First bid starts at 20 dollars.
