Neil Gaiman, �Don�t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker�s Guide to the Galaxy Companion�
Okay, maybe I haven�t finished reading trash, but still...
That�s actually unfair, I was expecting this to be lame — after all, most books involving outsiders talking about comedy have been painfully unfunny, at least in my experience — but this was very nice indeed. Neil Gaiman (yes, the same Neil Gaiman who went on to do the Sandman series) is actually pretty funny in his own right, and can be funny in a Douglas Adams way without ripping off Douglas Adams.
Well, not ripping off much, anyway...
While this says to be a companion for the Hitchhiker Guide, it�s really more of a tag-along of Douglas Adams — it just so happens that most of the work Douglas Adams did revolved around the Hitchhiker�s Guide. Of course, as is the problem with biographies of people who are still alive, things change. So when Gaiman says that there will be no fifth book in the Hitchhiker Trilogy, he is now required to wince whenever he sees a copy of Mostly Harmless in a bookstore.
I love the first three books in the trilogy, and I even like So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, though not on the same level. I couldn�t tell you how many times I�ve read those books (don�t freak out, it�s in the single digits). But the real fun I had in reading this was when they talked about the old Hitchihiker Infocom game.
Did anybody else have this? I didn�t have a computer when it came out, so I convinced my friend (who I don�t think ever read an entire book in his life) to buy it. Infocom games had no pictures, no chicks with guns wearing hot pants, no shotgun toting zombie killers — hell, it didn�t even have sound! All you had were words. Thousands and thousands of words. Then you typed some words and in response, you got more words.
And it was really funny. It makes me wonder if Infocom kept up with the technology, because if I can still get this game I�d buy it in a heartbeat.
Sadly, Douglas Adams died last year, so we�ll never get a sixth book to the increasingly poorly named Hitchhiker trilogy. But I guess that�s not all bad — after all, I have enough books to go through.
