Irish author Eoin Colfer, was given permission to pen another book by Douglas Adams' widow, Jane Belson.
"It's like Monty Python meets Mel Brooks - in space," says Colfer, describing Adams's style. "That's what I try to do, though my book is probably more on the Mel Brooks side."
Fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide series - also known as H2G2 - will rejoice that most familiar elements are intact: There are witty Guide entries, the Vogons and their awful poetry, the Infinite Improbability Drive and, of course, Arthur Dent and his companions Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Ambivalence marks my feelings here. On the one hand, it's not written by the man himself and this is tampering. But on the other, Terry Jones novelized Starship Titanic and it was fine. He took DNA's material and made it his own. Colfer may well have produced a nice tribute to DNA and an entertaining read to boot. In the end, I think H2G2 fans will be better off if he didn't try to do a forgery of Adams' style and instead wrote in his own voice but in the same ballpark as DNA.
In other Douglas Adams news, the BBC has been airing Last Chance to See, a TV series based on the book and radio series that DNA did with Mark Carwardine back in 1990. (And a multimedia CD-ROM in the early 90s as well.) It was a look at various animals that were on the verge of extinction.
Here, DNA's friend Stephen Fry gets the nod and joins Carwardine in search of endangered species. Some of them were featured in the original incarnations of LCtS while others are new. It's a six-part series and that final episode airs next week. I've grabbed the first five eps in HD but haven't watched any of them yet. Any readers watched it?
No comments:
Post a Comment