Damn-Dutch

Not too long ago the following book hit my doorstep… And Another Thing, the “sixth book” in the Hitchhiker’s “trilogy” by Eoin Colfer.

Read it, though not as quickly as I would have liked and well. The only impression it left with me is “this is a radio script”. Now in HHG terms that is not necessarily a bad thing as any HHG fan might know, this is how it started after all. But for a novel, it’s diet-HHG at best. The basic story is pretty entertaining, I’m a fan of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged so that was a decent enough choice. It was also stitched onto the story as it ended in Mostly Harmless. Zaphod has two heads, sort of, as opposed to that horrible pop-up head thing being used in the movie (yeah I know, DNA’s idea. Doesn’t make it a good idea). So all in all, yeah, it’s HHG.

So why do I consider it HHG light rather than fullblown HHG. Why did I call it a radio script rather than a novel? Well. It lacks details. I wasn’t hearing the surroundings in my head. Less descriptions of the look and feel of the tech I suppose. And more importantly it lacks endless diversions and sidetracking into the infinite depths of some random culture on a random planetoid in a random nebula of a random galaxy with a very random history indeed. In short it lacks striking guide narrative. It is there, but they’re pretty short injections of tiny factoids rather than side-stories in a nutshell. Oh and there isn’t a single “dingo’s kidneys” in there. In stead we get “buffa biscuit” which just plain reminded me too much of the Star Wars “Bantha poodoo” remark (at the very least present in SWKOTOR1).

All in all not a bad read though. It’ll make a more entertaining radio play should it ever be produced than it does a novel though, if you’ve read DNA’s books religiously.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 00:22 and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.