Arthur, Random, Trillian, and Ford are rescued from the unrealities the Hitchhiker's Guide Mark II placed them in and then rescued by Zaphod Beeblebrox as the earth is getting destroyed yet again. The reunited crew is then saved from certain death by an immortal dedicated to insulting every sentient being in the galaxy. Things go pear-shaped when Arthur learns of a colony of earthlings on a planet near Magrathea and the Vogon Constructor Fleet bent on finishing what they started. Not a terribly More...

There are some great moments in this book, moments worthy of quotation. There is tea; there are gods; there is Vogon bureaucracy and Vogon poetry. And Another Thing... sublimely embraces the h2g2 universe by grabbing hold of it by the scruff of its neck and shaking it vigorously until more characters and random plot events fall out.

And I didn't like it.

See, h2g2's humorous nexus of improbable events with zany characters is the icing on an already delicious cake. My attraction to The Hitchhiker's More...

I was kind of scared to read this book. Actually, I was very scared, but I was also very excited--and then I read the forward. It was wonderful. Eoin Colfer knows he's not Douglas Adams, and he knows that his contribution to the trilogy won't be the same or mean the same thing to the readers. But he also clearly knows and appreciates his Hitchhiker's Guide, and he's funny.

So I read the book. It was nice right away, because the characters weren't all dead. Then the story took off on its own inte More...

Am I becoming old?
Definitely.
Am I losing my sense of humour?
Most likely.
Am I disappointed that Eoin Colfer can't carry a candle to the late great departed Mr Adams?
Yes. The bugger.

I was conned. I was ripped off. I dreamed of dolphins and instead I got sardines.

And Arther wasn't even wearing his dressing gown.

And that reminds me, wasn't Zaphod a brunette?

And another thing...a seventh book would be killing the overkill, Mr Colfer. Please don't.

And Another Thing makes a nicer end for Hitchhiker's than Mostly Harmless did, which, as I gather, was the point of having it written. Colfer's writing doesn't read like Adams's which is good because Colfer's own style is reasonably pleasant and I've read enough things by people pretending (unsuccessfully) to be Douglas Adams to last me Wowbagger's lifetime and bad because the reason I picked up the book was that I wanted to read a new Douglas Adams novel (alas, a thing that is not to be). Colfe More...

In this sixth book in the increasingly inappropriately named Hitchhikers Trilogy, we are treated once again to the very funny exploits of doomed earth-man Arthur Dent and his pals. This book is actually the first in the series not written by the now late, but still great, Douglas Adams. Filling in for him is Eoin Colfer, a man best known for his kids & teen books, but still quite a nice fellow.

In fact, during most of my time spent reading this book, I could quite easily forget that I wasn't More...

Mea culpa, I am an enormous Douglas Adams fan. I had low expectations for this book and I was not won over by the time I'd finished reading it.

While Eoin Colfer does an excellent job of trying to pick up the abandoned threads where Mostly Harmless stagnated and stalled. Instead of resolving those threads in this book, the story seems to turn inwards. There is no real movement forward with the overall tale. It reads like fan fiction from the least popular age of a show.

Had this been written by Do More...

It's just wrong.

I opened And Another Thing... which Adams' widow commissioned Colfer to write with a sinking feeling and reading it has done nothing to dispel the disquiet. As much as I'd love to have another Douglas Adams' book (Hitchhikers or something else) this isn't it. There is no way it could be. Colfer gives it a valiant try. He's got the humour, he needs work on his digressions, doesn't really have that sharp organizing idea that Adams seemed to somehow structure his books around. (So More...

Originally published on my blog here in July 2010.

I borrowed this book from the library expecting to hate it. Even though I didn't like the end of the Hitchhiker series as it stood at Douglas Adams' death, I couldn't imagine anyone else continuing it in the way that he might have been able to (if he'd overcome the blocks he experienced in the later part of his writing career). I'd also read Artemis Fowl, which made Colfer's name, and didn't think much of it.

And, when And Another Thing... came ou More...

Non mi era mai stato così difficile aprire la prima pagina di un libro. Se siete qua, sicuramente avrete letto i precedenti 5 capitoli della Saga più geniale che mente umana abbia mai concepito. La Guida Galattica è più di un libro. E' un Formaggio. I più svegli di voi si saranno sicuramente accorti che il buon vecchio Douglas ci ha abbandonati un po' di anni fa.

E questo nuovo capitolo!? E' stato affidato a Eoin Colfer. Non avevo la più pallida idea di chi fosse, ma una volta che ho saputo di qu More...

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy - the encyclopedia, not the novel - has a lot of information on sequels. For instance, we can read about an expert on robot construction on the planet DNA Prime, who gained fame for a series of five robots often considered the best in their class. They could do tricks, tell jokes, spin absolutely insane stories that still somehow seemed to be about regular people, and were generally just really great to hang out with. (Even if some people claimed that the la More...

So, I was wandering through a used book store, not looking for anything in particular, when I stumbled upon this.

I walked past it.

I stopped, and retraced my steps.

I squinted, confusion spreading across my face.

I picked it up. The confusion failed to dissipate.

Somehow, despite being a pretty avid fan of the works of Douglas Adams, I had simply never heard of this book. I wasn't exactly sure how to feel about the existence of an "official" H2G2 trilogy book by anyone other than Adams himself. I de More...

First of all, I had no idea how to pronounce his name. I say "his" based on the dustjacket picture, I wouldn't have even known that otherwise. He's apparently Irish, and with that in mind I probably would have guessed that his name was pronounced either phonetically as "Eowyn," which can't be right since it's a girl's name, or something unlikely and glommed together, like "Yawn." Wikipedia says it's "Owen," which actually seems like a decent compromise between phonetic and unlikely to my Yanqui More...

I am torn at what this book embodies. The original 5 book trilogy was legendary and as such I have read the books many times. I was happy to see the characters live on this book but it felt, off.

The story layout was much more structured and less random than the original series. It read as if there was a difinate goal in mind from the author. I thought the characters weren't used to full advantge or correctly. Wowbagger was a great character before because he was a joke. A leading character in t More...

This is Volume 6 of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, and I purchased it while a member of the Science-Fiction/Fantasy Book Club mostly because I had read the previous five volumes and enjoyed them. This book was written eight years after Douglas Adams, the author of the first five volumes, had died and it was published to mark the 30th aniversary of the first volume, which had originally started life as a radio show in Great Britain. Colfer was given permission to write the book by More...

There have been many things written about the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Many of them are scandalous, many more are only libelous, most are simply untrue – although in accordance with Dr Han Streetmentioner’s theory of the quasi-reciprocality of truth this means that they are almost certainly the kind of indisputable facts for denying which a major religion could kill you.

One of those untruths, and here the author undertakes his statement with full awareness of the risk of a multi-dimens More...

This really surprised me. I put off reading it because it was a sequel written by someone who was not Douglas Adams . . . But when I saw it at Big Lots for $.50 I figured I had nothing to lose.

And it really surprised me. It was funny in parts, touching in parts, and thought provoking in parts . . . which is all like Douglas Adams, but not quite LIKE Douglas Adams.

It was a valiant effort to honor the Hitchhiker's style, and while i will never understand why anyone would try to continue a series More...

Maybe I was expecting too much when I heard he was a continuation of one of my favorite Science Fiction authors that passed away- Douglas Adams. But when compared to Douglas Adams, I found his story to be tiring because it was so predictable and so difficult to follow. Compared to other authors I don't think he was short in these areas, but compared to Douglas Adams he was.

As an example, the story so logical was able to anticipate what he was going to say about sub ether and that it was basicall More...

If you pay close attention, Colfer tells you exactly what you can expect from this book right at the beginning, using a well-chosen quote from Douglas Adams: “The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying 'And another thing...' twenty minutes after admitting he'd lost the argument.” (So Long and Thanks for All the Fish)

As Adams well knew, the phrase "And another thing..." is superfluous. It is said by the person who just c More...

This was an attempt at a sixth book for Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Although the book has some good moments, overall, it just didn't hold me. It may not have been worse than the worst of the original books, but it certainly had no where near the wit and sparkle of the best.

If I had to summarize it's flaws, I would say that they stem from the Colffer's over reliance on guide notes to explain things that did not really need explaining and his rambling style. I was also More...

Like a lot of people, i reacted to the news that Eoin Colfer had been tapped to write a follow-on to Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" quintrilogy with equal amounts of "That might be cool" and "What the holy heck?" Having finally worked up the courage to approach And Another Thing with what I hoped was an open mind, my status report changes to "That was definitely cool" and "What the holy heck?"

Colfer does a fairly amazing job of channeling the spirit and storytelling style of A More...

Major ambivalence here (and some vague spoilers ahead, so beware). There are certainly some hilarious parts (the Cthulu interview comes to mind). But there are lots of parts that try to be funny but just aren't because of how hard they/Colfer are trying. There are some great moments that it was an absolute pleasure to live through with our revived heroes, but there are a LOT of tedious moments in between. Much of the overall concept is apropos, considering Douglas Adams' well-known atheism--and More...

With the tragic Author Existence Failure of the late Douglas Adams, it seemed as if his Hitchhiker's Guide series was doomed to end on a tremendous downer. Enter Eoin Colfer, taking on the daunting task of stepping into the shoes of the galaxy's hoopiest frood to give H2G2 fans a more fitting farewell for their beloved characters.

What's immediately apparent is that Colfer is not Adams, and for the first fourth or so of the book I had the unsatisfying feeling of reading a work that felt almost, b More...

To say that I disliked this book would be an understatement. I have only finished this book because I despise leaving books unfinished. Now, I told myself when I sat down to read it that I had to judge this book on two criteria, I had to judge it as a novel in it's own right and I have to judge it as a hitchhikers book, but as I read the only point I kept coming back to is that this is an awful hitchhikers book, miles worse then any Douglas Adams wrote. It completely lacks the wit and sparkle of More...

Attempting to tell someone about any of the books in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series is next to impossible. It can be done, but will it make any sense? I'm not even going to try, except to say that this story takes up where the last one left off and involves Vogons, a colony of Earthlings who survived the destruction of their planet to make way for a superhighway, the god Thor, his stolen longboat which has been made into a spaceship, and several other unrelated subjects. More...

1.5 stars for the effort, but Colfer's book reads more like fanfiction set in the HHGG universe rather than a proper new novel and conclusion. Most elements and gags are recycled from older stories, giving it a feel of a 'best of' where you keep retreading the same tracks rather than visiting something new. It doesn't help that the notes from the Guide, an important part of the previous books, here feel like annoying intermissions that break up the pacing rather than well-thought diversions that More...

The quote from which Colfer pulls his title rather says it all: "The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying 'And another thing...' twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument."

And Another Thing... is the written embodiment of that quote: it's too little, too late. It neither accomplishes anything useful nor does it add anything other than an unsatisfying addendum to a long finished conversation. Ultimately, it More...

Hope and experience slugged it out again... And as usual I backed that loser "Hope"... This is hugely disappointing... but then I suppose that makes Eoin Colfer the perfect inheritor of Douglas Adams' mantle. The original trilogy were nothing short of brilliant, but Adam's famous disregard for deadlines and (in my opinion) the contempt of him and his publishers for his loyal readership, meant that his last couple were merely exercises in commercial cynicism devoid of wit or original narrative... More...

Thoroughly enjoyed it. Was slightly unsure about the whole thing; H2G2 is probably my favourite collection of books, and while I really like Artemis Fowl as well, there was always going to be a bit of trepidation going into this. But honestly, just reading the foreword allayed that fear. It was funny, clever, it was interesting, it was fun. I thought Colfer dealt very well with picking it up after Mostly Harmless, and did a very good job of keeping it within the H2G2 world while still making it More...