Douglas Adams
Lit News: New Hitchhiker’s Sequel
by Titus Gee
This just in from our friends at Jacket Copy on latimes.com:
The widow of Douglas Adams, Jane Belson, has reportedly sanctioned a new book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series, to be written by Eoin Colfer (pronounced ‘Owen’), author of the Artemis Fowl series. The project apparently was instigated by Belson who chose the author to succeed her late husband.
The new book to be titled “And Another Thing…” will be published in October 2009 by Penguin Books, the publisher announced on Sep. 17.
According to the release, Douglas Adams himself once said the series was not meant to end as it did.
“I suspect at some point in the future I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book,” Adams said in interview. “I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note. Five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number.”
Adams fans will be glad to know that Colfer may be counted among their number.
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was like nothing I had read before, or since for that matter,” he wrote in a recent release at his website. “The Guide is a slice of satirical genius. A marvel of quantum tomfoolery. A dissection of the absurdities of our human condition. A space odyssey that forces us to face ourselves and collapse in hysterics. Imagine if Messrs. Hawking and Fry were locked in a room with the entire cast of Monty Python and forced to write a book which would subsequently be edited by Pink Floyd, then the result would need a lot of work before it could be cut from Douglas Adams’ first draft.”
He certainly seems to be taking the responsibility seriously.
“My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series. But on reflection I realised that this is a wonderful opportunity to work with characters I have loved since childhood and give them something of my own voice while holding onto the spirit of Douglas Adams and not laying a single finger on his five books . . . I feel more pressure to perform now than I ever have with my own books, and that is why I am bloody determined that this will be the best thing I have ever written.”
Arthur Dent almost certainly will be resurrected from the tiny bits he ended in at the end of Adams’s fifth book, Mostly Harmless, . . . whether Dent likes it or not.
