"This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. " - Douglas AdamsAccording to the official Douglas Adams blog, celebrated children's author Eoin Colfer has written a new installment to the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which will be appropriately entitled "And Another Thing..."
As a long time fan, I'm not sure how I feel about that, though I love Eoin's writing and I'm willing to give it a shot. I do wonder if he's going to be building it upon the foundation of the story Douglas was in the middle of when he died.
Posthumous additions to a writer's oeuvre are always a dicey issue. Either it's something the writer didn't think was worth publishing at the time or a hired gun trying to remake the writer's work in their own image. Sometimes it's just correspondence and biography, but more often than not it fails to live up to the genius that spawned it.
You may remember that the aforementioned work-in-progress found on Douglas's laptop was packaged with some letters and speeches he'd given during his life and published in its unfinished form as "Salmon of Doubt". As is so often the case with these things, it showed flashes of the genius we missed, but failed to sate the appetite.
Which brings us to Eoin. He's been hired to continue the Hitchhiker's Saga. Which will be quite a trick since when last we left our trepid heroes (no I didn't mistype, trepidity was part of their charm) at the culmination of "Mostly Harmless" they had just died. Not that this is necessarily a deal breaker in the Douglas Adams universe.
Anyway, I'm trying to keep an open mind... if only because of the trust I have for Eoin. Here he is talking about it on his blog:
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Pages to Type is a blog about books, writing and literary culture (with the occasional digression into coffee and the care and feeding of giant robots).