...And Another Thing

Eoin Colfer is not Douglas Adams, and he knows it. Aside from an overdose of continuity references in a book that will forever stand apart from the first five books in the Hitchhiker's trilogy, he does an admirable job of carrying on the legacy of lunacy.

First and foremost, Zaphod finally returned. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is my least favorite book in the series because Ford doesn't do anything important until the end and Zaphod's not in it at all. Colfer pulls a wacky stunt at the beginning, letting characters live out their lives in a virtual reality thing for a while before plopping them back into the real world. This handwaves away any inconsistencies between the way Colfer portrays characters and the way Adams did, but aside from Random's er, random interest in politics, he does a fairly decent job of getting them right, and Zaphod's no exception (Zaph wasn't in the VR world, but he wasn't in the last two books either). He's lost one of his heads - please tell me that's not a reference to That Bloody Movie - but other than that he's still crazy.

The plot is wonky and Adamsesque, very reminiscent of Mostly Harmless in that everything fits together very neatly at the end, only this time we get a happier ending. Wowbagger the not-entirely-Infinitely-Prolonged-anymore-once-the-story-ends plays a rather prominent part, and what goes on with Trillian seems kinda odd, but weirder stuff has happened in this series and God knows she and Arthur were never actually going to be an item. Arthur is clueless as ever, and I really must give Colfer credit for creating the best and loopiest Ford Prefect since the original (I wasn't particularly impressed with his portrayal in either the TV series or That Bloody Movie).

Now the big question: Would Douglas Adams approve? I think he would have enjoyed its madcap insanity, but it does lack his signature style. It is not, thankfully, Artemis Fowl in space (nothing against that series, but that having been all Colfer wrote before this, I worried a bit that silly acronyms and super-geniuses were going to suddenly pop up everywhere).

So as I said, Colfer doesn't try to imitate Adams precisely, which is probably for the best, and just gets on telling an Adamsesque story in his own words. Frankly this is the best possible outcome.