Starship Titanic - Douglas Adams > Reviews > The doorbot is feeling friendly today

Author's product rating:   

Would you listen to it again?	Maybe
Story	Good
Characters	Outstanding
Listenability	Pretty compelling but not addictive
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?	Excellent

Advantages:	Funny, witty , uplifting adn weird
Disadvantages:	it runs out of pages eventually

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Following the sad demise of Mr Adams , I sought out the Terry Jones penned Adams inspired novel to glimpse once again the joys of his humour. The game is great, I recommend that too, but the book is probably a better read if you have NOT played the game.

It follows the basic plot of the game, but makes a few changes in the spirit of narrative coherance.

I mean, Terry Jones changes things so it makes some kind of sense.

An alien luxury liner craashes on earth, the only remaining passengers are the robotic crew, a parrot, and a sentient bomb (reminiscent of Dark Star). The robots decide, oddly, that a restaurant owner is the best person to help, they give him a suite (Standard class) and he spends a fair amount of the book trying to get his room upgraded.

The robotic staff are marvellously bureaucratic, the bomb is intent on exploding, but easily distracted from its 1000 to 1 countdown, (4,3,2.... "Hello, Bomb? Can you keep the parrot company?" 1000, 999, 998, 997....), and probably the funniest plot device, the alien builders of the ship, who attack it for ruining their planets economy, and then repair it because their moral code makes them, and then attack it again, and then repair it.......

It has splashes of Adams like brilliance, but Terry Jones manages to strike through this with his own witty style and dextrous wordplay to deliver a novel that is in parts laugth out loud funny, in parts knowing chuckle funny and in parts genuine absurd drama. The main character is a little similar to Arthur Dent , not a bad thing , it works very well, and the alien boatbuilders, the robotic crew, the parrot and the bomb are all very original and very funny character concepts.

In saying all this, its not quite up there with Douglas Adams' stuff, but I enjoyed it, and if you can hunt it down, or see it sat lonely on a second hand bookstore shelf, check it out.Buy it now if only to taste once again the childhood fantasy of aliens with shiny metal robot butlers and big bold hhgttg concepts.