Books: Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic by Terry Jones (1997)

Originally, Starship Titanic was an adventure game written and designed by Douglas Adams, which was started in 1996 and released in 1998. The game takes place on the eponymous starship, which the player is tasked with repairing by locating the missing parts of its control system. The gameplay involves solving puzzles and speaking with the bots inside the ship. The game features a text parser similar to those of text adventure games with which the player can talk with characters. The game scored mixed reviews and was a financial disappointment, but it was re-released for modern PCs in 2015.

Back in late 1997, Terry Jones of Monty Python fame –by request of Adam’s himself- was given the task of adapting the background outline the late author created for the game (and which started life as a footnote in the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel Life, the Universe and Everything) in novel form and thus we have Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic.

"On the planet Blérontin, we are preparing to inaugurate with great pomp the Starship Titanic, a formidable spaceship, the last creation of Leovinus, the greatest inventor of the universe and of all times. However, of course, the craft was sabotaged - a smart bomb was placed on board - and all the conditions are thus gathered for this first experimental flight to be an unprecedented disaster, putting in particular the grave passengers: Leovinus, a parrot of the planet Yassacan, a journalist named The Journalist and a trio of innocent humans"

Now I know why I waited twenty years to read it, mostly because I'm was not completely sure what I was expecting. I knew –or sensed- that the book would not really read like a Douglas Adams book, and I was right. It does have its moments, and there are a few inspired bits, but it’s clear that Monty Python actor/writer/director Terry Jones brought more his sensibilities to the tale than Douglas Adams. The characters were fairly broad and all unmemorable –including the humans. Much like the a few Doctor Who novels adapted from Adams scripts, this book reminds me again what we lost when Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49. He was a remarkably unique and brilliant man, one of kind in many ways.

The adaptations of his works are fine in many ways, but I still wish he walked the good Earth, amusing us and making us think.