The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I searched both the title and the name Douglas Adams, and amazingly, I didn't get a hit for a dedicated thread. So here's an all-purpose topic for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series/franchise, I guess! (If I missed it, please do your thing, mods.)

The question I wanted to ask is, do you figure we'll ever get a novelization of the ending of the radio show? The really nice one where the Babel Fish saves everyone and they all meet up at Milliways, where Arthur reunites with Fenchurch? I'm jonesing for more of these characters and this world, and I'm sure they could finagle it so it follows from And Another Thing if they really wanted.

I'm sure its possible, the radio show/book was fairly popular. I'm not really sure that it would be done all that competently. The radio show has a very unique kind of wit that might be hard to replicate well. personally I'd rather a lack further content than have it be mediocre. On a different note, did they ever explain the discrepancy between the ending of the second book and the beginning of the third?

There are two writers I'd completely trust with more Hitchhiker's Guide: Neil Gaiman and Jasper Fforde.

Which inconsistency are you talking about? iirc the third book starts with Arthur and Ford on prehistoric Earth, right where we left them.

The Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency TV show being as good as it was makes me wonder if another The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy show could work.

Which Dirk Gently TV series do you mean? There was one on the BBC in 2010 and then another on BBC America in 2016. The first, while only loosely adapted, is more in keeping with the tone and spirit of the novels, while the second, while good on it's own merits, bears no resemblance to Adams' work at all.

Eoin Colfer's Hitchhiker's novel was, to my mind, a huge disappointment. If anyone is going to continue the series, I'd say it should be Neil Gaiman, and if not him, then it should probably just be left alone.

Edited by Robbery on Oct 9th 2020 at 8:08:39 AM

The one I linked to is the one I was referring to; the other was called Dirk Gently.

Under normal circumstances, the Eoin Colfer book would have been fine, but it was built around tying threads from previous books together with a couple new additions, a thing the series basically refused to do beforehand.

And making Wowbagger an actual character and not just a weird recurring joke was a mistake.

I felt it spent far too much time on Zaphod, and Colfer's own additions.

I don't agree. I enjoyed that Wowbagger was a bigger part of the story, like Slartibartfast before him.

Here's an Hitchhiker's Guide book I wish Adams had written: since so much of the humor was in the tidbits about the universe in the series, I'd like to have read a book full of only that sort of material, a sort of abridged version of the actual Guide.

Edited by MFLuder on Oct 23rd 2020 at 8:35:58 AM