Една от не толкова добрите и забавни хумористични фантастики - слаба фабула и малко скучновати герои. Все пак съм доволна, че привършвам цикъла "Дъглас Адамс" :)

This is a hard one to review because on one hand it is a lot of fun, it's silly and light and there's a couple of particularly hilarious sex scenes. And it is the result of two great comedy minds working together so I can't really criticise. However it is a novelisation of a point-and-click computer game and this really shows in the pacing and plot points.

Както винаги Дъглас Адамс разсмива и те увлича дори в този сравнително кратък роман.

That something written by DNA should receive anything other than 5/5 says it all really. The idea is here, the bones with a fair degree of meat attached, but... it hasn't the ability to lead you to a 'wow moment' without seeing it well in advance. As his other books did. Do!

I bought the game too, it was equally as frustrating.

An entertaining alien take on the Earth's seaship titanic, the starship Titania is having teething troubles as its lavish construction costs take down a planets economy.

The story covers multiple humorous characters including the ships genius creator who is trying to complete Titania whilst finding all is not to the standard he envisaged, three humans who accidentally end up on the starship, a alien journalist on the hunt for the story of his lifetime with an uncontrollabel sex drive, an easily distracted bomb that speaks and a parrot.

Not on the level of Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, but still an interesting read.

Whilst there are some parts where Douglas makes funny parallels to real life, the story is a little predictable once it gets going. However, it doesn't really take too many parts of the real life titanic story, which I guess was to stop the plot being too obvious (which I actually found to be a negative and a positive).

I found a copy of Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic at a half-price book store last December, and picked it up. I'd played the related computer game when it came out back in 1997 and was curious to see how (what I remembered of) the storyline played out in book format.

The story opens with Leovinus - the genius designer of the Starship Titanic "the ship that cannot possibly go wrong" - taking a last-minute tour of the ship, only to find that some very serious corners were cut in its construction.

He tracks down the project manager, who is being pointedly questioned by The Reporter - a struggle ensues, during which the ship suffers from SMEF (Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure); winking out of existence from its launch point, crashing into Earth - where 3 humans board it (and Leovinius apparently disembarks), and winking out again. The ship's artificial intelligence is damaged, there's a sentient bomb aboard, and the original builders are massing outside, ready to take the ship as plunder.

Terry Jones does a serviceable job writing from the basic outline of the game that Adams designed - but he just doesn't have the subtle & absurd way with language that we see in Hitchhikers or Dirk Gently. It does make me want to try re-loading & playing the game, however.

Overall, I'd rate Starship Titanic as a decent, if light, sci-fi read - and recommend it to Douglas Adams completists.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Terry Jones' attempt to mimic Douglas Adams reminds us that it can also be the gravest form of insult.

When I was younger, the cover of the Starship Titanic video game - back when games were still published in nice big boxes that could show off their art - was the coolest and scariest thing I'd ever seen. It stuck in my head, and when I stumbled on this in a free bookshelf, I was thrilled to read it and finally enter that world. What a massive waste of my time.

You see, the *title* is Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic, but as Adams was busy the novelisation was written by Terry Jones, of Monty Python. You might think Adams' and Python's styles are pretty compatible - Adams even worked on the show - but Jones does a terrible Adams impression. (Jones was always the broadest Python, humour-wise. Maybe Adams would have been better served by the dryness of Chapman or the humanism of Palin.)

Yes, Python is zany and Hitchhiker's Guide (of which Starship Titanic was a spinoff) is zany, but Python is a sketch show which seldom had to worry about the world outside its two minute surreal masterpieces. H2G2 is a five novel series. Its zaniness works because it's built on a strong satirical core, memorable characters with unique voices and well crafted stories. Jones can occasionally pull off a funny line, but most of the time it's just meaningless absurdity - he tries many times to craft a simile to rival Adams' perfect "The ships hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don't" and falls inevitably short. Where he does make a good joke, he often kills it with an unnecessary exclamation mark!

The plot is clearly adapted directly from a text adventure video game, mostly concerning collecting vouchers to upgrade class to unlock a new area to search for another collectible to upgrade to another class. Stuff happens, and the characters bimble along with each event, their mood and personality completely arbitrary from one line to the next. They argue about something, and within half a page the topic has changed entirely and their tension is forgotten. And speaking of the characters...

This is one of the most misogynistic books I've ever read. Two of the main characters are women, but both are sensual beauties who alternate between brilliant and brainless. One immediately and impulsively has sex with an alien and spends the rest of the novel alternately rejecting him and screwing him, while the other is groped, ogled and doused with an aphrodisiac perfume. It's a teenage boy's fantasy - and a particular grimy, crusty-socked kind of fantasy at that - and indeed the writing style feels simplistic enough for 10 year olds, if it weren't for the occasional descriptions of handjobs.

A dire book that, like its namesake vessel, should have undergone a Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure.

Hittade den i en bokbytarhylla.. den höll ju inte Liftarens-guideklass alls, men skulle kunnat vara refuserade delar ur serien slarvigt ihopbundet till en berättelse. Kul med absurda grejer, kul med Liftarens guide-känslan men inte en bok jag skulle rekommendera någon annan.

Not as good as the first time I read it, but they never are. Still, pretty good, for a novel that was written in three weeks.

I recently replayed Starship Titanic, over two decades after my first play-through, and it was a lot shorter and less clever than I remembered it being. It did remind me that there was also a book (I remember downloading it as a text file and printing it out on my first ink-jet printer in middle school, but I'm not sure, now, that I ever read the whole thing), so in an effort to salvage my fond memories of the game, I thought I'd give that another go. It didn't help.

It's technically a video game novel, of course, but it's a video game novel written by one of the Monty Pythons, about a game made by Douglas Adams, on which said Monty Python actually worked—the writing really has no business being this amazingly awful. At least some of the blame must fall on the publisher's insistence that it be released at the same time as the game (as Douglas Adams mentions in the introduction; the book was actually published a few months before the game was released), meaning it had to be written while some aspects of it were still, presumably, up in the air. That might explain why, for example, the pellerator has a Liftbot and why the Succ-U-Bus doesn't have a name or much of a personality yet and why Leovinus has a beard instead of being Douglas Adams; the space battle and the gun-fights and the sex scenes (and the constant threat of additional sex scenes in the later part of the book) are harder to justify.
To some extent the problem is that Jones tried to write another Hitchhiker's Guide novel instead of a Starship Titanic novel; the latter may be a spin-off of the former, but the tone of the two settings—or rather, the scope, the acceptable range of events and actions taken by the characters—is very different. Even putting that aside, though, he's just a bad writer—another reviewer mentioned that the book reads like a chapterbook, and that's only a little bit of an exaggeration. I've previously read another book by Jones and hated that as well, but that one was non-fiction and I thought it was just because he got all of his facts wrong.

Starship Titanic the game could have been a great game if it had been the puzzle game it pretended to be instead of the look-at-our-fancy-speech-engine-and-3D-FMVs game it actually was; as it was, it was just okay. Starship Titanic the novel could have been a great complement to it (and probably a decent novel in its own right) if it had been the canon prequel it initially looks to be instead of an alternate universe mess that only vaguely resembles the finished game, but it would have needed someone else to write it as well; as it is, it's extraordinarily bad.
Two lessons:

1. Being good at funny voices doesn't automatically make you a good writer, comedic or otherwise.
2. Writing in the nude is fine, but writing with an erection will completely wreck your book.

And maybe also:

3. Don't ask a close friend to write a book for you if your friendship means you won't be able to get someone else to do it when it turns out to be shit.

This is a madcap silly tale full of highly imaginative humor in which one escapade keeps leading to another. A light, fast paced story.

Love the humor and it's amazing how everything just feels it could be nowadays. Love the characters and the crazy thoughts that sound so logic!