in one of the novels of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Tri-Quad-Quintilogy, there is a throwaway line about the fate of the Starship Titanic, undergoing Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure ten seconds after launch. This tiny reference is the basis for this whole novel. As explained in his amusing foreword, Adams was concentrating on HHGTTG so he passed the writing job over to his friend and python Terry Jones.

The Starship Titanic (and her core intelligence Titania) are never-before-seen marvels of technology and everyone is very excited for its launch. Unfortunately in the moments leading up to her launch its creator Levovinus discovers a sabotage plot...

I mean, to try and explain the background information would be folly. There is nonsense about two different space-faring alien races and the transferral of work opportunities from one to the other resulting in planetary bankruptcy, leading to the eventual planting of a bomb and the destruction of Titania's core brain... but the real story starts when the Ship undergoes its Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure... and crashes into Earth.

Three humans are brought on board and meet a strange alien called The Journalist (abbreviated to "The") and then theres a whole load of shenanigans as the humans fight the snobbish, malfunctioning WaiterBots / Maitre'd'bots / lift bots / cleaner bots, etc etc in the unfinished starship. Theres even a really weird love triangle between the humans and the Journalist.

Its not brilliant. I confess, i find Adams' tangental sidetracks rather jarring in the same way that Family Guy now claims as its own. Often whole paragraphs are given to completely unnecessary anecdotes - from why the Blerotontin like canapes to a book we should all read about how Nettie Solved the Problem or what not. Now, don't get me wrong, this is Adams' trademark and Terry Jones effortlessly mimics it here... so i'd be a fool reading this novel not expecting these kind of narrative asides. It does make me think it would be interesting to see this written WITHOUT any of them and see just how long the book becomes. Probably a very slender volume.

Its also very clear that this was written by a very horny man (unsurprisingly as we find out it was written entirely in the nude), as nearly every conversation alludes to a bit of obsession, lusting and nipple-ogling. The love triangles - and every other variation of a romantic entanglement are laughable - i mean, none of these people should be together at all - but its hardly a piece of romantic fiction so i'm willing to let the complete lack of coherent characterisation weigh the review down.

For what its worth - two or three days, its not a challenging read - the concept alone is enough to hold my interest. It does make me yearn for more intelligent, higher concept Science fiction, though - so i'm off to Arrakis to continue the Dune trilogy...

Not nearly as good as I thought it might be.

I was first gifted this story many, many, many (etc) years ago, as an audiobook. It may well have been my first! I think it was a package of four cassettes, and it was actally read by Terry Jones Hisownself. My wife knows I was/am a big fan of Douglas Adams, and of Monty Python, and this is one of those places where these two things meet. As usual, she was right, and I must have listened to these things eight or nine times over the course of the next year or two. I also looked for the video game, but either it was too expensive for me at the time, or my admittedly rather primitive computers couldn't run it. An opportunity missed, I suppose.

Anywhoo. It's many many years later, and sadly, both Douglas and Terry are gone. But their work endures, and as I was looking for a somewhat less serious read to finish my yearly Goodreads challenge, I remembered that I had this in my queue. So...why not? It was as delightful as I'd recalled from the audiobooks, once you get past the introductory part and all of its obscure alien names (probably based on Welsh?) you'll do just fine. If you remember Mr. Neutron fondly, you'll eat this stuff up, and it's a shame that it never got a chance as a movie script, because it sounds like it would be a lot of fun. I probably still have the cassettes somewhere...not sure I would have anything to play them on anymore, but I remember the delight of listening to Terry relate the story of Levonius, The Greatest Mind In The Entire Known Galaxy, and his greatest creation and true love Titania. It's silly escapist stuff, and if you're of a like mind, you'll eat it up.

Wer Douglas Adams liest und sich fragt, ob es noch etwas mehr von allem sein könnte: Bitteschön!

I was very happy to discover this book on my aunt's shelf, as I thought I'd read everything influenced by Douglas Adams. It was written by Terry Jones based on a game developed by Douglas Adams. This was an entertaining read with a few laughs, and great for over Christmas. It sounds like a game I would have enjoyed playing.

Full disclosure to start with, I’m a huge fan of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide series and I had the Starship Titanic computer game back in the 1990s. This of course isn’t written by Adams, as he was busy with developing the game at the time, but by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, of whom I’m also a fan.

It pains me to say therefore that this book isn’t very good. There are some nice comic touches – the intelligent bomb that’s easily distracted and loses its place in the countdown is a particular highlight. There’s too much filler between the laughs, however, and it lacks Adams’ carefully honed prose, in particular the deliciously memorable absurdities like, ‘...hung in the sky in exactly the same way that bricks don’t’.

All of which is a shame because there’s a lot of potential in the idea. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that this would have been much better if Adams had written in himself. Sadly, short of finding a way to some parallel universe, we’ll never get to find out.

This book was cowritten with Robert Sheckley and it kinda shows. It fits thematically with Adams's other works but if you're looking for a Douglas Adams book, this isn't one. The style feels much less mature and polished than anything else Adams has written.

Should really be 2.5 stars. This was an okay read - which I realize is damning with faint praise. While written by Jones, it's based on Adams's game, which I have not played, but I can recognize or guess the elements that surely must come from Adams and not added in by Jones. I also recognize the beats of the plot's developments as clearly being stages or "levels" of a computer game - that's not a bad thing necessarily, just something that stands out more than a wholly original novel not based on a game.

The book starts off pretty darn funny and silly. There are some genuinely funny moments - short scenes and single lines - in this book that made me laugh or facepalm (especially when listening to the audiobook, read by the wonderful and sadly late Terry Jones himself - the man makes one hell of a vocal narrator). Granted, there are many such moments, but as the book progresses, and especially in its latter half, too often the moments lack a certain punch given the stakes and setting of the story - this is not as insanely ridiculous or as adventurous as the Hitchhiker's Guide saga - and too much going on *between* the funny moments that isn't funny and did not feel strong enough to make me care; they only made me impatient for the comedy to resume. Basically, too often the book seems to get bogged down either in its pacing or in the amount of comical content, although the latter is so subjective that what does not work for me might easily work for someone else (look at all the other readers giving this book 4 or 5 stars!). If it's not the pacing, then it may be cultural references or cultural standards that might appeal better to British readers than Americans like myself.

Ultimately, I am glad I read the book (especially as an audiobook), but I don't feel a compelling need to keep it in my iTunes library or acquire a print copy. Should you try it? Sure, but I recommend that you go with the audiobook for best effect (it's about a 5-hour listen, so it's a brisk "read" even with the pacing issues), and be aware it may not appeal to everyone, even devout fans of Douglas Adams and/or Monty Python.

So the other Terry Jones book I own besides Terry Jones' Fantastic Stories is this, which is his novelization of a PC game based on a drive-by footnote joke Douglas Adams wrote in his third H2G2 novel Life, the Universe and Everything about the Starship Titanic, which suffers from Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure (SMEF) ten seconds after launch. Jones contributed his voice for one of the game’s characters (a parrot), and Adams – who wanted to write a novel version of the game to accompany its release but had no time to do so – asked Jones if he’d do it. Jones agreed on the condition that he could write it whilst nude.

Which may or may not explain all the gratuitous sex in the story, which (apart from all the aforementioned gratuitous sex) is based on the backstory, set-up and objective of the game: Starship Titanic – created by the great architect Leovinus – has been sabotaged (in the name of insurance fraud) by removing the intelligence modules from the ship’s central AI computer. The ship crash-lands on Earth on your house, and you are invited to board the ship and locate the missing modules and restore the AI so the ship can function normally. In this story, the “players” are represented by three Earthlings – Dan, Lucy and Nettie – which is where all the gratuitous sex comes in (mainly via Lucy and a libidinous alien journalist).

Obviously, it’s difficult to review this fairly, partly because it’s essentially a quickly written computer game cash-in (Jones had three weeks to write it), and partly because it’s impossible to not compare it with Adams’ H2G2 works and Jones’ Monty Python pedigree, and inevitably it falls short of both. For the most part, I think it’s good for what it is, and better than it has any right to be. The weak link is the underdeveloped Earth characters, who mostly squabble a lot and have relationship problems that aren’t interesting. Apart from that, it’s reasonably funny and entertaining, but probably only for completists of H2G2 and/or Jones’ written work, or anyone who has ever played the PC game. If nothing else, you get an author photo of Jones sitting nude with a laptop.

This is a rare 1 star review for me. I debated back and forth between 1 and 2 stars. If I'd gone with the text version it probably would have been 2 stars. More on that below.

I didn't look that close at the author when I picked it - it's not actually Douglas Adams. This is written by Terry Jones on a Douglas Adams' concept. I like Terry Jones video work, not so sold on this. It appeared to me he wanted to write it in Douglas Adams' style and it was close. But it wasn't as good as Adams' actual work. It didn't quite achieve the comedy level and the tone was constantly thrown off by characters constantly having sex or talking about sex. That seemed to be a primary plot point for no real reason. Unless you're just desparate for more in the Hitchhiker's Guide vein I can't recommend this. (And I definitely wouldn't get the audio book. One of the female characters screams constantly in the first half of the book at every little thing. It gets VERY old on audio.)

This book is like someone tried to right a douglas Adams book but didn't have anything interesting to say with it. The plot was batshit insane, but not in a good way, and the writing was at times very objectifying towards the female characters. This is bad enough, but considering that the author wrote the book naked (which he makes a point of telling you), it begins to feel a little uncomfortable.

A founding member of The Monty Python writing a sci fi book for Douglas Adams: what can possibly go right?