Based on a Douglas Adams book, written / directed by the great Terry Jones and narrated by the silver tones of Bill Nighey. Alexa please bring all my favourite things together.
A funny and entertaining listen

Significantly better than it’s been made out to be. It has a charm that’s it’s own - I’m glad I came around and read this one.

Oh, how I wanted to like this book more. But for me it was simply impossible not to go into it with sky-high expectations, even though I tried not to. I also have very high standards for comedy. (I'm picky, perhaps a comedy snob, and I find most mainstream "humor" to be unfunny.) So I might be more critical than the average reader. A few chuckles and maybe two good laughs was not enough for a book by a comedic dream team. If the rest of the book was up to the standards of the few very funny sections, this could have been a 5-star book.

What can I say that hasn't already been said? Nothing, that's what, so I guess I'll say it all anyway.

I went into this really wanting and expecting it to be good, considering it had the names of two comedic legends in big letters on the front. As I read the first couple pages, however, I quickly realized that I was going to be disappointed in this book. I've never read anything else by Terry Jones, so I can't say that he's a bad writer necessarily, but he is definitely not good at emulating the Douglas Adams style, which is what it seems like this whole book is an attempt at doing. As a result, most of the jokes are sub par, the moments that try to be self aware and break the fourth wall are painfully and un-self-awarefully on the nose, and the romance subplots are predictable and clunky.

In the end, it was definitely entertaining, but it just reads like a mediocre fan fic short story. In a word: disappointing.

(2.5) Fun concept, not Terry-bly well written

Terry Jones is no novelist, but the storyline plane that is one of the pillars of great Adams writing is still present (others being satire and witty wording/dialogue), and delights despite the nonstop narrative in place of dialogue/inner monologue. Maybe the game makes more sense now? (I never made any headway whatsoever—must’ve needed to work on that second class upgrade first...)

[pre-reading:] Played the computer game based on this (or I guess the other way around) a long, long time ago. As I recall, I failed to make any appreciable progress whatsoever. Was that the joke? Maybe this novel will shed some light on what we were supposed to do... :)

Similar in style to Hitchhiker but different enough to be it's own thing. Douglas Adams may be associated with this book (based on a game he created) but this was written by Terry Jones. I actually think he does a pretty good job.

Is it the funniest book I've ever read? No. But I did chuckle a few times and never found my mind wandering. I'm a fan of Adams but sometimes he had a tendency to try and be as absurd as possible, which was sometimes funny but sometimes less so. Jones' style is more coherent - it just tries to tell a story and be funny without trying to be "clever" all time. And to be fair, it succeeds.

If you are after a Hitchhiker clone, you may be disappointed but if you are after a simple read, a sci fi, a light hearted comedy - then give it a go.

I love a good space adventure. When its funny and just plain silly, I'm even more content. Its a fun romp with aliens, a luxury spaceship and true love. Spoiler alert, it has a happy ending so there!

Mostly entertaining.

A humorously silly planetary adventure...

The computer game came with the first cassette of an audiobook adaptation included, and the excerpt on the tape was just long enough for me to recognize the book as an imperfect pastiche of Douglas Adams's style. Douglas Adams-like digressions, but lingering a bit too long, or failing to come together into a clever bit. Jokes that would've been great if Adams told them, but which somehow don't stick the landing... I never picked up the book.

What I wasn't picking up on back then, of course, is that when the Douglas Adams voice is botched here, the stuff you see beneath the the patchwork is Terry Jones, if a bit rough around the edges in his first published novel. And that's charming on its own rights. Starship Titanic is not a Douglas Adams novel, and I can't imagine it would sustain repeated readings the way his do. But neither is it just a poor imitator.

Oh no! I really really wanted to love this. Douglas Adams and Terry Jones writing a hitchhikers universe based space adventure! Sounds amazing! Unfortunately everything seemed to fall very flat. At one point while I was reading I was worried I’d been duped and had ended up buying an AI written novel that had been fed only Douglas Adams and poor, badly aged romcoms. It’s fine. But not great. Would have given it 2 stars but I heard it was written in only 3 weeks and only cost me 99p. I don’t blame the author I blame the publishers for rushing it. Could have been so much better.

One of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide books has a toss-off joke about the Starship Titanic undergoing Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. At the time, he did nothing more with the idea, but a decade later he started basing both a novel and a text-based software game on it. Not being able to work on both in the time demanded by his publisher, he handed off the novel to Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame. Their two styles were compatible, and this novel was released in 1997, just a few years before Douglas Adams’ death.

The characters are stick-figure stereotypes with a tendency to fall into lust at the slightest drop of perfume, the alien cultures are warped caricatures of humanity, the robots are psychotic, and the starship itself is unrelentingly superlative – in short, a spin-off in the spirit of Hitchhiker’s Guide books. You need not have read any of those before this.

Those who find irreverent science fictional humor to be clever, will find this to be clever. I found it a quick read and mildly amusing.