Funny and Adams-esk.
Good but not great.

This is simply good comedic Sci-fi fun, if you are into that sort of thing.

Enjoyable, Terry Jones narrated beautifully. But halfway through I was looking down the tunnel for a light. By the way, I have not yet read Hitchhiker.

A must read for any fan of Adam’s hitchhikers guide

Like "And Another Thing..." this is based on the work of Douglas Adams and was created by someone else after his death. It has fewer references to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy than that book did, but I would still only recommend it to fans of the series.

For a humorous book, the thing that really matters is whether it is funny. It is. I laughed out loud once reading this book, and enjoyed at least half of the humor.

The story is mildly entertaining, the aliens quirky, and the silly tech inventive. Some elements of the book reveal that the bulk of the material was written a few decades ago, specifically the gender-related stereotypes of the main human cast. For me, the humorous tone mocking those stereotypes and the transformations that each character experiences over the course of the story are strong enough that I don't mind the use of the stereotypes, but I could understand if a reader put the book down long before it got around to justifying itself.

Auch wenn ich kein wirklicher Fan von Monty Python bin und mit dem Namen Terry Jones nicht viel anfangen konnte, fühlte ich mich doch ein wenig in die Zeiten des "Anhalters" zurückversetzt. Die Reise von Lucy und Co. mit dem Starship Titanic erinnert gekonnt an Douglas Adams' Werk, wirkt aber leider auch teilweise wie ein lauwarmer Aufguss. Insgesamt war sie nette kurzweilige Unterhaltung.

If you expect a book by Douglas Adams, you will be disappointed. It is not a hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. If you expect a silly space adventure in the vein of Douglas Adams, then this novel has it's merits. Although I would not so much say it is a novel rather than a serie of silly sketches glued together in a cursory way which pretend to be a novel of sorts.

No wonder if you realize that this book has been written by the late Terry Jones, grandmaster of silly sketches of Monty Python fame. If you read it at such, it has it's moments. It is certainly funny at times. But it is riddled with gaping plot holes and unfulfilled build-ups. Story wise it is a bit of a mess.

I have enjoyed this book nonetheless, possibly because Terry Jones perished only days ago. And I do have a soft spot for him. He lightened up a good part of my youth and showed me which way was Camelot. Three stars for a book about a starfaring parrot, without so much parrot in it.

Not too bad but certainly nothing amazing. It’s a shame Adams didn’t flesh this out as originally intended since it was his idea. It could have been pretty incredible like the Hitchhiker series, and kudos to Jones for scratching it out at the last moment to work with the then contemporary video game, but the short production time shows; it ends up being just okay. The part with the sentient bomb was on the right track; however, that ended up being the most redeeming quality of the entire novel.

It is so achingly close to being the Douglas Adams I remember. So painfully near you can almost feel it but just distant enough to feel wrong, like an ill-made facsimile.

The concept was well within Adams's wheelhouse. Madcap sci-fi shenanigans. Earthlings playing the fish-out-of-water. Decently witty with just enough silliness. The not-a-ghostwriter is Terry Jones. As in Monty Python emeritus Terry Jones. That should have gelled perfectly.

But it kind of just doesn't.

Starship Titanic was a point-and-click adventure game first and then eventually novelized by Jones. It grew out of an offhand joke in the Life, The Universe, and Everything and grew from an idea Adams had to the tune of "What if Myst had characters you can interact with?" It isn't infertile soil to mine.

And some of the jokes DO land but some of it feels very dated. There's an extended sequence where a non-earthling character becomes enamored with one of the Earthlings and turns into a complete sex pest for the rest of the novel but it's ok but she's kind of into it, sometimes, if she isn't too busy talking a bomb out of exploding. It's a running joke that takes up an incredible percentage of the book but also feels ripped from an 80s sex comedy and even in 1996 seems very dated.

It's also very short novel that somehow feels padded to the point of pain. Very precious little actually happens in the way of plot. It contrasts with the Hitchhiker's Guide where a lot of things happen at a breakneck pace but Starship Titanic manages to do little while breaking the sound barrier doing it.

Maybe it's the medium. Maybe this kind of fiction just isn't Jones's forte though he seems to be a fairly prolific writer. Perhaps it was the weight of Douglas Adams's name on the front of the title. Having it there does create an expectation that it will be his style and while there is some cross-pollination between Adams and the Pythons but it does mean that Jones has to consciously write in the Adams mold.

It's hard to put it into words. But it's like something skinned your best friend and is wearing their flesh to a dinner party and pretending to be that friend even though it's obvious that something horrible has occurred.

Ok - that's a bit overdramatic. But the novel is the literary equivalent of the uncanny valley, a principle that holds that as something artificial becomes more human-like humans react more positively to it until it reaches a point where it's in the 'moving corpse' level of resemblance and reaction drops sharply. The novel is so close to being like the Adams novels I remember but it's just different enough that it feels wrong.

Overall a reasonable read and written in the Cain of other Douglas Adam’s books . Just felt too similar to HHGTTG

Starship Titanic is a standalone book that is based on the video game by the same name, created by Douglas Adams.

It has been over a decade since I've read Starship Titanic and I decided to give it a re-read, taking a break from my beloved mysteries for a little while. It's the story of a most breath-taking ship, built by the Greatest Genius The Galaxy Had Ever Known, and it's the story of it's [almost downfall] involving a journalist, a few humans and a parrot! In short it's brilliant.

In the time between reading Starship Titanic for the first time and now, I've since read Douglas Adams' biography written by Neil Gaiman and this book hits a little differently now. Douglas Adams was deeply interested in video games, which is how this book came to be. He was writing the script for the video game, but his publisher wanted a book to be released too and he couldn't do both, so enter Terry Jones. The book completely has the Douglas Adams feel about it, or at least I think so. I might be biased. It's got the same Hitchhikers zany humor and it was such a treat to read again.

She couldn't bear self-satisfied aliens who couldn't see any of the good things about Earth.

I listened on audiobook and it's narrated by Bill Nighy!!!! He does the absolute best job of narrating Starship Titanic. Honestly I couldn't imagine anyone else narrating this book!

If you like comic science fiction, I 110% recommend Starship Titanic. It's zany and cute, with sweet-endearing moments that will make you re-think life, followed by crazy antics that will have you spitting out your tea!

Not kindle Unlimited, actually have this in hardback from a while back, before I started doing reviews and before I had to have assistive tech to 'read' a book {kindle for pc WITH audio plug in, plus narrator with additional Speakonia}, it was either a 4 1/2 or a 5, remember the book, and liked it for what it was. Don't see the english language version for this.

At the center of the galaxy, a vast, unknown civilization is preparing for an event of epic proportions: the launching of the greatest, most gorgeous, most technologically advanced Starship ever built-the Starship Titanic. An earthling would see it as a mixture of the Chrysler Building, the tomb of Tutankhamen, and Venice. But less provincial onlookers would recognize it as the design of Leovinus, the galaxy's most renowned architect. He is an old man now, and the creation of the Starship Titanic is the pinnacle achievement of his twenty-year career. The night before the launch, Leovinus is prowling around the ship having a last little look. With mounting alarm he begins to find things are not right: unfinished workmanship, cybersystems not working correctly, robots colliding with doors. How could this have happened? And how could this have happened without his knowing?

Something somewhere is terribly wrong.On the following day, in an artificial event staged for the media, the Starship Titanic will leave its construction dock under autopilot and, a few days later, make its way to the terminal to pick up passengers for its maiden voyage. Although the ship will be deserted during its very first flight, it is nevertheless a major event, watched by all the galaxy's media.Hugely, magnificently, the fabulous ship eases its way forward from the construction dock, picks up speed, sways a bit, wobbles a bit, veers wildly, and just before it can do massive damage to everything around it, appears to undergo SMEF (Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure).In just ten seconds, the whole, stupendous enterprise is over. And our story has just begun.

Somehow three earthlings, one Blerontin journalist, a semideranged parrot, and a shipful of disoriented robots must overcome their differences. It's the only way to save the Starship Titanic ("The Ship That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong") from certain destruction and rescue the economy of an entire planet-not to mention to survive the latest threat, an attack by a swarm of hostile shipbuilders. . . .

I feel like I should point out that I've never played the game and always assumed the game was based on the book and just never got around to playing it, before it was too old for the computer I owned at the time. Also read and loved the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, but while that series contains a jokes about the Starship Titanic, this book is very much standalone. Which I didn't mind at all, because I never expected it to be part of something else.

A fun little romp through space, full of stupid little clichés and nods towards sci-fi authors and fans. I must have read this book 10 times at least and I still enjoy it very much every single time. Of course the bits that I love change a little over time, but most of them have stayed the same.
The characters are fun and a little silly, the sci-fi element and the spaceship description are absolutely gorgeous and I especially enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek description of the alien races in this book.
Would absolutely recommend this for a bit of fun and light afternoon reading on vacation and after whenever you need to escape your own life a little, because it's a wonderful contrast to the serious things we experience every day.