This work is unpolished, unfinished, and it's totally obvious. It cuts off as abruptly as the final piece of Bach (BWV 1080), leaving a vague disappointment and a void that won't ever be filled. I never met Douglas Adams, and I'll never have a chance to, but perhaps one day I'll visit his grave.

Douglas Adams was unique in his ability for existential satire. From his portrayal of transgalactic airports to the way Norse gods would act in modern London, all his work shows a delightful talent for combining the surreal and the mundane. He mixes them, like a fancy drink, garnishes it, and offers you one of the most pleasingly different word cocktails that you'll ever taste.

The Salmon of Doubt didn't contain this in the same density as his other novels, and perhaps if I were reading it without the necessary context of his writings I would be left confused and underwhelmed. But knowing Adams' oeuvre makes it almost-make-sense, in the way the first cut-off half of an absurdly complicated mystery novel might. I'm rating this five stars regardless of the unpolished writing because of the emotions it instills in me- the guaranteed sadness, the sense that I lost someone important to me before I'd ever even met him.

The Salmon of Doubt is a hard book to categorize. It contains various items from Douglas Adam's hard drive downloaded after his death, along with some items from other sources, and his half finished novel The Salmon of Doubt. It was compiled and published after his death. The book as a whole is an interesting look into the mind of a man who, although remembered for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is so much more. If you want to truly know all the facets of his mind, this is the book to read. He was not only a great wit, but a concerned environmentalist, and philosopher. Highly recommended for any Douglas Adams fan!

Leider wurde "Lachs im Zweifel" nie zu Ende geschrieben... Aber wenigstens gab es ein paar Stücke, die hier zusammengetragen und veröffentlicht wurden. Blöd nur, dass ich jetzt natürlich wissen möchte, was aus der anderen Hälfte der Katze geworden ist... Da Douglas Adams' Stil einzigartig ist, wird diese Frage wohl unbeantwortet bleiben.

Das Buch versammelt unterschiedliche Texte über und von Douglas Adams, die uns u.a. auch seine privaten Seiten aufzeigen. Sein Einsatz für den Tierschutz, seine Faszination für Apple (sehr witzig, diese Episoden im Jahre 2023 zu lesen) und seine Beziehung zum Schreiben.

Interviews, Erinnerungen, Textfetzen - das alles ist hier versammelt. Es ist kein reiner Dirk Gently, wie der Rückentext vielleicht vermuten lässt, sondern eine Hommage an Douglas Adams und sein Werk. Deswegen in erster Linie für Fans geeignet, die den Autoren, seine Werke und dessen Art bereits kennen.

Ein schöner Abschied, dieses Buch.

Douglas Adams has a pleasant writing style and this was a very fun little read.

I came to this posthumous publication with some uncertainty. Was the estate of Douglas Adams attempting to cash in on whatever they found on his hard drive? However, considering the fact that he sold over 15 million books while he was alive, his heirs probably aren't short of a quid. I was delighted to find that this volume contains a plethora of real treats. Apart from his unfinished Dirk Gently novel there are short pieces, many non-fiction, along with speeches, interviews, & other items. All contain Adams' superlative wit & amount to a fitting tribute to a gifted humourist & environmentalist who left us way too soon (at 49). And they reminded me that it is way too long since I last re-read the Hitch-hikers series. Vale, Douglas. One of a kind.

2.5 stars

Since you come into this book expecting Douglas Adams, and what you get is only somewhat Douglas Adams, it was a huge let down. The man's writing is very distinct, and while the little bits that are his are good, the other bits aren't.

There's honestly really no way of me writing about this book without gushing all over the place. Despite the undeniable brilliance of his other books, Salmon of Doubt very quietly takes you into the mind of the introspective and thoughtful Adams that must have spent time staring deeply into the unknowable. It gets to the core of what he wrote about and why; his fascination with science which he would eventually find amusing and eventually have it evolve into jokes that he'd write into his books. And to draw all of this together, the infuriating ease with which he places words together. Though he was notorious for procrastinating and finding the writing process as arduous as almost anyone can testify, Adams was also known (after being forced to) for being able to sit down and write straight for two weeks and come out with a book. And his humor from his blog writings are so casual and flippant that there's no way to not feel awful about how unfunny and unwitty you are.

I appreciated this book for the glimpse it gave into Adams' mind, which turned out to be a minutely aware and self-searching one about technology, about himself, about life, the universe, and everything. A bittersweet compendium celebrating the man he was and mourning the future books he'll never write, the observations he'll never perfectly word in a single apt sentence.

UPDATE ON "2ND" READING:
Technically it's not my second reading, but it's been a really long time since I sat down and read the whole thing again from start to finish. It's a book I remember huge chunks of, listen to the audiobook when I'm feeling restless, dip into it when I half remember a passage and want to reread the whole section and then end up reading the whole several following chapters. In a way I've read it quite a lot. But it's been a while since I really read it all the way through, taking in every word and really parsing everything he says.

Turns out that I've grown up a lot in that time.

I read it, incidentally, as a break from reading another one of my favorite writers whose most current work hasn't been evoking a lot of enthusiasm in me. What could be more appropriate, when disappointed by an author whose current work I feel like is somewhat regressive, than reading an author whose work never had time to grow?

Adams died at the relatively tender age of 49. It was unexpected, heartbreaking, and every time I go through this book, either briefly or wholly, I am struck by the sadness of that. He never got to see all the ways that the internet has exploded, for better or for worse - and the thing about Adams was the fact that, for the most part, he was expertly attuned to seeing technology as being for the better. His writings in this book about technology are the stuff I come back to the most. At a close second are his religious philosophies. What I got from his books at the time was not a resentment of religion but a fascination in our physical world. That our world was amazing and beautiful enough that religion wasn't required - but that didn't necessarily mean doing away with it or imposing that on other people.

And that's where I get a little relieved that I didn't have to watch Adams evolve. Because I've watched Dawkins do it, I've watched Fry do it. I've watched it turn into a spurning of religion in any form. Adams manages to hang onto his acknowledgement and understanding of it, but it's with a hint of European condescension and not exactly a difficult hop, skip, and a jump to the atheists of today. He paints it as something for the primitive locals to accept and the educated foreigners to understand. In that way, I'm glad that Adams is trapped forever in 2001 and older. It's one thing for someone to say that then; it's another thing for that mindset to holdout to this day. And I wish and want and hope and believe that he wouldn't have kept his foibles for another 16 years.

And by god are his foibles reflected well in what was left over of Salmon of Doubt. He's never been the greatest with female characters - I believe that it helped massively that Lalla Ward and Mary Tamm were sharp enough people to input personality into anything for the times he wrote Romana. They're invariably "attractive" (a massive pet peeve of mine being that female characters are introduced with a quantifier on that account - something, incidentally, that the book I was avoiding did) and often inscrutable. Richard and Arthur are both, in a way, bland, but are also both, in a way, interesting characters with interests and focus. His fumbling with characters like Kate and Trillian, bland with no personality or interests (or interests that change wildly from one story to the next), brings to sharp relief how bad he was at writing them. I don't exactly understand what was so incredibly inscrutable about the women-folk to Adams, but it does make me glad I don't have a book from him to be disappointed by. And yet, at the same time, I suffer under the missing half of Salmon of Doubt - about a cat that is missing its bottom half, like some sort of hellish ironic parallel. It remains unfinished, unfound, and despite apparently an entire well of writing in his harddrive, unknowable, taking the fate of Gusty Winds with it.

I love Adams - when I think of people whose works I've been invariably changed by, influenced by, Adams sits on top of that tower, beaming beatifically. But I'm old enough to opine myself, to have perspective and opinions separate from him (I didn't, once), and with that perspective, it's not that he's fallen in my eyes, it's that I've risen a lot since I last really perused him. This book is still incredibly important to me, and I won't deny that reading Dawkins' eulogy at the end still brings me to tears.

This is most definitely not "Dirk Gently #3".
This is a motley collection of odds and ends found on Douglas Adams' many hard disks after his sudden death.
There is the beginning of a Dirk Gently story here that is going nowhere, padded with some stuff that just possibly might be connected to the plot, based on three sentences the author mailed to his editor. This whole mess runs to 79 pages. Very disappointing.
The rest of the collection I enjoyed. Letters, articles, speeches, interviews. The spirit of Douglas Adams, clever and funny, shines through. Still glad I got this in the library and didn't shell out any real money for it though.
And by the way, don't believe the subtitle "Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time" either, you get thirteen pages of Zaphod, that's it.

I can't believe it's over.

Although this book isn't a finished novel, it is still brilliantly funny and unexpected. The essays on technology in the middle section of the volume don't add much, but many of the humorous sketches were delightful. The collected fragments of what might have become a new novel are amazingly entertaining for something so incomplete. Well worth reading for any Douglas Adams fan.

It was inevitably at least a little disappointing, but then, this is the price of entry paid at the start, and we understand it explicitly: we will never know the end of this last tale. Further, we'll never know whether Adams would have kept it in Gently form, or figured out how to transform it into another (final?) Hitchhiker.

The journey through was sometimes a little dull, which for me was a disappointing realization as a fan of DNA's many styles and interests. This isn't at all unusual for a journey, however. There are always boring bits on the road. It was fine. I was traveling just the same. Some of the tech talk is outdated, but most still worthy of the knowledge and insight Adams had gathered, sifted, and filtered. The fiction, when I came to it, was a delight, exciting, intriguing. New scenery, but familiar, because it was Adams country, through and through. Unexpected laughter sometimes startled people near me, as had always happened when I read a Douglas Adams book.

Knowing and willingly paying the price might have made it easier when I came to the end. But I was still, unexpectedly, perplexingly, sad to reach the precipice, a road which was, assuredly, going *somewhere*, but torn away ahead of me, a great cloudy chasm in its place, and fuzzy shapes on the other side of it, too far to make out distinct forms or gauge the distance properly. If only. If only.

A collection of essays, speeches, ramblings unearthed on his hard drive(s), one short story culled from a BBC annual, and the titular unfinished Dirk Gently novel. The essays are breezy and witty, often lacking focus when discussing science and technology, but comprise (realistically) the most readable of his non-fiction output. There are some readers, yours included, who feel Adams spent himself on the Hitchhiker’s books: although the Dirk Gentlys were absurdist romps sutured with awesome logic, they didn’t hang together as novels. The short excerpt from The Salmon of Doubt, however, might prove me wrong: the usual warmth and humour is present, although in nascent form, (the narration even slips from third into first person, a sign of Adams’s dissatisfaction). But all in all, nobody who loves Adams could resist reading this book, despite snoozing through the travel/nature pieces to get to the stuff they want. It’s a pleasing gallimaufry. Savour it, because there is no more.

Passata l'iniziale diffidenza verso questo genere di operazioni, che mi sembrano sempre molto commerciali e prive di amore verso gli autori scomparsi, mi sono trovato davanti qualcosa di gradevole e gustoso.
La prima metà, saggistica, è buona, con articoli ed aneddoti su vari aspetti dell'ingegno umano e dell'umana condizione, che fanno riflettere, sorridere, interrogarsi. Certo, alcuni sono un pò sottotono, ma tutti hanno il pregio di farci conoscere meglio questo autore, le sue idee ed il suo modo di pensare.
La seconda parte contiene un breve racconto dell'universo della Guida Galattica ("Sicuro, sicurissimo, perfettamente sicuro") ed i primi capitoli de "Il salmone del dubbio", nuova avventura del detective olistico Dirk Gently, incompiuta.
Questa parte è tanto meravigliosa, nella misura in cui amate questo autore: se la Guida Galattica vi ha lasciati indifferenti, non troverete nulla di interessante. Se Dirk Gently non vi è piaciuto, odierete lo spreco di pagine dedicato alla sua nuova avventura, anche se incompiuta.
Ma se viceversa li avete apprezzati, troverete "pane per i vostri denti": storie e personaggi assurdi, stravaganti, a tratti follemente divertenti.
Personalmente ho gradito molto la parte saggistica, perchè mostra l'uomo, prima dello scrittore. Un uomo arguto e sagace, raffinato nell'intelletto, dannatamente "british", capace di tratteggiare situazioni ed idiosincrasie del nostro tempo.
Viceversa il racconto incompleto di Gently, proprio perchè incompleto lascia l'amaro in bocca.