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.

Hitchhiker's Guide meets Monty Python. What more could you ask for? The settings and characters are pure Adams but the writing is unquestionably Terry Jones. A fun reads for fans of both styles with a couple laugh out loud passages.

Ξεκαρδιστικό σε σημεία, πέρασα καλά.

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...

For anybody who's a fan of both Monty Python and Douglas Adams, this book may seem a bit disappointing. It seems like Terry Jones watered down Douglas Adams' writing a bit. It feels like he took the story of the CD-ROM game and wrote it as one of his children's books. There are bits in there that approach the laughs you expect from either Adams or Jones on their own. They don't carry through the whole book so in the end it does not live up to expectations. It reads more like Erik the Viking, then any of the Hitchhiker's books.
I did really enjoy the interactions with the robot crew of the starship. Perhaps because they reminded me of Monty Python sketches with Douglas Adams characters. I did find it amusing that a character's name is The, short for The Journalist, until we find out his real name at the end.
It's a fun read. Just don't have any expectations when you read it. It makes the story much more enjoyable.

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.

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).

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.

It’s the writers of Hitchhikers Guide and Monty Python working on a book together. I should’ve loved it! It fine, had a few funny moments that were very Pythonesque but about halfway through it felt like a slog. It should have been an automatic new favorite book of mine but it just didn’t live up to expectations.

Funny and Adams-esk.
Good but not great.

Love Monty Python, Love Douglas Adams, enjoyed the video game this book was based on. Disappointed in the book.

I got this book from my grandpa. I read Life, the Universe and Everything and then read this book. This was not written like what Douglas Adams wrote like.