And Another Thing...

And Another Thing… is the title of the sixth installment of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Since Adams is currently dead, the book was written by Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series. Much as I like Artemis Fowl and all of Eoin's other books, I'm skeptical about this one. Douglas Adams wrote unique books. In fact, the whole basic point of the books was to be weird. I don't think anyone can really replace him, and that's not just a sentimental statement. However, I'm only mostly skeptical. I used to be very skeptical, until I read a plot summary:


“The story begins as death rays bear down on Earth, and the characters awaken from a virtual reality. Zaphod picks them up shortly before they're killed, but completely fails to escape the death beams. They are then saved by Bowerick Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged, who they agree to help kill. Zaphod travels to Asgard to get Thor's help. In the meantime, the Vogons are heading to destroy a colony of people who also escaped Earth's destruction, on the planet Nano. Arthur, Wowbagger, Trillian and Random head to Nano to try to stop the Vogons, and on the journey, Wowbagger and Trillian fall in love, making Wowbagger question whether or not he wants to be killed. Zaphod arrives with Thor, who then signs up to be the planet's God. He almost kills Wowbagger, but thanks to Random, he only loses his immortality, and gets married to Trillian. Thor then stops the first Vogon attack, and apparently dies. Meanwhile, Constant Mown, son of Prostetnic Jeltz, convinces his father that the people on the planet are not citizens of Earth, but are, in fact, citizens of Nano, which means that it would be illegal to kill them. As the book draws to a close, Arthur is on his way to check out a possible university for Random, when, during a hyperspace jump, he is flung across alternate universes, has a brief encounter with Fenchurch, and ends up exactly where he'd want to be. And then the Vogons turn up again."

Sounds entertaining and strange enough. But what I really liked was that the title is  taken from the third chapter of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, where it appears in the following passage:

“	The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying "And another thing…" twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument."

This reminds me that Colfer's adding another book a while after the series has died, which I find funny. I suspect that's what Colfer meant by the title as well.


I haven't read the book, so I can't say whether it's any good. In fact, I mostly just made this post so that I wouldn't have a little mindless post about HSM as the first post on the blog page.