Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: And Another Thing…,
Eoin Colfer’s authorized sequel to the late Douglas Adams’s
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, is a horrible, pointless
book. The first, and perhaps most egregious, crime Colfer commits
is simply not being funny. His book is unimaginative and sloppily
devoted to Adams’s previous work (characters who were created to be
punch lines to throwaway non-sequitur jokes in the original series,
like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, are given backstories and
motivations in this new book, spoiling the joke by overexplaining it).
Colfer doesn’t even try to mimic Adams’s sublime
Wodehouse-writes-Monty Python-in-space mashup style. Instead, he
vomits up some halfhearted fan fiction and expects to coast on his
predecessor’s reputation.
Why did Colfer agree to continue a work considered by many to be one
of the highlights of late-20th-century humorous writing? Promotional
materials provided to The Stranger with the book offer one
answer: Colfer says, “My aim is to introduce H2G2 to a new
generation!” But that, of course, is bullshit. Teenagers will
always find and adore Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series, the way
generations of children always manage to find S. E. Hinton and Homer
Price and the Chronicles of Narnia and all the other classics.
Colfer’s addition is more likely to confuse prospective buyers than to
bring new readers to Adams’s best-selling series. No, the money was
probably too good to ignore, and since somebody else would have done it
anyway, Colfer stepped up to the corporate publishing machine as a
willing whore.
He’s even fucked up all the goodwill he’s previously earned to do
it. For as long as Colfer has been touring with his own Artemis Fowl
series, he has read at University Book Store, and the booksellers at
UBS have supported his work from his days as an unknown
author—avid fans eagerly hand-selling his titles, creating even
more Colfer fans one book at a time. The bookstore supported him for
years, long before his work achieved the kind of success that would
allow him to sell out to Hyperion Books. But now that he’s on tour with
this abortion of Adams’s legacy and a full corporate publicity machine
behind him, Colfer is snubbing his biggest Seattle supporters and reading instead at the University Village Barnes & Noble
(additional horrors: Colfer is reading with Dave Barry, the biggest
known suckhole of literary comedy that America has ever produced). So
much for loyalty to the fans.
The modern history of publishing is full of these little travesties:
For the last 20 years, publishers have been churning out sequels to
Gone with the Wind and the works of Jane Austen, and authors
have been happily selling their reputations for a quick paycheck and
the opportunity to fuck up another author’s life’s work. It’s not
honorable, it’s not ethical, and, most importantly for Colfer: It’s
just not funny. 
Eoin Colfer reads Fri Oct 30, University
Village Barnes
& Noble, 7 pm, free.
Well said.
Your comments lead me to believe you have some kind of personal beef with the author or publisher, Paul. This reads less like a book review than a whiny kid with a grudge.
Eoin Colfer didn’t sell out to Hyperion. He’s always been published by Hyperion in the United States (Hyperion Kids).
And I’m unsure why you take such umbrage at this particular sequel when there are loads of them this fall, the most hyped of all being the Brandon Sanderson continuation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time Series. (And in both cases, if I remember correctly, the widow of the deceased author asked the new writer to finish off the series as a favor.)
There’s a sequel to Dracula, to Winnie the Pooh and even Peter Pan (which is what Dave Barry & Ridley Peason collaborated on and most likely why Colfer is reading at Barnes & Noble instead of U Books – it fits a theme).
So why the hate on this sequel?
Your comments lead me to believe you have some kind of personal beef with the author or publisher, Paul. This reads less like a book review than a whiny kid with a grudge.
Eoin Colfer didn’t sell out to Hyperion. He’s always been published by Hyperion in the United States (Hyperion Kids).
And I’m unsure why you take such umbrage at this particular sequel when there are loads of them this fall, the most hyped of all being the Brandon Sanderson continuation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time Series. (And in both cases, if I remember correctly, the widow of the deceased author asked the new writer to finish off the series as a favor.)
There’s a sequel to Dracula, to Winnie the Pooh and even Peter Pan (which is what Dave Barry & Ridley Peason collaborated on and most likely why Colfer is reading at Barnes & Noble instead of U Books – it fits a theme).
So why the hate on this sequel?
@Becca: Good question! All reading is personal, and so I do have a personal beef with this book in particular. I loved the Hitchhiker’s Guide books when I was 12 or 13—-read them over and over—-whereas I have no personal history with the Wheel of Time and so can’t speak to the authenticity of the sequel. I think I make my feelings on the Peter Pan book clear enough here. Winnie the Pooh got subsumed by Disney a long time ago, so I find it hard to get concerned about it, and I’ve looked at the Dracula book and it’s so dumb that it will disappear on its own.
And besides, I criticize all these kinds of books at the end of the column; I was just using an example that personally riled me up to get there.