h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I just got around to reading it. It felt faithful to the setting and character. As a pure science-fiction (and I guess fantasy) story it was on par with, maybe even better, than most of the earlier Hitchhiker's, It even introduced some new characters that I rather liked (Hillman springs to mind). BUT I DIDN'T LITERALLY LAUGH OUT LOUD A SINGLE TIME. This is disappointing in a Colfer book and would be inconceivable with a DNA novel. Colfer's a good writer, but he isn't funny in the same way DNA is. I mean this both in the sense that he's less funny and that his humor style doesn't quite mesh with the setting. Don't get me wrong there was a large amount of ambient comedy, some if it was even pretty good, but Colfer completely failed to produce the grade A stuff that litters DNA's work.

DNA does these wonderful asides. And Colfer wanted to do the same, but knew he couldn't, so he put them in as "Guide Notes", with a heading and everything, far more formal than the way DNA wove them into the narrative. And that's ... well, it's a good thing that he wrote like himself, and didn't really try to imitate Adams's style, but, to be honest, the Guide Notes just don't work. And they're just close enough to DNA's asides to remind you of what you're missing.

Still glad I read it, mind you.

TRiG.

Thats about how I felt.

Some bits of it (possibly the 'guide notes'), felt a little bit to me, like he was 'tryign to hard', if not exactly to emulate Douglas's style, then something 'close' to it... and that didn't work; The bits where it went into more of the authors own style worked a bit better for me, but actually, in some bits of the narrative it was quite close to DNS; but the few percent it patently wasn't* DNA was a very notacible percent or two... if that makes sense
The BBC Radio Four adaptation of it worked pretty well, though I think I missed half of it at the time (though I'm sure I have it recorded on the PC somewhere still waiting for me to edit it properly (they showed it in such short blocks that I wanted to edit it into a single or just a handful of files, so I could listen to it in a few big chunks rather than very short episode lengths))

Exactly. Thats why I liked it, but think I would have preferred a pure Colfer book.