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

hmmm.... well i keep mine in a jar next to my bed so i guess its gree if someone steals it

I sold mine on eBay last year for a tenner.

You ripped 'em off. Nice job.

Yes well, I too have embraced the true meaning of capitalism.

Robert Rankin who writes novels, one being Sprout Mask Replica is a satirist. He has a penchant for Sprouts and allotments and is bedwettingly funny. I'm reading 'The greatest show off Earth ' this very moment. I appreciate the need also to remember people and the benefit of religion in the aid to mourning and other rituals, but it is entirely unnecessary to force people to regiment themselves to a Sunday service and guilt-trip them if they don't. Sunday was only chosen for convienience. The sabbath is actually Saturday, and with all the calender hiccoughs throughout the centuries, that day is probably wrong anyway.
Hare Krishnas sometimes wear orange robes and I think they have to say 'Hare Krishna' at least a thousand times a day or it's sinful. Hahahaha, one of the more peculiar religions.

Aye, aye, but surely it could have something to do with aforementioned Captain Beefheart album?

And yes, it would seem so. I wonder how long it takes to say all that?

You have "The Greatest Show Off Earth"?!!! I've been looking for that book for nearly a year!

Check eBay.

I'm buying it on Amazon as I type.

Smartly done.

I seem to have timed it perfectly. According to the ETA, my book will arrive at roughly the same time as I finish the last Robert Rankin book that I have.

How many pages are they, roughly, on average?

Approx. 300.

Not small but not chunky. I'm now reading a collection of short stories. My favourite type of book, succinct, short and enjoyable bite-size morsels of literary food.

Sate-Hen has got to be one of the funniest Evil forces around.

Yes! Me too. I write a few as well, generally I find out later that the idea has already been done and better, but I keep on striking out in the hope of originality sometime.

Just working my way through a Kafka compilation, having browsed most of an Allen book. Yourself?

Great news, the book arrived early! It's a first edition paperback, so it doesn't match in with the rest of my second edition paperbacks, but it will do.

And I cracked up when I read the name "Sat-Hen".

Surely that's better? I'd always go for a first edition over a second edition. Is the cover art different or somethign? Enjoy it anyway.

Always first ed. for collection and second ed. for reading.
A first ed. Phil. Pullman Northern lights hard-back is worth around a grand. That's only 20ish years old!

I reading a fantasy compilation called Wizard fantastic. Edited by Martin H. Greenberg. He's a pretty solid and enjoyable editor. I haven't yet got round to writing any short fiction, but I have a few ideas bumping around and I think a couple are original. I think it was Cambell that said that you don't need an original idea, as long as you write an original story with it. It might have been Gold or Heinlein but anyway the point is still valid. Write a good story and it'll remain a good one even if it has been done similarly before.

Ah, true. I don't have the stamina to do more than a few thousand words, but it's good fun. I keep a little pad of ideas that occur to me so that I won't lose them.

Is Northern Lights really that old? The sequels came out very quickly then! Once Subtle Knife was out it was only a few years before the Amber Spyglass was out, wasn't it?

It's my opinion that every story that can ever be told has already been told, but that they are all told in different ways, with different characters and settings.

If you know what I mean, and I'm sure that you do.

Well, if you get down to it, all stories are really about sex, or death, or both of them. It's just aspects of them that are there to be explored.

But I don't think that every story that can be told already has been. You couldn't get stories about the internet before computers were invented, for example, and you wouldn't get stories about aliens before we became conscious that we might not be the only intelligent in the universe. Other technological and psychological developments will bring new things that we can't even imagine now. You might argue that stories about aliens are just updated stories about angels or spirits or gods, but I say that there's something new there that wasn't there before, and it's probably in our way of thinking about them.