And Another Thing... (Eoin Colfer)

And Another Thing...
(The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Book 6)
Eoin Colfer
Hyperion
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION:  The hapless human Arthur Dent, his hitchhiking Betelguesean friend Ford Prefect, the one-time human girlfriend of the President of the Galaxy Trillian, and Arthur and Trillian's moody teenage daughter Random were last seen on Earth - at least, an Earth from a dimension that wasn't destroyed by Vogons - facing down the planet-devouring death rays of the Grebulons.  This story, the long-anticipated sixth installment of the late Douglas Adams' classic sci-fi series, begins with Arthur, Ford, Trillian, and Random facing down the planet-devouring death rays of the Grebulons, after a brief mental sidetrack into the lives they wished they'd led.  With improbably good timing, ex-President Zaphod Beeblebrox and the Infinite Improbability Drive ship Heart of Gold (now powered by one of Zaphod's heads instead of the original shipboard computer) turn up to snatch the foursome from the soon-to-be-destroyed-in-all-remaining-dimensions Earth.  Meanwhile, Prostetnic Jeltz, the Vogon responsible for the destruction of Earth in this and all other possible dimensions (to ensure a smooth and large-planetary-obstacle-free hyperspace bypass passage), turns his bureaucruiser Business End toward a new target.  Evidently, a handful of Earthlings survived the fall of their planet on a small Magrathean-crafted world called Nano... and surviving Earthlings could mean official protests and demands for restitution, just the sort of justice the Vogons would rather avoid.
Thus begins another chapter in the lives of Arthur Dent and company, a chapter involving unemployed gods, a dark matter ship with a crush on its former owner, improbable love affairs, strained family ties, planet-endangering peril, and of course cheese.

REVIEW: I'm not sure how to review this one.  My original impression of the series was severely tainted by the final book, which read like a dark cloud spitting all over an otherwise enjoyable picnic lunch.  From what I gather, the late Douglas Adams wasn't too keen on the way he ended the series, and may have been considering a sixth book himself before Fate decided otherwise. Now comes this book, written by Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl young adult fantasy series. In tackling this book, he not only took on an iconic universe, but picked up the considerable challenge of writing a sequel to a series that ended fairly definitively in the previous volume, with the utter annihilation of the characters, the planet, and the titular guidebook.  Of course, in sci-fi, dead doesn't mean dead unless the rating say otherwise, and in a universe as irreverent and deliberately illogical as the one Adams created, it means even less than that.  Carrying on that universe, Colfer comes across as a bit over-eager; he frequently interrupts the narrative with bits from the Guide's vast repository of generally useless galactic trivia, a gimmick that works better on screen (as in the last movie or the BBC adaptations) than in print, and he almost goes out of his way bringing in species and characters from Adam's books as if hoping to give extra nudges and winks to any remaining skeptics about the revival of the Hitchhiker print franchise.  Other than that, he did a good job capturing the whimsical, occasionally fatalistic feel of the original books.  As for the characters, they were pretty much as I remembered them... unfortunately so, in the case of Random.  Except for the very last bit of the book, she was nothing but a cliche of a brooding teenager, and even then she took her moody selfishness too far.  But, then, the characters always had a touch of the exaggerated to them, as it was a deliberately exaggerated and silly universe.  In the end, Colfer manages to pull most of the story's wild threads together into a fairly cohesive ending... a distinctly better ending, I must say, than the one Adams smacked me in the face with in Mostly Harmless (the fifth Hitchhiker book.)  I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that there's a very strong hint of more books to come; I wonder if Colfer will get to write them, or if the resurrected franchise will be passed like a torch among authors, to carry where they will.  In any event, even if this wasn't five-star literature, it entertained me while I read it and left me reasonably satisfied, and for that it earns Good marks.  I mostly read it hoping to dispell the gloom of depression cast by the fifth book, and in that I have to say Colfer definitely came through with flying colors.