… said Douglas Adams, brushing down his dressing gown and staring wildly around him, slightly disorientated by the spinning motion which had woken him up in his coffin. "Wasn't I dead? Who the hell are you? Where's my tea?"
"I" said a small Irishman, "am Owen Colfer, an android with Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's latest Genuine People Personality technology. I am, therefore, also you. In a manner of speaking."
"Now wait a minute", expostulated the late author. "You can't just dig me up".
"No", said the stranger. "But Infinidim Enterprises can. The Encyclopaedia Galactica, the memoirs of the Eccentrica Gallumbits, the Three-Breasted Whore of Eroticon 6 - all flops I'm afraid, and Christmas-like events are approaching. No, what we needed was a massive pile of galactic credits to spend on Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters. And on new digital watches, of course. The only solution, old chum, was to rip off your dressing gown, pull down your pyjama trousers and violate you in as many unimaginative ways as we possibly could."
"But. But. You just can't dig me up and pretend everything's fine. You're behaving like the Vogons, turning up and blasting everything I stood for into a million little pieces".
"We can, and we have. What you thought was reality was in fact a bourgeois virtual construct, with your primitive ideas of integrity and authorship. We can take your old books, extract the stuff about tea, cricket and Fenchurch, discard the rest and make more trillions of credits than the Frantles from the ninety-eighth dimension made from the Zantle exhibits four billion years ago".*
"But. But. But…"
"No, no, monkey man. We need the money. And let's be honest, this pastiche thing's zarking easy, isn't it Zaphod?
"Yeah, froody", said Zaphod, banging his heads together. "Now let's, y'know, find some excitement, adventure and really wild things. Again. Coming, earthman?".
"Great", said Douglas Adams, as a few fingerjoints detached themselves from his rotting corpse. "All I ever wanted from life was a decent cup of tea. Even Marvin would find this particularly depressing".
The Zantles, as everybody in the galaxy knows, were the cunningest pan-dimensional beings of their zallifrarg. To explain this to a carbon-based lifeform such as yourself would be so difficult that even the Guide, by now a pan-pan-dimensional positronic lifeform, would melt its biocorcuits even trying to think down to your level.
3 comments:
WAT
Told you it was shit.
Illustrated beautifully by the fact that you have a much closer grasp on Adams than Colfer has.
Its all so frustrating isn't it?
Trying to think positively about the 'franchise', I wondered whether it might be an interesting idea, insofar as Douglas Adams was (in my view) a terrible novelist, but just the most exquisite thinker and sketch-writer. So the publisher wanted to get an *actual* novelist in to write some actual sci-fi novels with the characters.
But then I realised that these books have not very much to do with science fiction at all. They're philosophy, aren't they?
You can't develop someone else's philosophy.
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