Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic
by Terry Jones (Pan, 1997)
audiobook read by Bill Nighy (Pan, 2023)
Given only a three-week deadline, Jones produced a passable Adams pastiche. Starship Titanic has its moments but more often serves to highlight, through laboured contrast, the finesses that Adams himself sweated blood over in pulling off his particular brand of freewheeling facetiousness.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
dir. Garth Jennings (2005)
Depressingly close to being really, really good. The Vogons are top-notch and the reworked characterisations have much to offer. Ironically, though, while the newly scripted scenes are vintage Adams, a great deal of slavishly reproduced old material fails to hit the mark.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Hexagonal Phase
by Eoin Colfer; adapted by Dirk Maggs (BBC, 2018)
Colfer’s contribution to Hitchhiker’s probably works better in adaptation—as a continuation of the seminal radio series—than as a novel. Forty years on, the original actors have returned to their recording booths and sound ever-young, still invested in Adams’ cosmic zaniness.
Mostly Harmless
by Douglas Adams (William Heinemann, 1992); audiobook read by Martin Freeman (Bolinda, 2006)
An ingeniously plotted novel—by far the most coherent of the Hitchhiker’s books—and one in which Adams at last paid attention to characterisation; but the effect is spoiled somewhat by an incongruous (if by then expected) jokiness in the prose style.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams (Macmillan Digital Audio, 2007)
[first published by Pan, 1979] {Read by Stephen Fry}
In embellishing the riotous and extemporised cerebral peregrinations of the Hitchhiker’s radio series, Douglas Adams crafted one of the funniest (and most-quoted-from) novels of any genre. Stephen Fry’s range of narrative inflections subsequently affords the audiobook status as a distinct dramatic production.