YMMV / And Another Thing...

---

• Crack Pairing: Trillian and Wowbagger.
• Contested Sequel: Reception to this story has been all over the place. While it's pretty universally agreed that it's not a substitute for an actual Douglas Adams-penned book, opinions differ wildly on whether or not it's actually a good story in its own right. Some fans like it and are happy that the Hitchhiker's series got to end on a more positive note than the bleak and depressing Mostly Harmless, others abolutely hate it and consider it an utter travesty and a mockery of Douglas Adams's work, while yet others just think it's So Okay, It's Average.
• Older Than They Think: This isn't the first The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy novel that wasn't written by Douglas Adams. Terry Jones wrote a novelization to Starship Titanic, a spin-off game based on events mentioned in Life, the Universe and Everything.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: At least a significant portion of the Douglas Adams fans out there were not at all satisfied with this book. Eoin Colfer at least acknowledges this at the start of the book, in a roundabout way not unlike most of Adams' trademark Seinfeldian Side Stories: the five of three results given for typing "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" into the book itself (which is an analogy for the five stories by Adams) are described as "-a lengthy article accompanied by many hours of video and audio files, and some dramatic reconstructions featuring quite well-known actors." Then it lists a text-only appendix at the bottom of the screen (obviously Colfer's entry) "-with absolutely no audio, and not so much as a frame of video shot by a student director who made the whole thing in his bedroom and paid his drama soc. mates with sandwiches." - before admitting "This is the story of that appendix"
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Trillian, who came across as a very poor mother in Mostly Harmless, thanks to her Married to the Job lifestyle, is much more sympathetic here and spends a lot of the book dealing with her guilt over how she raised Random.
  • Random herself, thanks to her Lotus-Eater Machine experience of serving as Galactic President, transcends her original Emo Teen characterization and now has ambitions of opening Earth up to contact with the rest of the galaxy.
• Squick: Zaphod's spare neck hole.
• Strangled by the Red String: Trillian and Wowbagger, justified by the fact dark space amplifies emotions.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: "Frood" isn't an adjective! Zark is spelled with a lower-case z! Did this guy even read the first five books?

---