I thought the book was going to be crashingly sexist for the first 60 pages or so. So I'll mainly just refer to the author as Adams / Jones, except when I'm explicitly commenting on which of them might have contributed particular ideas. I've never played the game, because I didn't have a computer capable of running it when it came out, so I can't judge how close the relationship between the game and the novel is, and therefore which aspects of the novel might have come primarily from Adams, and which from Jones. So Jones was working with a basic scenario set out by Adams, and presumably some briefing notes about the characters and what ought to happen to them - but the details were down to him. Adams originally intended to write the novel as well as the game himself, but as deadlines loomed and he decided that his primary interest was the game, he passed the work of producing the novel on to Terry Jones. Basically, it is the novelisation of a computer game, Starship Titanic, which Douglas Adams produced in the late '90s. I'm not going to be terribly complimentary about it, unfortunately, and for that reason if nothing else it's probably best to say a bit about its authorship before I start criticising. But then when I saw it for £1 on a book-stall at the excellent Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space conference in the summer, it seemed silly to pass it up. Except that obviously, it isn't actually by him, so the urge was never quite strong enough to make me actually hunt it down. I've read, listened to or watched everything else Douglas Adams ever produced after all, and this was the last remaining item of his which I hadn't experienced. Starship Titanic - The Ship That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong.Strange_complexI've always meant to read this. Strange characters, stunning environments, wild satire, and a series of puzzles of escalating weirdness all add up to. State-of-the-art language technology lets you do this. To do this you will have to gain the trust of the robots, which you do the same way you would with anybody else - by talking to them. Your task is to discover what has happened here, to reveal the deep conspiracy that lies behind this catastrophic failure, to repair the ship's intelligence and guide the ship back home. You find yourself in the grip of one of the most powerful forces known to modern man - the desire for a free upgrade. The ship is inhabited by traumatized robots, a lobotomized cyberintelligence, a frankly unhinged parrot and, as the ship takes off, taking you deep into unknown interstellar space, you realize that life on board as a third class passenger is going to be tough going. You find your way on board (or not, if you just want to play the two minute version of the game) and are confronted with an interior which resembles a mixture of the Ritz, the Chrysler Building, Tutankhamen's tomb, and Venice. The first you know of it is when you are sitting at home having a quiet evening in front of the TV and the most fabulous starship in the galaxy crashes into your home. On its maiden voyage it crashes into hyperspace and vanishes. It is fabulous, beautiful and technologically miraculous. At the heart of a galaxy of which we know nothing, the greatest, most advanced starship ever known has been built - the Starship Titanic.
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