Douglas Adams' Last Book

mixedbag writes "A BBC news article suggests that a sixth book in Douglas Adams's Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series will be published next May. It will be unfinished from files found of his computer. The title is to be A Salmon of Doubt."

unfinished art

[colmore]

I don't know how I feel about this. While I'll be glad to have another book from such a great author, I worry that this will in some way corrupt the memory by putting an unfinished work-in-progress up against his polished final drafts. I hope at least they'll leave it unfinished, and not have some hack come in and tie things up for him.

Original Source

[VA Software]

The original source of the story is the Sunday Telegraph [telegraph.co.uk].
There is a little more information here than at the BBC.

Sad?

[Kidbro]

Once again, I'd like to refer to what Neil Gaiman [everything2.com] wrote in his journal [neilgaiman.com] once he heard of Douglas' death: I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print. (the Saturday, May [neilgaiman.com] 12, 2001 entry).

Re:Is this right?

[Audent]

I seem to remember reading something along those lines as well...
I do know that Terry Pratchett has included in his will (well, his literary will - apparently you need one of those) that NOBODY is to finish anything he's half way through and any unfinished work is NOT to be published (literally over his dead body)which I think is fair enough... Writing is an odd business and I don't imagine each chapter is carefully crafted and honed before the author moves on to the next... it would be a rough draft/first walk through kind of thing.
Mind you, it could give great insight into the workings of a writer... I'd pay for that I think.

Re:Salmon of Doubt .... or .. ?

[Stavros42]

In August, the BBC showed an "Omnibus" documentary on Douglas Adams' life, which said, along with the fact that Adams suffered writer's block a lot, that the only way he could be persuaded to finish the fifth novel, Mostly Harmless, was to set it up so that all Planet Earths in all possible universes ceased to exist - that way nobody could ask him to write a sixth Hitch Hiker novel!

The BBC page seems to think that the unfinished bits of novel that have been found comprise the sixth Hitch Hiker novel. This is unlikely, as that interview says. I would have thought it is something completely new, i.e. neither Hitch Hiker nor Dirk Gently, but the BBC article says that the work will be edited - could this mean that bits of separate stories might be merged to produce a novel? In any case, I hope it is done in a way Douglas' family feel he would have wanted.

Okay...

[Grendel Drago]

Instead of asking ``who the fuck is Ernest P. Worrel'', I'm sparing everyone else the trouble. He's that damned annoying ``Ernest Goes to Camp''/``Ernest Goes to Africa''/``Ernest Goes to Eroticon Six'' guy, played my Jim Varley.

http://us.imdb.com/Mlinks?0119068

That sort of thing.

-grendel drago

Re:Read it for what it's worth...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got the feeling at the end of Mostly Harmless that he had pulled a Charlton Heston at the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes--that he wanted to end the series so finally that no sequel was possible.

Yeah, he did at first. But he changed his mind eventually and said he was going to do a sequel sooner or later. When people asked him how he planned on doing a sequel with all the characters dead, he told them that being dead would make it even easier, since they're all in the same place.

Re:Reminds me of...

[zhensel]

Having read his unfinished / requested incinerated novel The Trial and a whole slew of short stories, I'd have to disagree entirely. Within the "established literary tradition" or not, these are wonderful works with all sorts of meaning. I loved The Trial and it was almost better that it was unfinished. I sat around for days wondering about the various forms that the work could've took in a finished state. At least with the novel I read, I've found that Kafka's unfinished work is easily equal in quality, meaning, et al to his short story work which is undeniably brilliant. If you reply saying that The Judgement, A Country Doctor, Josephine and the Mouse Folk, and Metamorphosis are all likewise horrible I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Besides, Kafka wasn't spot on in his evaluation of anything - just read up on his history and then read his work and see how twisted his evaluation of women was. He was one paranoid fellow.

Re:Is this right?

[nomadic]

Harlan Ellison had a great response [harlanellison.com] to the question "So is it wrong to do so?". Never was a huge fan of his fiction (obviously brilliant, just never clicked with me), but my God the man can write a brilliant invective.

Unfinished Works

[BrianArm]

Everyone complaining that the idea of publishing Douglas Adams' unfinished book posthumously seems somehow wrong, might find it interesting that Douglas himself wrote the forward for his own favorite author P. G. Wodehouse's unwished book "Sunset at Blanding". In it he wrote:

"This is P. G. Wodehouse's last -- and unfinished -- book. It is unfinished not just in the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man and his work, stops in mid-flow, but in the more important sense that the text up to that point is also unfinished."
...
"Will you, anyway, find much evidence of the great genius of Wodehouse here? Well, to be honest, no."
...
"But you will want to read Sunset for completeness, and for that sense you get, from its unfinishedness, of being suddenly and unexpectedly close to a Master actually at work -- a bit like seeing paint pots and scaffolding being carried in and out of the Sistine Chapel."

So I don't think Douglas himself would really object to this.

Re:So many questions...

[PurpleBob]

That explanation is very clever and very wrong.

Arthur found the WRONG question, because his evolution had been tainted by the Golgafrinchans. It is not a typo, and it is not base 13. It is simply supposed to be wrong.