If At First You Don’t Succeed, Tryfe, Tryfe Again [Review: There Goes The Galaxy]

Bertram Ludlow is kidnapped from his home on Tryfe (a quaint, backwater planet known to its inhabitants as Earth) and catapulted across the Galaxy on a quest to save his homeworld from... well, from something. He’s not quite sure exactly who, or what, constitutes this existential threat. In any case his brain is in denial, preferring to believe he is the victim of international terrorists looking for his PhD thesis on procrastination. But the Greater Communicating Universe is not a friendly place. The meat-eating daisies wait in the shadows, and it’ll take more than some special chewing gum and a mysterious yellow thing on a rope to put Tryfe on the galactic map – Bertram may also need to rely on his wits. It’s going to be a long day.

There Goes The Galaxy, by Jenn Thorson, is a comedy space opera which is very inventive, and which also owes a small debt to the novels of Douglas Adams. In particular Bertram Ludlow, the middle child in a family of two, is a non-hero of the Arthur Dent school – a coward but with that same obstinate streak that leads him to misguided bravery. His captor Rolliam Smorlood is an intergalactic rogue-about-town not completely dissimilar to Zaphod Beeblebrox. Like the Hitch-Hiker novels, There Goes The Galaxy is interspersed with funny extracts from galactic publications, and the novel takes a scattergun approach to satire, taking on estate agents, televised book clubs, organized crime (incidentally, when will people give those guys a break? They’re just trying to earn a living!) and everything in between.

This book would appeal to a Tryfling who likes their science fiction colourful, fast, satirical, utterly demented, and with an inexplicably British feel to it, or perhaps someone desperate for their next Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy hit, but not quite desperate enough to read Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing. The similarities I’ve highlighted are a positive, not a negative aspect to this novel, and it’s fair to add that Douglas Adams didn’t invent any of the space-opera tropes – he just made them fun, a tradition that I’m happy to see is alive and well today.

There Goes The Galaxy can be found on Amazon - Kindle edition here. Of Cabbages And Kings, Jenn Thorson's blog, is here.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Titanic [Titanic II Week]

Starship Titanic was an experimental computer game designed by galactic hitch-hiker Douglas Adams. The experimental element was the existential gameplay which involved asking questions of a series of eccentric robots, to which they universally failed to reply. Kafka would have been impressed. Where the game failed in artificial intelligence breakthroughs, it succeeded with artwork, animation and atmosphere, providing the player with (for it's time) a highly detailed art deco starship interior to explore.

Douglas Adams first mentioned the Starship Titanic in the third Hitch-Hiker novel Life, The Universe and Everything - a prototype Improbability Drive ship that unfortunately suffered a gratuitous Total Existence Failure during its maiden voyage. Terry Jones' novel "Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic" develops this story arc further in parallel with the computer game.

Doctor Who is indebted to Douglas Adams in many ways and the Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat series are laced with references to Adams' books. The 2007 extended episode Voyage Of The Damned, starring David Tennant and Kylie Minogue, was also set on a Starship Titanic, although arguably the plot itself had more in common with The Poseidon Adventure. This Titanic was once again staffed by mad robots - robotic angels with deadly, detachable halos.

Douglas Adams has a history of developing brilliant but tricky computer games - his two Interactive Fiction games, Bureaucracy and the official Hitch Hiker game, are both masterpieces of fiendish multi-layered puzzles. Success is virtually impossible but failure is fun. I don't know what happens if you complete either one of them - possibly the entire Universe is destroyed and replaced by something even more fiendish (there are of course those who claim this has already happened.) You can play a version of the Hitch Hiker game here on the BBC Radio 4 website, updated with some fantastic new artwork. The original text-only game is hosted here.