42

Good day, Bookies. Stand by for news.

As you all surely know, that's the answer to everything. 42.

Douglas Adams died in 2001 at age 49. I remember the shock when I heard that he'd died. But now at how he died: he was at a gym, exercising. He must surely find the irony delicious.

I was pretty PO'ed at the time. After all, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy was stuck on five books and just didn't quite seem complete. 'Mostly Harmless' was panned by a lot of fans, but I loved it. Maybe that's me having low standards, maybe that's a literary marketplace devoid of anything approaching truly talented humorists or maybe I'm right. Since this is my blog, I'm picking the latter. It was a great book and Adams died before he could ever give us the next one, dammit!

Chin up, lads and laddies, because now we'll get that one last book we're looking for. Click on today's blog title for the full story, but Eoin Colfer is writing the sixth, and last, in the series, '...And Another Thing." Some will say this is bad and terrible and the omen of an interstellar bypass heading our way, I say good-O, mate! Why the hell shouldn't we have another book? If it's awful, I won't read it. If it's great, then I have my last in the series. No downside as far as I can see.

Adams often co-wrote books, most notably Starship Titanic, where we are told Terry Jones did most of the actual writing, so it's not like this is a new thing. It's probably new for Adams, collaborating on a project 7 years after he died, but when you're dead you're almost surely looking for something to pass the time and looking over the shoulder of a co-writer, trying to materialize and tell him you hate what he's doing with Chapter 5, seems about as good a way as any.

This project has my stamp of approval. I know that's great news for all involved.

On a sidenote, I had a correspondence with Adams while he was still alive, and to this day have several letters from him, signed and all that. And with those letters I can reveal a secret to his personal staff that history may have wondered about: his administrative assistant was a choco-holic. It's true, I have the evidence.