Science Fictionary

Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) plus Terry Jones (Monty Python’s Flying Circus) equals “Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic.”

And it’s good, too.

If anybody’s seen the latest installation of Doctor Who — the Christmas episode where the Doctor ends up waltzing around aboard a starship Titanic — then you’ve got the idea. Well…that’s not quite accurate. Actually, what you have is a completely different idea with a few vague similarities.

Actually, you have the best idea just from these six key terms: Douglas Adams, Terry Jones, Starship Titanic. If you know anything about either of the key parties involved in creating this book and the history of the real Titanic, then you should be able to assemble the general ideas in your head: they are weird, bizarre, and confusing.

It’s a short book, based on the ideas Douglas Adams came up with while working on the computer game of the same name. Terry Adams ended up writing it because…well, that’s all in the introduction.

Really, there’s nothing at all I can say about this book in the way of a review. If you look the zany humor the Douglas Adams and Monty Python put out, you’re likely to enjoy it. If not, you won’t. Suck it up.

Man, this is a fun story. Now, this blog is likely to have a bit of a tendency toward praising the books I’m reviewing, but this isn’t that surprising…given that I’m primarily reviewing books I already own, and haven’t gotten rid of.

Anyhow, with that minor disclaimer out of the way, let’s get down to business!

Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (and it’s sequels) make up a really fun trilogy. The plot is this: Hobart Floyt, a minor bureaucrat on an Earth devastated by interstellar combat and an amateur genealogist, suddenly finds himself and inheritor (actually, an Inheritor) of an unknown inheritance from a man I’ll describe as an interstellar tyrant. The Earth bureaucracy, rather shy of interstellar travel (more than a little bit xenophobic) allow him to travel largely out of pure greed, wanting to have access to his inheritance.

The politics surrounding the nature of his inheritance and the reasons for the inheritance are highly significant…but also provide rather a lot of information about the overall plot for the trilogy which is probably left absent in these comments.

At any rate, the story is well worth reading, and I recommend it!