And Another Thing… Review

And Another Thing… review: an authorized return with a different pulse

Any And Another Thing… review must begin with the awkward fact that the novel is both a continuation and an argument for continuing. Eoin Colfer took on the sixth novel in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequence after Douglas Adams's five-book run, with the authorization of the Adams estate. The result does not erase the boundary between the two writers, and it would be unreasonable to ask it to. Instead, Colfer offers a vigorous, affectionate reconstruction of the series' machinery: cosmic disaster, bureaucratic cruelty, impossible rescue, wounded friendship, theological farce, and jokes that arrive from directions the plot has not yet discovered.

That approach produces a book with real momentum and periodic flashes of inspired absurdity. It also produces a crowded experience. Colfer is eager to keep the ensemble moving, restore familiar rhythms, and make room for new complications at the same time. The central critical question is therefore not whether he can imitate Adams sentence by sentence. He cannot, and the novel is healthier whenever it stops trying. The useful question is whether this new episode creates enough comic and emotional purpose to merit reopening a story that had already reached a bleak, decisive stopping point. The answer is a qualified yes: the novel is generous, funny, and readable, but more successful as a spirited encore than as an invisible extension of Adams's voice.

Readers looking for similarly expansive speculative fiction can browse the site's science-fiction collection. This book belongs there not because its technology asks to be taken seriously, but because it uses galaxies, artificial minds, aliens, and improbable travel to enlarge recognizably human foolishness.

A premise built from escape, repetition, and comic inevitability

The opening problem is appropriately severe. Arthur Dent has returned to Earth, only to face the prospect of the planet being destroyed again. That recurrence is more than a nostalgic reset. It establishes Colfer's understanding of the series' comic physics: survival is temporary, home is unstable, and the universe regards personal closure as an administrative error. Arthur's desire for ordinary comforts remains funny because the surrounding scale is so hostile to ordinary life.

From there, the novel gathers returning figures and introduces a fresh round of cosmic entanglements. Zaphod Beeblebrox's disruptive energy matters to the rescue plot, while gods, machines, aliens, and political interests complicate what might otherwise have been a simple flight from danger. The publisher's description accurately calls attention to unemployed gods, a lovestruck green alien, an irritating computer, and a large slab of cheese; that inventory conveys the book's method better than a conventional synopsis could. Colfer piles incompatible elements together until their collisions become the story.

The premise is strongest when repetition gains a new emotional shade. Another threatened Earth might seem like an easy way to replay the franchise's first move, yet Arthur is no longer the bewildered man whose house and planet vanish on the same day. Repetition now carries exhaustion. He knows too much about the galaxy to expect justice, but not enough to stop hoping for a pocket of peace. That tension gives the novel a modest emotional anchor even as the plot keeps accelerating away from him.

Colfer's voice works best beside the original, not inside it

The novel's most visible challenge is tonal. Adams's comedy often sounds effortless because its logic is meticulously misaligned: an institution explains itself too clearly, a machine fulfills the wrong purpose perfectly, or a sentence calmly walks past reason and keeps going. Colfer understands those structures. He supplies digressions, invented terminology, comic definitions, and sudden reversals of scale. Many of them are sharp, and the book rarely lacks a joke for long.

The difference is pressure. Colfer often underlines the comic atmosphere by adding another aside before the previous one has settled. The reader can feel the performance working. That does not make the jokes invalid, but it changes their rhythm. Adams's driest passages could leave an unnerving amount of empty space around a punch line; Colfer tends to fill that space with movement. His prose is warmer, busier, and more openly enthusiastic about the fictional world.

Once accepted as a feature rather than a failure, that energy becomes enjoyable. Colfer is not a literary ventriloquist suppressing every instinct of his own. His experience with swift adventure is evident in the clean scene changes, the readable action, and the instinct to bring scattered pieces back into contact. The continuation has a different pulse because a different novelist is driving it. Readers who demand perfect mimicry will remain conscious of the gap; readers willing to hear a cover version may appreciate what the new performer emphasizes.

The ensemble brings warmth—and structural congestion

Arthur, Ford Prefect, Trillian, Random, and Zaphod arrive with histories that cannot be summarized into neat functions. That inheritance gives the book immediate emotional and comic capital. A small gesture can recall years of separation or frustration, while a foolish decision can feel completely plausible because the character has spent several books preparing to make it. Colfer treats the ensemble with evident affection and generally resists sanding away its abrasiveness.

Arthur remains the most useful measure of the novel's success. His endurance is not heroic in a conventional sense. It is the stubborn persistence of someone who keeps discovering that reality has misunderstood the basic terms of his existence. Colfer recognizes the melancholy beneath that joke. When the book slows enough to let Arthur register another loss, another rescue, or another absurd demand, the continuation finds a humane tone of its own.

Zaphod is naturally louder, and the plot repeatedly benefits from his ability to turn confidence into catastrophe. Yet the balance can tilt too far toward the characters and incidents with the highest immediate comic volume. Some relationships receive less patient development than their histories invite. Random in particular brings complicated family tensions into the story, but the rushing structure does not always allow those tensions to ripen. The issue is not a shortage of material. It is the opposite: too many active pieces compete for the same narrative oxygen.

The mythological strand broadens the book beyond technological farce. Readers drawn to stories that collide speculative systems with gods and legends may also find useful paths through the fantasy collection. Here, mythology is not a solemn alternative to science fiction; it is another institution with reputations, employment problems, rivalries, and inconvenient expectations.

What the continuation does especially well

Its first major strength is accessibility within a heavily serialized premise. This is not the right entry point for a complete newcomer, but Colfer gives returning readers enough orientation to recover the relevant relationships without reducing the opening to a dossier. The book moves as if it trusts recognition while still providing handholds.

Its second strength is generosity. Mostly Harmless ends in a register of unusual finality and despair. Colfer does not pretend that darkness never occurred, but he creates room for motion after it. That decision will divide readers on principle: for some, reopening the ending weakens its force. For others, the change in emotional weather is precisely the continuation's appeal. On its own terms, the more hopeful current is not cheap cheerfulness. It is a willingness to let damaged characters attempt connection again, even in a universe that has repeatedly punished the attempt.

The third strength is the handling of scale. A private grievance can become a planetary concern; a cosmic threat can be interrupted by vanity, romance, or food. That telescoping movement is essential to Hitchhiker comedy, and Colfer uses it confidently. The story understands that the galaxy is funniest when grandeur and pettiness are not opposites but partners.

Finally, the novel is admirably unembarrassed about being entertainment. It wants to move, surprise, and amuse. Even when a comic sequence does not fully land, another idea is already approaching. Readers can explore the science-fiction collection to compare other comic and speculative works, but few continuations face quite this combination of inherited expectations and deliberate nonsense.

Where the book strains against its inheritance

The clearest caution is density. Characters, subplots, callbacks, invented concepts, Guide-like interventions, and action beats accumulate faster than the novel can rank them. Because almost every element arrives with a comic flourish, the prose can lose contrast. A quiet line cannot surprise if the surrounding paragraph is already performing at maximum volume.

The second caution is that recognition sometimes substitutes for discovery. A returning character or familiar pattern can generate pleasure simply by reappearing, but recognition has diminishing returns. The best continuation does not merely remind readers what they loved; it creates a new situation that alters their understanding of those familiar elements. And Another Thing… achieves that intermittently rather than consistently. Its new material is often lively, yet the book remains tethered to the need to prove that it belongs.

There is also an unavoidable authorship problem. Adams's style was not a kit of replaceable parts, and the original novels changed considerably across the sequence anyway. Measuring every sentence against an idealized composite of five different books is unfair to Colfer and not especially illuminating. Still, voice is central to this series, so readers cannot simply disregard the shift. The novel's more explicit sentiment, brisker plotting, and heavier concentration of comic signals will delight some readers and tire others.

None of these weaknesses makes the project cynical. The care is evident. The limitation is that care itself can become visible as effort, and Hitchhiker comedy is most magical when elaborate construction masquerades as a casual remark.

Who should read And Another Thing…

The ideal reader has completed the five Adams novels and wants more time with the characters without requiring a perfect simulation of their creator. Familiarity matters because the book spends its emotional energy on continuation rather than introduction. A newcomer could follow the immediate jeopardy, but many of the reunions, reversals, and behavioral jokes would lose their charge.

It is also a strong match for readers who enjoy rapid comic invention. The pace rarely becomes contemplative for long. Scenes turn on misunderstandings, inflated egos, eccentric systems, and the disproportion between what characters want and what the galaxy permits. Fans of Colfer's talent for propulsion may be more comfortable with this rhythm than readers seeking the driest passages of Adams.

The book is less suitable for anyone who regards Mostly Harmless as an ending that should remain untouched. It will also frustrate readers who prefer sparse satire, tightly limited casts, or a continuation that disappears completely into the original author's manner. The most productive reading stance is neither reverence nor hostility. It is curiosity about what a skilled, authorized successor can preserve, change, and accidentally reveal about the work he follows.

Context matters: sequel, homage, and independent comic novel

Published in 2009, And Another Thing… arrived as the sixth novel in a sequence still identified with Douglas Adams. Colfer was already known for the Artemis Fowl books, and his official biography describes the Adams estate as having entrusted him with this continuation. Those facts explain the novel's legitimacy as a commissioned project, but legitimacy cannot settle its artistic value. Authorization answers who was permitted to write the book; criticism still has to ask what the writing accomplishes.

As a sequel, it restores jeopardy and reconnects an ensemble. As an homage, it recreates recognizable devices and repeatedly acknowledges the comic grammar of its source. As an independent novel, however, it is constrained by obligations that no ordinary space comedy would carry. It must revive, reassure, differentiate, and entertain at once. The congestion is partly the cost of that assignment.

This context also clarifies why the book's unevenness can be interesting. The passages that feel most naturally Colfer's—warm, quick, adventurous—suggest that continuation works through interpretation, not preservation. The passages that strain hardest for familiar effects expose how singular the source was. In that sense, even the imperfect mimicry has critical value: it makes readers notice techniques that may have seemed invisible in Adams's hands.

Alternatives for different kinds of Hitchhiker readers

Readers primarily seeking Adams's voice should return to the original five novels, beginning with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That route offers the cleanest introduction to the series' changing blend of radio-derived structure, philosophical comedy, and narrative mischief. Anyone especially attached to the bleaker late-series mood may prefer to let Mostly Harmless stand as the endpoint.

Readers interested in Colfer on his own ground should consider the Artemis Fowl series, where his command of pace, technology, fantasy systems, and combative personalities operates without the burden of imitating a predecessor. Comparing those books with this one helps distinguish his native strengths from the deliberate Hitchhiker mannerisms.

For readers attracted less to continuity than to the collision of absurdity and speculative ideas, the broader science-fiction and fantasy catalogs are better guides than a franchise reading order. And Another Thing… is valuable partly because it reveals what kind of sequel a reader wants: faithful recurrence, tonal reinvention, emotional repair, or simply another improbable trip with familiar company.

Final verdict

And Another Thing… earns its place most convincingly when it treats the Hitchhiker universe as a stage for new performance rather than a museum to be guarded. Colfer brings pace, affection, and an appealing willingness to let hope re-enter a famously indifferent cosmos. His ensemble handling is energetic, his speculative clutter is often funny, and his respect for the characters keeps the project from feeling merely contractual.

The same enthusiasm creates the novel's chief weakness. It is crowded with plot, voices, reminders, and punch lines, sometimes leaving too little silence for the sharpest joke or most vulnerable character beat. The book does not sound exactly like Douglas Adams, and its efforts to do so are less persuasive than the moments when Colfer trusts his own warmer, faster instincts.

Taken as an authorized encore, it is worthwhile: not essential to understanding the original five books, not a replacement for their ending, but a lively exploration of what can happen after finality. Readers who accept the visible seam between authors will find wit, motion, and genuine fondness here. Those who cannot will at least discover why the seam matters.