Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic
From the minds of Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and Terry Jones (Monty Python) comes Starship Titanic, the hilarious novelization of the third-best adventure game of 1999.
Welcome on board the Starship Titanic.
The Ship that Cannot Possibly Go Wrong.
At the centre of the galaxy, a vast, unknown civilization is preparing for an event of epic proportions: the launch of the greatest, most gorgeous, most technologically advanced spaceship ever built – the Starship Titanic.
An Earthling would see the ship as something really, really big, but rather less provincial onlookers would recognize it as the design of Leovinus, the galaxy’s most renowned architect. Before the launch Leovinus is having one last little look round and begins to find that things just aren’t right: poor workmanship, cybersystems out of control, robots walking into doors. How could this have happened?
The following morning, while the galaxy’s media looks on, the fabulous ship eases away from the construction dock, picks up speed, sways a little, wobbles a bit, veers wildly and, just before it can do untold damage to everything around it, appears to undergo SMEF (Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure). In just ten seconds, the whole stupendous enterprise is over. And our story has just begun . . .
Terry Jones was a writer, actor, comedian, screenwriter, film director, presenter, poet, historian and author. He is best known as a member of the Monty Python comedy troupe and for directing the group's films, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian. He died in 2020.
Douglas Adams created all the various and contradictory manifestations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: radio, novels, TV, computer game, stage adaptations, comic book and bath towel. He lectured and broadcast around the world, wrote for Doctor Who and was a patron of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Save the Rhino International. Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge, UK and lived with his wife and daughter in Islington, London, before moving to Santa Barbara, California, where he died suddenly in 2001.