Lost
In Space!
Reviews
of Unknown or Underappreciated Books
Starship
Titanic
by Terry
Jones
Hello and welcome to
what will be an occasional feature on my blog!
So – what, exactly,
do I mean by 'unknown or underappreciated'?
To put it simply –
not everyone is a Kevin J. Anderson or David Weber or Eric Flint or
Robert Heinlein. Some authors – I would venture to say, MOST
authors – produce perfectly fine books: readable, enjoyable,
well-structured, skillfully plotted and with fully-developed
characters. And yet, something happens.
They never quite get
the recognition they deserve. The book slides into obscurity, and the
author – having watched their baby disappear from the public eye –
often follows.
Well, no more!
I've been reading SF
for basically my entire conscious life, and when I like a book, I
hold onto it. So, for you lucky, lucky readers, I'm diving back into
my stacks to find books which deserve another shot at the sunlight.
Imagine, if you will,
Hitchhiker's Guide meets
Monty Python.
Oh,
brilliant! As a fan of
both, this would seem to be the ultimate book for a person like
myself.
British
science fiction meets British insanity – what could be more
perfect?
In
the late 1980s (yes, I know, we're going back to another century
here, but bear with me. There's a point to this time travel) Douglas
Adams was on top of the science fiction world.
His
Hitchhiker's 'Trilogy' was hugely successful, existing as books, a
television series, and a radio series. A movie deal was in the works.
What media was left? Well, obviously, the realm of computer games!
(Remember, this is pre-XBox, pre-PS, and just barely post-Atari.)
'Give
us something,' he was told, 'that we can use to make a text-driven
adventure. It's got to be something with a beginning, a middle, and
an end, and it has to be something that you haven't written yet,
because we don't want the players to know how the story goes before
they play.'
Um,
what? You
can imagine Adams thinking.
'Oh,
and it would be nice if it was related to the Hitchhiker's books but
not part of them, or at least nothing major.'
Excuse
me?
Well,
eventually Adams remembers about the Starship Titanic – here's the
reference, in full, from Life, The Universe, and
Everything:
Many
speak of the legendary and gigantic starship Titanic,
a majestic and luxurious cruise liner launched from the great
shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artifactovol some hundreds of
years ago now, and with good reason.
It
was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge and more pleasantly
equipped than any ship in what now remains of history (see page 110
[on the Campaign for Real Time]) but it had the misfortune to be
built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before
this difficult and cussed branch of knowledge was fully, or at all,
understood.
The
designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a
prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly,
to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever
go wrong with any part of the ship.
They
did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular
nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was
Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost
immediately.
The
starship Titanic was
a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan
Megavoidwhale among the laser-lit tracery of its construction
gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the
deep interstellar blackness, but when launched, it did not even
manage to complete its very first radio message – an SOS – before
undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.
That's
it. That's what he had to write from, a snippet that is mostly about
the early misapplication of Improbability equations.
No
wonder it took him until 1998 to get the thing written, coded,
published and distributed.
Then
came the suggestion: Why
don't you write a book to go with the game, tie it in, we can broaden
our marketing?
The
response was probably interesting but not particularly germane,
except that in the end, he didn't write it.
Terry
Jones did.
Yes,
that Terry Jones. From Monty Python. Who frequently appears nude in
the sketches and movies.
What,
you might ask, does he know about writing a book?
As
it turns out, not much.
He
had the plot of the game to follow – simply put, the starship
Titanic
doesn't undergo a SMEF (sudden massive existence failure) as much as
dematerialize. It reappears above, of course, Earth. Smashed into a
house.
Four
Earthlings are there; three of them are invited aboard the ship while
the fourth scarpers off. They then encounter various difficulties in
trying to get the ship to function as it should and return them to
Earth.
To
this bare-bones plot, various details are added: industrial
espionage, insurance fraud, sabotage, labor unions, and a faulty
Mega-Scuttler bomb.
The
whole idea is ridiculous.
Then
again, so is the idea of hitchhiking across the galaxy, and he made
pretty good hay from that.
Ah,
but the problem with Starship Titanic
is that Adams didn't write it, Jones did, and he lacks the former's
deft touch with the ridiculous.
The
dialogue is stiff and forced, at best. The plot is, as mentioned,
ridiculous, and the resolution requires a deus ex machina straight
out of classical Greek theater.
Yet
there are moments of levity, of humour, where Adams' direction is
apparent, where the intervention more direct.
Alas,
they are too few and far between to justify the book as a whole.
If
you want to read this, go ahead. It's still out there. Perhaps you
can find one at a yard sale, or a library book sale.
If
you're interested in the game, well, the web site still exists.
StarshipTitanic.com, though it doesn't seem to do much. Finally, if
you really want to play the game, there are instructions here:
http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibly-Go-Wrong
And
what happened to the game? Well, text-driven games were a dying breed
by the time Adams (a notorious procrastinator and ignorer of
deadlines) finally finished his end. The PlayStation was out, the PS2
two years away, the Xbox three years away – so the whole thing was,
like the eponymous starship, doomed from the start.
Moving
forward – I welcome your comments and suggestions! If there is a
book YOU want me to review, drop me a line! You can find me on
Facebook (very creatively, Adam Gaffen) or you can send an email to
TheKildaran@yahoo.com
OR you can simply leave a comment here!
Thanks – and I'll be
back soon with another lost treasure!
