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Starship Titanic is the Douglas Adams curiosity that nobody talks about: a 1997 computer game, designed by Adams, with a tie-in novel written by Terry Jones (yes, that Terry Jones, of Monty Python). The book is in print on its own merits and is sometimes shelved as a Douglas Adams novel, which is half-right.
Jones brings his own sensibility to the material, which means more whimsy and slightly less of the cosmological cruelty that Adams was best at. The plot is a haywire interstellar luxury liner, a misfit crew, and a series of comic detours that recall both Hitchhiker's Guide and the better Discworld pastiches.
It is uneven. Some of the jokes are genuinely Jones at his best. Some of the characters wear thin over 200 pages. Three stars. Recommended to Adams completists and to Python fans curious about Jones's prose-fiction voice.
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