billcoffin 's review for:

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

1.0

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Even by the tired standard of the first three Hitchhiker's Guide novels, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish comes off as a tired, threadbare effort by a writer who simply did not have enough gas in the tank at this point and really should have waited the 10 years or so that it would have taken him to recharge fully and put together something with the creative density of his first or second installment in this series. I have not liked any of the book in this series, but at least there seemed to be a certain genuine energy to the first novel. By the fourth installment, any misgivings I had with the nature of the story and Adams' humor have been well underscored by a frustration at such a cynical attempt by the author to produce something for the sake of producing it. There is an interesting love story nestled in the middle of this one that remains nice if and only if one can overlook the fact that Adams, like so many other times in this series, went back to the first novel, strip mined a throwaway line for a high concept and decided to weave an entire story around it. It was a throwaway line for a reason. That Adams forgot that shows how far off the rails he'd gotten by this fourth installment.