Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic

An “irreverent [and] zany” (The Washington Post) novel about the mishaps of intergalactic travel from two of comedy’s most beloved icons: Douglas Adams and Terry Jones “I’ve always wanted to collaborate on something with Terry. . . . As you are about to discover, he has written an altogether sillier, naughtier, and more wonderful novel than I would have done.”—Douglas Adams, from the introduction Bestselling author Douglas Adams wrote the storyline based on his CD-ROM game of the same name (as this novel, not as him, obviously). Terry Jones of Monty Python wrote the book. In the nude! Parents be warned! Most of the words in this book were written by a naked man! So. You want to argue with that? All right, we give in. Starship Titanic is the greatest, most fabulous, most technologically advanced interstellar cruise line ever built. It is like a cross between the Queen Mary, the Chrysler Building, Tutankhamen’s tomb, and Venice. Furthermore, it cannot possibly go wrong. . . . Sadly, however, seconds after its launch it undergoes SMEF, or Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. And disappears. Except, everything’s got to be somewhere. Coming home that night, on a little-known planet called Earth, Dan and Lucy Gibson find something very large and very, very shiny sticking into their house. . . . Hugely, magnificently, the fabulous ship eases its way forward from the construction dock, picks up speed, sways a bit, wobbles a bit, veers wildly, and just before it can do massive 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. Somehow three earthlings, one Blerontin journalist, a semideranged parrot, and a shipful of disoriented robots must overcome their differences. It's the only way to save the Starship Titanic ("The Ship That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong") from certain destruction and rescue the economy of an entire planet-not to mention to survive the latest threat, an attack by a swarm of hostile shipbuilders. . . .