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The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
 
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The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (Paperback)

by Stephen Fry (Foreword), Richard Dawkins (Afterword), Douglas Adams (Author), Peter Guzzardi (Editor)
4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
RRP: £6.99
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Price For All Three: £16.97

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Product details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Pan Books; New edition edition (3 Jan 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330323121
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330323123
  • Product Dimensions: 17.7 x 11.1 x 2.7 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 13,473 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #2 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > A > Adams, Richard
    #2 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > A > Adams, Richard
    #3 in  Books > Fiction > Anthologies > Humour

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Salmon of Doubt is the late Douglas Adams' third comic novel about "holistic detective" Dirk Gently. Ten tantalising chapters of this unfinished project are padded to book size with about 50 short Adams pieces, mostly non-fiction.

Additional material includes introductions by Stephen Fry and editor Peter Guzzardi (who stitched together the Salmon fragment from disk drafts), The Guardian's Adams biography, Richard Dawkins' farewell piece, and the order of the memorial service.

The non-fiction by the man himself ranges from perhaps a dozen meaty articles and speeches to brief squibs, interview/questionnaire answers and tiny asides like:

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognise something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

There are enjoyable pieces on computers (especially), atheism, dogs, manta rays on the Great Barrier Reef, the Save the Rhino stunt climb, and PG Wodehouse. Much of the rest is ephemeral; you can't help reflecting that Adams himself never chose to collect all this lightweight newspaper work.

Lovers of his fiction will welcome the Hitch-Hiker-related short stories "The Private Life of Genghis Khan" and "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe", despite the latter's dreadfully dated political punch line.

What of The Salmon of Doubt itself, a quarter of this book? There's a glimpse of a far-future estate agent's utopia, a woman asking Dirk Gently to investigate a cat that's literally only half there (his puzzling reluctance to take the case may echo Adams' own feelings about the novel), Gently's capricious trip to America in response to an unknown client's total lack of instructions, the tragic death of a rhino as perceived by the rhino... Many teasing questions; we'll never know the answers.

Overall it's a must-have for devoted Adams fans and completists, a likely disappointment (though with pleasant exceptions) for new readers. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
'Douglas Adams created a new comic genre, and peopled a whole other world through his work' FINANCIAL TIMES 'His ability to connect cosmic ideas with the banal commonplaces of everyday life was unique' STEPHEN FRY

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Customer Reviews

31 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (31 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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136 of 138 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Last Chance to See ..., 25 April 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: The Salmon of Doubt (Hardcover)
Douglas Adams once noted that there was a class of reviewer who simply took the best jokes out of a book and put them in their review. It's going to be difficult to review The Salmon of Doubt without doing that, every page has quotable lines, memorable phrases and oh-so elegant metaphors that are just sitting there waiting for a reviewer to pluck them out. I'll do my best not to.

Latterly, Douglas Adams had become as famous for not writing Hitchhikers books as for writing them in the first place. The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of essays, articles, interviews and, finally, ten chapters of his last novel, demonstrates that he'd developed his displacement activities to avoid writing into a fine art, progressing from 'taking another bath' and 'going for a walk' to coming up with some of the most elegant essays on atheism ever written and climbing Kilimanjaro to save rhinos. This is what he'd been getting up to all that time, and it was a far more interesting and productive way of occupying himself than coming up with new things for Marvin to do.

And if I haven't done so already, here's where I lapse into cliche - Douglas Adams delighted millions; created characters and phrases that have passed into everyday use; he died tragically young; he made the most complex philosophical and scientific ideas seem so simple; I never met him but he made me feel that I knew him; I laughed aloud while reading this book.

Stephen Fry's introduction is perceptive, but more importantly it's moving. Fry makes the crucial point - Adams convinced a generation of readers that he was writing just for us. The sense of loss in this, and an equally moving tribute by Richard Dawkins at the end of the book, is keen. The subtitle of the book 'Hitchhiking the galaxy for one last time' captures the excitement of the prospect of being allowed into Douglas Adams' universe once more ... but also the sadness that it genuinely will only be once more...

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Not quite what was promised, but excellent nonetheless., 17 Aug 2006
By Peter Hunt (Mountain View, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
If you are a fan of Douglas Adams' fiction, then this book is well worth getting. Although it contains mostly non-fiction essays, articles and interviews, they are very entertaining, and have the same sharp, witty and informative voice as his fiction works.

Adams was clearly an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, and his ability to make wry but penetrating observations in a clear, concise and entertaining way is displayed here again and again. These essays run the gamut from the hilarious to the deeply moving - sometimes within the same article.

The unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, is interesting, but somewhat frustrating to read, as none of the disparate elements quite come together. As a work in progress, it sadly needed a lot more work done to it to bring it up to Adams' usual standard.

I deduct one star because the collection is not *quite* what was promised. Initially, we were told in press releases that this book would contain much of the unpublished material found on Adams' laptop after his death. However, apart from the novel excerpt, nearly all the material has been published before, either in magazines, newspapers or online. It's great to have it all in one place, but a lot of it we've seen before.

Nevertheless, as a tribute to Adams' life as a novelist and journalist, this book is as close to perfect as it can be. After reading The Salmon of Doubt, I both marvelled at Adams' genius, and mourned his untimely passing.

Ah Douglas, you left us far too soon.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Sorely missed genius..., 30 May 2002
By Martin Andrew Kerr "Martin A. Kerr" (Sheffield) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: The Salmon of Doubt (Hardcover)
When this book turned up on my desk at work, I tore open the wrapping and started reading it there and then. Much chortling (and no small amount of guffawing) later, I had to return to work. But the book left its mark on me, in the form of a huge wave of melancholy...

You see, Mr. Adams is gone. The genius and extremely tall gentleman who breathed life into Dentarthurdent and changed the name of Svlad Cjelli into something altogether more pronounceable has gone to amuse the inhabitants of an altogether nicer place, and the world is a duller place for it.

What we have left to remember him by is this, a half-finished novel, a collection of contemplations, some book introductions, interviews, and short things that can only be described as sentences. Tell you what, it's bloody genius. Maybe it's because he's writing for himself a lot of the time, I don't know, but it really is genius.

Buy it, and remember him as I think he would have liked to be remembered. As someone who really knew how to make you laugh.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't exactly leap to the top of Adams' body of work
There's not much to add that previous reviewers haven't covered regarding this posthumous Douglas Adams collection. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Binro The Heretic

4.0 out of 5 stars The Benefit of Doubt.
`The Salmon of Doubt' is a posthumously published collection of words put into a fantastic collection of arrays by Douglas Adams whom had previously been assembling words in a... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Ian Wood, Author of 'Here's 2 ...

5.0 out of 5 stars A look into an awesome mind
If you have read every Douglas Adams book but still don't feel close enough to the great man himself, this is the book for you. Read more
Published 12 months ago by E. Marsden

4.0 out of 5 stars Be aware of what you're getting
For those who know Douglas Adams' work, chances are you are aware that The Salmon of Doubt is the last of Adams' work before his untimely death and is incomplete. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Mr. R. Wenman

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't um, don't ah, just buy and read.
This lunchtime I finished reading The Salmon Of Doubt, the first work of Douglas's I've read since he died all those years ago. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Paul Castle

4.0 out of 5 stars A look into the personality of DNA, + a weird story
I got this book from my step-brother, and although ithe story in it was unfinished and a little confusing, the short stories and intos that Douglas Adams had written through the... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Alex Wilson

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
This book is a mixture of articles from Adams on a variety of subjects, and a few chapters of a new Dirk Gently novel he was working on when he died. Read more
Published on 26 April 2006 by BC

5.0 out of 5 stars A Valuable Look
This was a spur of the moment purchase for me, I'd read The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy but nothing else by Adams to this point. Read more
Published on 14 Mar 2005 by deadteddy

5.0 out of 5 stars The Salmon of Doubt
This book is a biographical collection of extracts from Douglas Adams' work including, articles, correspondance and an unfinished draft from book he was writing at the time of his... Read more
Published on 22 Jan 2004 by narsil9

5.0 out of 5 stars Atheism to Zaphod
Memorials, no matter how well done, are sad affairs. They are necessarily incomplete, usually being but pointers into a richer past. Read more
Published on 15 Oct 2003 by Stephen A. Haines

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