To Be Read

'Outside the sun shines. Buses rumble towards Ealing Broadway and I'm expected to do battle with the powers of darkness. It all seems a little unfair...'You could say it all started with the red-eyed tramp with the slimy fingers who put the wind up Neville, the part-time barman, something rotten. Or when Archroy's wife swapped his trusty Morris Minor for five magic beans while he was out at the rubber factory.On the other hand, you could say it all started a lot earlier. Like 450 years ago, when Borgias walked the earth.Pooley and Omally, stars of the Brentford Laboiur Exchange and the Flying Swan, want nothing to do with it, especially if there's a Yankee and a pint of Large in the offing. Pope Alexander VI, last of the Borgias, has other ideas...

Questions about figgins, DEATH, mind-destroying footnotes, carnivorous Luggage, quantum butterflies,the magico-numerical significance of what we must always call twice-four or seven-plus-one, and even the precise sex of the Great A'Tuin, the enormous sea-turtle who swims eternally through space bearing (via four elephant middlemen) the Discworld ...all these and many more will keep fans of fantasy and the Discworld occupied for many happy hours. Each of the faculties of the Discworld's greatest college of magic, Unseen University, in the heart of that great metropolis Ankh-Morpork, have provided a number of questions - and the answers, in case you don't know as much about the Discworld and fantasy as you thought you did. However, be assured there is no golden turtle buried somewhere on the Sto Plains for followers of the *hidden* clues to unearth ...this is just a myth!

Does the sensation of Tingrith(1) make you yelp? Do you bend sympathetically when you see someone Ahenny(2)? Can you deal with a Naugatuck(3) without causing a Toronto(4)? Will you suffer from Kettering(5) this summer? Probably. You are almost certainly familiar with all these experiences but just didn’t know that there are words for them. Well, in fact, there aren’t—or rather there weren’t, until Douglas Adams and John Lloyd decided to plug these egregious linguistic lacunae(6). They quickly realized that just as there are an awful lot of experiences that no one has a name for, so there are an awful lot of names for places you will never need to go to. What a waste. As responsible citizens of a small and crowded world, we must all learn the virtues of recycling(7) and put old, worn-out but still serviceable names to exciting, vibrant, new uses. This is the book that does that for you: The Deeper Meaning of Liff—a whole new solution to the problem of Great Wakering(8)1—The feeling of aluminum foil against your fillings.2—The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves.3—A plastic packet containing shampoo, mustard, etc., which is impossible to open except by biting off the corners.4—Generic term for anything that comes out in a gush, despite all your efforts to let it out carefully, e.g., flour into a white sauce, ketchup onto fish, a dog into the yard, and another naughty meaning that we can’t put on the cover.5—The marks left on your bottom and thighs after you’ve been sitting sunbathing in a wicker chair.6—God knows what this means7—For instance, some of this book was first published in Britain twenty-six years ago.8—Look it up yourself.

The legendary BBC series did indeed push back the barriers of radio comedy, and in so doing so spawned records, books, a stage production, a TV series, a computer adventure game, even a towel, and attracted a deluge of letters from curious audiences throughout the world.To satisfy this curiosity, here are the twelve original radio scripts – Hitch-Hiker as it was originally written, and exactly as it was broadcast on Radio 4 for the very first time. They include amendments and additions made during recordings, bits which were reluctantly cut for reasons of time, and notes on the writing and producing of the series by Douglas Adams and Geoffrey Perkins.For those who have always longed to know why, who, how, when, where, and what its all about, these scripts are essential reading.

With Monty Python's Flying Circus, Eric Idle proved he was one of the funniest people in the world. And with The Road to Mars he reaffirms this with a raucously sidesplitting vengence.Muscroft and Ashby are a comedy team on "The Road to Mars," an interplanetary vaudeville circuit of the future. Accompanied by Carlton, a robot incapable of understanding irony but driven to learn the essence of humor, Alex and Lewis bumble their way into an intergalactic terrorist plot. Supported by a delicious cast, including a micropaleontologist narrator (he studies the evolutionary impact of the last ten minutes) and the ultra-diva Brenda Woolley, The Road to Mars is a fabulous trip through Eric Idle's inimitable world, a "universe expanding at the speed of laughter."

It all started when Douglas Adams demolished planet Earth in order to make way for an intergalactic expressway–and then invited everyone to thumb a ride on a comical cosmic road trip with the likes of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and the other daft denizens of deep space immortalized in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams made the universe a much funnier place to inhabit and forever changed the way we think about towels, extraterrestrial poetry, and especially the number 42. And then, too soon, he was gone.Just who was this impossibly tall Englishman who wedded science fiction and absurdist humor to create the multimillion-selling five-book “trilogy” that became a cult phenomenon read round the world? Even if you’ve dined in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, you’ve been exposed to only a portion of the offbeat, endearing, and irresistible Adams mystique. Have you met the only official unofficial member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus? The very first person to purchase a Macintosh computer? The first (and thus far only) author to play a guitar solo onstage with Pink Floyd? Adams was also the writer so notorious for missing deadlines that he had to be held captive in a hotel room under the watchful eye of his editor; the creator of the epic computer game Starship Titanic; and a globetrotting wildlife crusader.A longtime friend of the author, Nick Webb reveals many quirks and contradictions: Adams as the high-tech-gadget junkie and lavish gift giver . . .irrepressible ham and painfully timid soul . . . gregarious conversationalist and brooding depressive . . . brilliant intellect and prickly egotist. Into the brief span of forty-nine years, Douglas Adams exuberantly crammed more lives than the most resilient cat–while still finding time and energy to pursue whatever side projects captivated his ever-inquisitive mind. By turns touching, tongue-in-cheek, and not at all timid about telling the warts-and-all truth, Wish You Were Here is summation as celebration– a look back at a life well worth the vicarious reliving, and studded with anecdote, droll comic incident, and heartfelt insight as its subject’s own unforgettable tales of cosmic wanderlust. For the countless fans of Douglas Adams and his unique and winsome world, here is a wonderful postcard: to be read, reread, and treasured for the memories it bears.From the Hardcover edition.

Bruce shoots movies. Wayne and Scout shoot to kill. In a single night they find out the hard way what's real and what's not, who's the hero and who's the villain. The USA watches slack-jawed as Bruce and Wayne together resolve some serious questions. Does Bruce use erection cream? Does art imitate life or does life simply imitate bad art? And most of all, does sugar-pie really love his honeybun?

From the point of view of 2050, you're historyTheological warfare. Elvis on an epic time-travel journey - the Presliad. Buddhavision - a network bigger than God (and more powerful, too). Nasty nuclear leftovers. Naughty sex habits. Dalai Dan (the 153rd reincarnation of the Lama of that ilk) and Barry, the talkative Time Sprout. Even with all this excitement, you wouldn't think a backwater planet like Earth makes much of a splash in the galatic pond.But the soap opera called The Earthers is making big video bucks in the intergalactic ratings race. And alien TV execs know exactly what the old earth drama needs to make the off-world audience sit up and stare: a spectacular Armageddon-type finale. With a cast of millions - including you! DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL - IT'S GONNA BE A HELLUVA SHOW!

SMALL, WELL APPOINTED FUTURE. SEMI DETACHED.If the end of the world is nigh, then surely it's only sensible to make alternative arrangements. Certainly the Earth has its points, but what most people need is something smaller and more manageable. Of course there are those who say that's planetary treason, but who cares what the weirdos and terrorists think? Not Nathan. All he cares is that his movie gets made and that there's somebody left to see it.In marketing terms the end of the world will be very big. Anyone trying to save it should remember that.

Gridlock is when a city dies.Killed in the name of freedom. Killed in the name of oil and steel. Choked on carbon monoxide and strangled with a pair of fluffy dice.How did it come to this? How did the ultimate freedom machine end up paralysing us all? How did we end up driving to our own funeral, in somebody else's gravy train?Deborah and Geoffrey know, but they have transport problems of their own, and anyway, whoever it was that murdered the city can just as easily murder them.

Lifetimes ago, the generation ship Willflower set out, manned by the cream of humanity, on a mission to colonize the stars. But by the 10th generation, things are starting to go badly wrong. The only man who can save the ship is astrophysical Dr Piers Morton. Only he's not an astrophysical engineer, he's not a doctor, he's not even Piers Morgan, and all that remains of his body is his head, his spinal column and absolutely nothing else. Better yet, somebody on board is trying to kill what's left of him...

My first taste of Robert Rankin's work was the BBC radio adaptation of The Brightonomicon. I found it to be hilarious, so, of course, I went on to read the novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was pleased to find that it was the eighth book in a "trilogy" of nine, and promptly began buying the rest of the series.The Brentford Chainstore Massacre is the fifth book in the series and, in my opinion, the best (chronologically speaking) so far. The writing style that attracted me to the series in The Brightonomicon comes fully into its own for the first time in the series. Rankin attacks his brand of fiction with his tongue pressed so firmly into his cheek that it's in danger of poking through! The story is paced to read like a blockbuster action movie, with humorous transitions tying one part of the story to the next, no matter how unrelated they are.Chainstore also marks the first time in the series where Rankin not so much breaks down the fourth wall as rides a bulldozer through it. And then reverses over the debris. Probably laughing manically as he goes.The usual cast are back, with Pooley and Omally taking centre stage, surrounded by the same faces and, of course, a great evil to battle. The duo hatch a plan to get their hands on some of the Millennial Celebration Funding two years early, not knowing that, by doing so, they are causing a certain event to take place at a certain time that will have wonderful consequences for humanity.So, of course, they can't be allowed to succeed.From cloned saviors to ancient scrolls, assassinated monks to hell lizards, this story has everything you could imagination... if your imagination was full of very strange things, and on the tail end of a prolonged session on hard drugs.The only negative I came away from this story with is that the plot seems a little... well, plotless at times, with the events of entire chapters seemingly voided by what follows them. Still, for a story that, at times, pokes fun at its own narrative, a gripe about plot cohesion is a relatively small gripe to have.For fans of Rankin, this book is a must-read, though I would recommend reading the earlier novels in this particular series first if you haven't already, or if you are new to his work. Not, you understand, because of any overarching plot (very little is carried over from story to story), but because the evolution of Rankin's writing style is most evident over this series of novels, and I'd imagine that reading The Antipope after this could be a bit underwhelming.

The Man in the Rubber Mask chronicles Robert Llewellyn's career, from a struggling stage actor to a struggling actor playing Kryten on Red Dwarf.Red Dwarf is one of my top ten favorite shows of all time and I'm on series 3 of my latest re-watch. One of Robert Llewellyn's novels popped up in my recommendations so I decided to read this instead.While Kryten isn't my favorite character on Red Dwarf, I do feel his addition to the crew in the beginning of the third series was what took the show to the next level for me. While reading the book, I had Kryten's voice in my head.The Man in the Rubber Mask talks about Robert's early days as a stage actor and comedian but most of the book focuses on Red Dwarf, and rightly so. Although he's had success with Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars, Red Dwarf will go down as the work he's most remembered for.The behind the scenes stories of working on Red Dwarf were pretty entertaining, though the makeup process to transform Robert into Kryten sounds like torture. Llewelyn's comedic timing makes the book a joy to read. The failed American version of Red Dwarf sounds like it would have been a train wreck and I'm glad it wasn't picked up.Like a lot of biographies, it felt a little thin. I could have used more entertaining anecdotes from the making of Red Dwarf. For a huge Red Dwarf fan, this is a fun read. I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone who wasn't a fan of the show, though. Three out of five stars.

Stark is a secret consortium with more money than God, and the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn. What's more, it knows the Earth is dying.Deep in Western Australia where the Aboriginals used to milk the trees, a planet-sized plot is taking shape. Some green freaks pick up the scent: a pommie poseur; a brain-fried Vietnam vet; Aboriginals who have lost their land...not much against a conspiracy that controls society. But EcoAction isn't in society: it just lives in the same place, along with the cockroaches.If you're facing the richest and most disgusting scheme in history, you have to do more than stick up two fingers and say 'peace'.

Here are the first two novels of the cult series Red Dwarf in one volume – Red Dwarf and Better Than Life – plus the first draft of the original TV pilot script. It all begins when Dave Lister is celebrating his twenty-fourth birthday on a Monopoly board pub crawl round London, and somehow ends up three million years from Earth, marooned in the wrong dimension of the wrong reality, and down to his last two cigarettes. Together with a dead man, a senile computer, a deranged sanitation mechanoid with an overactive guilt chip and the best-dressed entity in all six known universes, the last remaining member of the human race begins his epic journey home.

I think, for the preservation of sci-fi as a book genre, this book should only be read by either fans of Terry Pratchett himself or of obscure, vintage sci-fi. And I reason thus...Terry Pratchett is an amazing writer. Of fantasy. I know many people would argue, but I don't think he would have become half the writer he was if he had not been writing in the fantasy genre. His ability to write about people is what made him wonderful and well-loved, but putting that in to a fantasy setting made it.The Dark Side of the Sun is a half-decent attempt at sci-fi. It has all the elements of a humorous lark á la Hitchhiker's and has some great imagination when it comes to technology, but there always seemed to be too much happening at once. Terry had a hard time explaining everything in a well-thought out manner.The best thing about this book? If you're a PTerry fan, it is the sheer amount of Discworld references (I say references, but this was a pre-cursor to Discworld so it's more of a starting point). We have Small Gods here, Hogswatch and klatch and probably a couple of character traits in the robots and humans. Widdershins may as well be on Discworld, only a Discworld that is 2000 years in to the future and has more advanced technology than the slide rule.It is a fairly decent yarn, with a good story arc and some great comedy sci-fi moments. The humour was lacking slightly, as if he was just a little apprehensive. The ending was useless in all fairness, but you can see the tiny seedling shoots of PTerry's genius here. I mean, it was published about five years before Discworld, and it's nice to know that a man like PTerry started his career with a slight failure. It makes you feel good about yourself.Imaginative? Yes. Humorous? Fairly. Epic to read about Hogswatch before Discworld had even been born? Totes. It's nice. It's a very quick read. It'll make you chuckle a little, if only at how rubbish it is considering who wrote it. But it's hugely enjoyable because that's what he does to you. He makes you enjoy stuff, the bastard.Blog | Reviews | Instagram | Twitter

Full disclosure on this one: my library system did not have this book so I had to inter-library loan it, and the copy they came up with for me is a first edition. They've since published an updated version of the book, re-titled Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was published about four years after Adams's death in 2001. It probably has all sorts of extra chapters about the seventeen years of Adams' writing and fan activity since 1988, and of course, his death and legacy, that the first edition did not have. I would really like to track down a copy of the updated version, is what I'm saying. This book was an obvious stop on my quest to read the complete Neil Gaiman bibliography, not least of which because it's one of the first things he ever published, and also because it's really interesting as a Gaiman fan (and an Adams fan) to see Gaiman freaking out hardcore about Douglas Adams and his work. His love for The Hitchhiker's Guide and its ilk is painfully obvious in every word (many of which have turns of phrase that foreshadow Gaiman's own career), which elevates the book from one of those commercial fan-guides it might have been, to something genuinely insightful. It also helps that Gaiman seems to have had access to the man himself, along with the key players involved in getting Adams's stories out to the world.According to the picture that Gaiman paints, Adams was a brilliant man who stepped into fame reluctantly, and almost by accident. He was notoriously obscenely late on delivering manuscripts (putting new context to his famous quote, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by"), and he described the process of writing more akin to torture than creating art (or humor, as he liked to think of it). It was also interesting to see the differences he had with the various mediums and stories he created. He described writing Hitchhiker's Guide to be all about the jokes, but his other series, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was in many ways easier for him to write because the story didn't constantly have to bend around itself to land jokes. He was also rather obsessed with computers and translating his stories to games. (This is the part I'd be really interested in reading in the updated version . . . 1988 was around that time when obsession with computers and technology was starting to go from something fantastical to more of an everyday experience).I've read Hitchhiker's Guide several times, although I haven't picked it up in almost ten years now, so I think I'm due for a re-read. It will be interesting to read it with all this background knowledge for context (also, it will be interesting to read it now that I've got a functioning brain, as opposed to whatever it is I had back in high school).Must read for Douglas Adams fans and Neil Gaiman completionists, but it might also be interesting reading for someone new to Gaiman or Adams, depending on how interested you are in behind-the-scenes-making-of stories. Anyway I liked it.

Trapped in Virtual Reality17 March 2016 I version I was reading was actually part of the Red Dwarf Omnibus which, along with the first two books, also has the script of the original radio play, and the pilot episode that they used to pitch to the TV executives (and as was suggested, at the time TV executives were very reluctant to take on a science fiction show, despite the fact that at the time Doctor Who was a rip-roaring success). Anyway, in the script for the pilot episode there was a line with a star next to it, and the footnote said 'the rest of the line is missing'. Upon seeing this I immediately thought of the ancient texts that I read where you see this occurring fairly often. This made me wonder what would somebody two thousand years from now, after our society had collapsed, think if he (or she) unearthed a casket that contained a copy of the Red Dwarf Omnibus. In fact what would they think if this box contained a bunch of John Grisham novels, along with say, something by Jackie Collins. In fact, if this box contained a copy of Life of Pi, what would they think of our society – would they have this weird understanding of the world that existed before the collapse of our society, and would they actually believe that we had conquered the stars? Mind you, sometimes I have the desire to build a huge underground vault and stock it full of books (and maybe even a computer, along with all of the manuals) for somebody in the future to uncover. Anyway, I'm not going to answer that question, but if you have any thoughts please put them in the comment section below because I would love to hear what other people would think. This is how the first book in the series ended:What harm was one more day? He turned away from the dissolving exit and crunched up the drive to 220.One more night of that pinball smile.Just one.He couldn't leave them on Christmas Eve.But, of course, in Bedford Falls it was always Christmas Eve … Lister and the crew of Red Dwarf had found themselves trapped in a game called 'Better than Life' and this is where this book begins. Mind you, the book isn't set entirely in Bedford Falls, just the first part, and we learn how they escape – thanks to the fact that Rimmer has this mental disorder in which he simply cannot accept that anything good can ever happen to him. Mind you, it is not that this is a disorder that he knows, but rather something deep in his subconsciousness, something that he doesn't realise himself, but a reality that will eventually rise up and destroy any joy that he has in his life. This is hinted at in the first book, where we learn that despite the fact that they live in this virtual world where everybody's fantasies come true, the Brazillian bombshell that he married still has an affair with the pool cleaner. That is the thing with Better Than Life – it is supposed to create a world based on your subconscious where everything is perfect, which means that when you jack into the game you never want to leave. As such while you live in paradise, your body is slowly dying. Of course the writers never consider that people living in such a world could be hooked up to an intravenous source for sustenance, but then again this game is illegal so such facilities basically don't exist. Actually, I remember watching a film once (I can't remember what it was called though) where everybody lived in such a game while in the real world they were sleeping in beds being fed intravenously (no, it's not The Matrix). The scary thing is that we see similar things happening today, where people log onto online computer games and simply spend their entire lives immersed therein. I remember living with somebody like that, in the days before World of Warcraft (back then it was Everquest and Ultima Online). His fiancée ended up breaking off the relationship namely because he preferred to play Ultima Online than actually spend anytime with her. Seeing this unfold before my eyes sort of put me off the whole online roleplaying phenomena (and the fact that I was never willing to ply the subscription fees – though I did play around with Neverwinter Nights for quite a while, but that had more to do with creating a world using their editor than anything else). Like the first book in the series, Better then Life contains a montage of episodes from the next couple of seasons. Mind you, I have to admit that reading some of the jokes, such as the joke where Lister and the Cat dream of having an affair with Wilma Flintstone, and then discarding it based on the fact that she would never leave Fred, are so much better when you watch the TV series than when you read it in the book. However, having watched pretty much all of the original seasons, reading the same jokes still gives me a chuckle, namely because I remember the visual jokes from the screen. In fact I simply cannot picture the crew of Red Dwarf without images of Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Robert Llewellyn, and Danny John-Jules (not to forget Norman Lovett) in my head. Actually, I suspect that they intended this to be as such since the books were written after the TV series were released. Better than life ends similarly to the previous book, in a way that suggests that a sequel could be coming along, and ending it in a way that could leave us quite content. While it is tempting to write about the last section of the book I think I'll leave it at that, namely because if it is similar to this book then the beginning of Backwards is going to go on from the end of Better than Life. I just hope I don't forget some of the ideas that related to this when I get around to reading that book (which shouldn't be too far into the future).