English Story

Author, author: Writing a sequel to H2G2 by Douglas Adams

Since I agreed to do Hitchhiker part six a lot of people have approached me to say how brave I am.

I knew I was being cheeky saying yes to this project. Optimistic, even. But brave? Hardly brave. Brave is diving into a swollen river to rescue a photogenic child. Brave is admitting that yes, you did notice that woman who just sashayed past. But finishing someone else's sci-fi series, surely that shouldn't be classed as brave. It's not as if there's any actual danger, I thought at the time. I think a little differently now.

I have known for decades that H2G2 is an extraordinary series. More than extraordinary. Brilliant. A lightning bolt across the worthy sci-fi landscape, jazzing up those tired old electrons, getting those sluggish matter transporters firing on all cylinders again. It was just what we needed in 1979, when sci fi was all about "chosen ones": Arthur Dent was everyman and therefore us and by extension me. Finally, I remember thinking, I get to go into space.

I knew this, and a handful of my friends knew it. This knowledge warmed us a little and justified haughty snorts whenever we came across someone who was not privy to the special meaning of the number 42. We enjoyed this cocoon of Hitchhiker bliss for a couple of years then drifted apart. Some of us found girlfriends, a few discovered alcohol, one guy even managed to talk his way into a high powered job in IBM. Hitchhiker became a treasured memory, part of our development. It went on that special shelf along with Kate Bush, Treasure Island, David Bowie,Highlander, Queen, Shannara, Rush, Thunderball and Debbie Harry. This shelf glows warmly to this day and calls me back whenever I need a little boost.

I assumed this was the way for everyone. But elsewhere, in the world of the mega and the giga, people were not ready to let Hitchhiker go quite so gently into the good night. There was a place where Arthur and Zaphod could live on, with a vibrancy and relevance that they had never before achieved, and it was a place that Douglas Adams had foreseen. He dubbed it the sub-etha; we know it as the internet.

I knew there was a Hitchhiker presence on the web just as I knew there was a planet called Mars. It was there and it was big but it didn't really affect me on a daily basis, until the announcement was made that I was doing the sequel. Then, to continue with the cosmic imagery, it was as though the little green men had landed in my garden – armed. Suddenly what had been a vague presence came into very sharp focus. I woke up the next morning and logged on to my own site to find the messageboard traffic had not just spiked, it had completely sprawled with communiqués from the Hitchhiker faithful who were eager to inquire into my supposed pedigree for accepting this assignment. Though the words eager, pedigree and assignment were not the terms they used, the word "supposed" did feature quite a bit.

I was surprised by the sheer volume of the traffic. It seemed to me that if this continued, I could be inadvertently responsible for rupturing the very fabric of the internet, allowing millions of hours of celeb blogs and laughing baby videos to spill out into real space. Ignore it and it will go away, I decided maturely.

And for a while that actually worked, but then the virtual world began to seep through to my writing shed in Wexford, Ireland. Mostly thanks to my friends, who sent me sympathetic messages referring to chat-room roastings I hadn't read, such as: "Never mind ZB Alpha. I think you do have loads of talent compared to a couple of other writers." I was being pelted by snowballs on Facebook when a pop-up inquired if I would care to join a group objecting to me writing the Hitchhiker sequel. This was a bit of a shock, as these invitations are random. It's one thing to be targeted, but quite another to be randomly selected to campaign against oneself. This is bigger than I thought, I thought, and decided that the time had come to see just how much twitter-poke-blogging was going on.

So I joined the campaign to stop me writing H2G2 6, and had a fine time weighing in with my opinions on myself and feeding the bloggers hitherto unknown personal tidbits such as: "Eoin Colfer once spent an entire summer with a Bay City Rollers scarf tied around his wrist." And "Eoin Colfer often buys jeans online. In the teenager section." And "Eoin Colfer is extremely nervous about all this H2G2 hype. He tries to be flip but he's not fooling anyone."

There was a reason that all this feedback was getting to me – the Hitchhiker's Guide is not just a series of books, it's a philosophy, an attitude towards life, a long-drawn-out "screw you" to everything corporate, a delicious vein of subversive wordplay. It is our youth, and now some Irish chap was going to come along and screw it up.

Suddenly I understood why people were telling me how brave I am, and I wish I could compose a paragraph to reassure everyone, but I can't because everyone I've met has a different opinion as to how Hitchhiker should go. I am not going to please everyone, unless I win several lotteries, build a time machine and do a lot of house calls.

I am not trying to be Douglas Adams. I have tried to write something which could be seen as a tribute to him, which could possibly, with my name attached, bring the Hitchhiker to a whole new audience and back to the forefront of sci fi worldwide. Where he deserves to be.

It's already happening. The Hitchhiker is awake and creeping up the charts. You may not like every single character development and plot twist in the new book. But I hope you will approve of a good 75% (80% if you have a grudge against the gods of Asgard). One promise I will make quickly before I decide to yank it back is that And Another Thing is funny. I laughed and so did my wife, and how wrong can two such unbiased people be?

I talked with a guy in ComicCon who was queuing up for his signed towel and he took his leave with the quip: "I'm gonna read this new book before I hate it." And I think that's about all I can hope for. If I haven't hooked you by page 150 then put it back on the shelf and walk out. Bookshops love that kind of thing.