Starship Titanic

Starship Titanic-Douglas Adams and Terry Jones

How I found this book: My friend Patric actually had this in a whole grip of audiobooks he put on my Ipod, knowing how much I loved Douglas Adams.

Setting: In space, on the spaceliner Titanic mostly, the timeline is vague, though I’m assuming it is ‘current’ Earth time.

Main Characters:

Leovinus: The greatest mine ever on the planet of Blerontin, Leovinus is the designer of the luxury spaceliner Titanic. He sees the ship as his greatest creation ever, and is horrified to learn of what its fate is meant to be.

The Journalist: A Blerontinian journalist, (no journalist on the planet is allowed to have proper names); he is investigating the rumors of shoddy workmanship and over-spending on the Titanic project. He gets trapped aboard the ship when the plot is revealed.

Dan: One of the two owners of the now defunct “Top Ten Travel Company” on Earth, Dan is a handsome, but painfully passive creature who often defers to his hen-pecking girlfriend, Lucy. He and Lucy are planning on opening a hotel, when one night something lands right in the middle of it.

Lucy: Dan’s long-time girlfriend, she is a LA lawyer with a UCLA law education, and an overbearing nature when it comes to Dan. She likes to play calm and collected, even condescending, till real stress hits and she looses her head. It’s implied that while Dan has been faithful to Lucy, Lucy hasn’t always been faithful to Dan, though Lucy seems to get jealous much more easily than he does.

Nettie: Dan’s business partner’s girlfriend, she comes off as a dumb blonde to the irritation of Lucy, nothing but boobs and looks. But Nettie appears to be the most insightful one of the bunch.

Plot: The Starship Titanic was built to be the height of Blerontinian luxury, with no detail left overlooked…well that was the idea anyway. The gigantic spaceship was to have the best of everything, as its creator Leovinus wanted, but being more of a dreamer than an accountant, he didn’t realize that the ship was severely into debt. His business partners plot then to put the ship together as quickly as possible just to finish it up, so they can scuttle it on its maiden voyage, and use the insurance money to cover the debt and make themselves rich. When Leovinus and The Journalist find out about the plot, they attempt to thwart it, but not before the ship is spontaneously whisked away to Earth, where it lands in the middle of Dan and Lucy’s house. Dan, Lucy, and their friend Nettie end up being whisked away on the luxurious liner as it is being threatened by an angry army of disgruntled craftsmen, soldiers from the insurance company out to collect their property, and a bomb whose sole function was to destroy the ship in the first place, but who seems to keep getting sidetracked from it’s final countdown.


Themes:

The life of the filthy rich: Like its real life counterpart, the Spaceship Titanic was the height of luxury and decadence. It’s the biggest, the best, and the top of the line of everything. And this makes it as much of a liability as if it were an eyesore, even more so because it has put its owners into debt.

Sometimes looks can be deceiving: Whether it is the ship itself, which looks beautiful on the outside, but is really just a mess of incomplete work on the inside, or the gorgeous Nettie who looks like she is a dumb-blonde, but really is a highly intelligent woman, the idea of looks being deceiving is a playful theme throughout the entire story.

Poking fun at the relationship between craftsmanship and business: Ever since the Industrial Revolution began there has been the tension between those looking to make a dollar and those who want to see good workmanship. Sometimes they can go hand in hand, and in this story…apparently they go to war with each other.

The hubris of the builders: Like with the original Titanic in real life, there is a certain amount of hubris that goes into the great ship, and there is the belief that nothing could go wrong with it…till it does. Apparently human’s aren’t the only people who believe their own lies, but it’s a poignant example that if something can go wrong…it will.

Every book sucks somewhere: I must say, that while the book isn’t much for intellectual substance, I was OK with that, it’s still fun. You can't blame it, after all it's a book based on a video game. It’s not a very deep book, more of a book poking fun at us. So if you are looking for deep meanings in here, or perhaps an allegorical study of the real HMS Titanic’s sinking…this ain’t the place to look for it. There is no Leo DiCaprio-popsicles floating around in this book.

What did I like: It was fluffy, silly, goofy fun. AND, if you listen to the audiobook version, you get to hear the wonderful Terry Jones do a sex-scene from the book that will leave you screaming in laughter, it was so funny.

How would I rate this wormy book: This book rates a MONSTER from me, if nothing else because it’s just fun. It’s not deep reading, but its silly reading, and it’s a lot easier to follow than some of Adams other works, (and some of Jones’s Python work as well!)