At the beginning of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the reader is introduced to a species of aliens who write poetry so bad that it can be used as a torture device. In accord with the universal laws of fairness, balance, and narrative convenience, then, somewhere in the galaxy there must be a species—or at least an individual—whose prose is equally bad.
Hold that thought.
Douglas Adams, the author of the brilliant and world-renowned Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, died in 2001. Unsurprisingly, people who were not Douglas Adams finished the screenplay he had been working on, and a film adaptation was unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 2005. It was rather bad, but media people will do strange things for money. Conveniently for them, fans of Adams’ work will do even stranger things for another taste of it—such as go see a film they know is going to be awful.
Hold that thought, too.
In September of 2008, a man—or at least a man-shaped thing—was commissioned to write the sixth book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy”. The creature tapped for this role was none other than the “author”—in the same sense that Ford Prefect was an out-of-work actor and I myself am a quantum physicist—Eoin Colfer.
Douglas Adams was a Mac user, to say the least. This man is not. (screenshot from the app)
How to explain Eoin Colfer? To begin with, he is responsible for the heinous crimes against young adult literature known as the Artemis Fowl series. Some people have compared this series to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, but that is tremendously unkind to Rowling; the only possible comparison is that the entirety of Artemis Fowl is written as woodenly as Harry Potter himself is in the fifth and sixth books of that series.
Unsurprisingly, the choice of someone as impossibly and consistently unfunny as Colfer to write a new book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series raised some hackles in the Guide community. Many Guide fans declared publicly that they would never read such an abomination; nearly as many would have died before admitting that they were secretly planning to read the book under plain cover when it was finally published. I was part of both camps.
(Still holding those thoughts? Good.)
Recently, someone contacted me to let me know that the book had come out, someone had made an iPhone app out of it, and would I like a promo code. (Ready? Now bang those thoughts together!)
I said yes.
I’ll save you the trouble of reading any further by telling you that the first page of the book has two quotations. The first, understandably and completely satisfactorily, is by Douglas Adams. The second… well, the second is by Tenacious D.
Don’t forget to close your browser tab on the way out.
The Breakdown
For the benefit of those still reading, I suppose I should give a fuller description of the application. After all, the app doesn’t consist entirely of the written book any more than the book itself consists entirely of quotations by Tenacious D.
On launch, the user is confronted by a terribly unfriendly rendition of the words DON’T PANIC (along with some other words no one really cares about). On tapping the screen or waiting a few seconds, a copy of the ridiculous book cover appears.
Really, how much less friendly can those words get? (click for larger image)
After another tap or brief waiting period, the home screen of the application arrives. It’s wholly unremarkable, except in the lengths it goes to to avoid looking like a native iPhone app.
Because using native-looking buttons wouldn’t be wacky enough.
Rather than write about the things that aren’t actually part of the book, I’m just going to note that the design is awful and the included “extras” aren’t even worth the negative premium being charged for the application. You heard that right; someone at Hyperion understands how bad this app is, because they’re charging less for it than for the normal audiobook.
Now, lest we forget that this app is actually supposed to be a book (and an audiobook), let’s turn to that “feature”.
You can set the font size, but the application will steadfastly refuse to remember it across launches.
Rather than the normal and accepted method of turning pages by swiping right to left (or left to right), And Another Thing opts for an up-and-down scrolling mechanicsm. When you have reached the bottom of a page, you have to tap the same forward or back button used by the audiobook-reader part of the application. That’s right—even if you have no interest in the audiobook at all, you have to put up with the bottom fifth or so of the screen being taken up by the everpresent audiobook controls. And gods forbid you should ever accidentally tap a tiny bit to the right of the back button (or the left of the forward button); you’ll be greeted by the dulcet tones of Simon Jones. While Simon played Arthur Dent on the television and radio versions of the Guide, and his voice is perhaps the most enjoyable part of this damnable application, there are nevertheless moments when you are quietly reading a book in company and do not wish for a male British voice to begin speaking (possibly loudly) about the Sandcastle Hotel’s infamous vibrosuite.
I wasn’t kidding about the Tenacious D quotation.
To round out the total uselessness of the book portion of this app, there is a “Continue” option on the main book menu, but there is no other way of bookmarking a page or searching for text. If you want to show someone why you gave up on the book on page thirty, for example—say, if one of the major characters from the previous book had been written out of this one in the first ten pages, or if Eoin Colfer decided he could write Vogon poetry, or if Zaphod now only had one head (and the other was now driving the Heart of Gold)—you are totally and completely out of luck. Except, perhaps, in that not being able to show them such an atrocity probably means you get to keep that person as a friend, rather than being struck repeatedly in the face with your own iPhone.
In Summary
You may have noticed that in the last image, directly above the quotations, it reads, “This is the story of that appendix.” Eoin Colfer, while a terrible author and a destroyer of beautiful things, is at least honest. And Another Thing is exactly like an appendix: ugly to look at, and something you can live quite happily without for the rest of your life.
Fortunately, appendixes don’t cost $14.99 on the App Store.
