Throwing a cow

I heard about this on the radio this morning. Now, I know there are other slightly more important stories in the news at the moment, but I couldn’t help standing open mouthed, wondering just… well… why?

I’m not a big fan of Douglas Adams. I don’t find his writing especially humorous (there are far funnier sf writers), it is certainly highly derivative (no, he didn’t invent the paranoid android, or the zany space romp). He span out Hitchhikers because it seems to me he didn’t have many other ideas (or couldn’t be arsed to develop those he did have – preferring, instead, to keep rewriting the one book that made his name). But that’s not the issue. There is, after all, worse stuff in print.

What I am totally baffled by is that someone, somewhere along the line, thought it would be a good idea to get Eoin Colfer to write another. It can only be about the money, can’t it? There is no literary merit in this, no urgent need to ‘finish’ a series that had no overall plan.

As far as I can see it is going to consume vast amounts of time and money that could have been spent on developing new talent. Oh. No. Silly me. That would involve a bit of a risk. That would involve hard work on the part of an editorial and marketing team. That would involve highly paid people actually doing the job they get paid for (instead of farming it out to inexperienced undergrads on work placement).

So, I hereby suggest that the ‘final’ (yeah, right) volume of the Hitchhiker series be titled Cash Cow.