Eoin Colfer interview: on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Eoin Colfer talks about writing the sixth installment of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
By Toby ClementsPublished:10 Oct 2009, The Telegraph


Eoin Colfer (left): 'My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should tamper with this incredible series'

Next week, on a tiny planet somewhere in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the galaxy, a book will be published that may well have pan galactic reverberations.
Eoin Colfer, the author of the bestselling Artemis Fowl books, has written And Another Thing…, a sixth instalment of the trilogy in five books that we have come to know as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and he is an anxious man.

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“I still have grave doubts about doing it,” he tells me when we meet in his publisher’s office, turning over a copy of the book in his hands, “that only get graver now as the publication date draws near.”
He is right to be worried. Douglas Adams’s fans are notoriously protective of their late genius’s work. The books began life as a Radio 4 comedy show in 1978. In 1979 Adams adapted this radio series, and the second which followed soon afterwards, to create the masterpiece that fans today call just HHGTTG.
The BBC turned down the chance to publish the book, which they must regret, since it has so far sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, and been translated into 35 different languages. In 2008 it sold nearly 30,000 copies in the United Kingdom alone, and has become what publishers call an “evergreen”, something no amount of marketing budget can achieve.
Over the next 20 years Adams completed four more instalments in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy. He died while he was writing The Salmon of Doubt in 2001, which was published posthumously and contained within it the draft of a sixth novel that he hoped would end on a slightly more cheery note than Mostly Harmless, the fifth book, which saw all his heroes killed and the world destroyed.
The fact that Adams himself had a plan to resurrect his heroes makes Colfer’s instalment seem less freakish. On hearing of Colfer’s plan to write the new book, an American aficionado of the original series had the decency to promise him that he was at least going to read And Another Thing… before he hated it, and in fact when Colfer was asked to write it he initially refused. “My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series, but then I saw it was an opportunity to work with characters I’ve loved since childhood and to give them something of my own voice while holding onto the spirit of Douglas Adams,” he says.

Read the ful report at The Telegraph online.
And a story from The Independent - The Hitchhikers are back.