So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish		Rating
			C
	Douglas Adams
	Series	Related Books
	The Hitchhiker's Trilogy	The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, Mostly Harmless

Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect have split up. Ford is still wandering the Galaxy, but Arthur is... back on Earth? It's months later, and people are still talking about that strange mass hallucination regarding floating ships calling themselves Vogons, but it's definitely Earth.

My first impression when the story began on Earth was, "What the heck?" How the Earh got reconstituted isn't ever really explained. Arthur was too happy to care. For that matter, how Arthur even found himself home is left open to question. There's not even any of the typically nonsensical Adamsian explanation. It's just ignored.

There's also a problem with the plot. As in, there is none. Not unless you want to count Arthur finding his true love. The bit about dolphins, while present, isn't relevant and isn't explained - if you'd never read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy you wouldn't understand this at all. As it is, it's a red herring - no pun intended.

This book is short - only two-thirds the size of the previous books, and they weren't all that big to start off with. More importantly for a comedy book, it just isn't very funny. It's just about as weird, but I never really laughed. I got the distinct impression that Adams phoned this one in.

There is one good thing, one saving grace. Arthur is not the bumbling, clueless nothing that he is in the other books. He's at home; he knows how things work, here. And his travels around the galaxy have given him some knew knowledge and skills, not to mention the ability to take strangeness in stride. But between the lack of even cursory explanations, the extremely short length, and the simple lack of humor, it was left wanting. And so, unfortunately, was I.

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