Starship Titanic (Theo)

The Starship Titanic is the greatest ship ever made. It's miles tall, miles long and created by the greatest genius the galaxy has ever known, the most spectacular feat of engineering and the cause of the fall of two planets economies. As the massive ship is unveiled, countless men stare in awe and countless single teenage mothers say to their children: "Your mummy made that". Then suddenly, in a flash, the spectacular creation undergoes what will later be known as SMEF or Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. The ship is gone...

Starship Titanic is a novel by Terry Jones (a friend of Douglas Adams the person who originally came up with the idea of Starship Titanic). The book starts when the Gat of Blerontis is holding the opening ceremony for the greatest spaceship of all time. The designer of the spaceship (Leovinus) cannot be found... The day before the opening ceremony of Spaceship Titanic, Leovinus is interviewed and the media, after much discussion, figure that there has been material cuts on the ship and that its construction has not gone according to plan. After the Starship experiences Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure it does not (as expected) disappear but does on the other hand go right to the most distant parts of the universe. There it crash-lands, bisecting an old rectory, the brand new home of Dan and Lucy, friends of Nettie and Nigel.


Later, Nettie, Dan and Lucy wake up on the ship, each in their own bedroom and each having a conversation with a talkative robotic lamp. They find each other and decide that they should do their best to get off the Titanic, or as they know it; the weird and somewhat scary but yet fascinating technologically advanced space ship. Lucy finds a strange man with orange eyes in the onboard infirmary, who believes there is a bomb on the ship. He inadvertenly arms the bomb and sets it to explode in sixteen minutes. Where this man comes from, "Press to Arm" means "Please Press Dog" and he acts purely out of curiosity. The rest of the book is centered around working out how to disarm the bomb and save the magnificent "Starship Titanic", although as expected there are many complications which I will not mention as to stop readers enjoying the book.

I conclude that the book is funny, whacky, and almost totally unrelated to science (as you would expect from anything written by Douglas Adams or Douglas Adams's friend). It is a thoroughly enjoyable and continually interesting book. I definitely recommend it.