This year, that honour fell to this, the posthumous collection of Douglas Adams's essays, the one HHGTTG short story - Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, and the existing 11 chapters of the book Adams was working on when he died.
It's a fascinating and well researched/compiled collection of Adams's writing outside of the novels.
His trademark humour shines through most of the essays and letters, regardless of how serious the subject matter might be. In some places, he's remarkably prescient in the ways computers would take over every aspect of life.
In others, he's not quite so accurate. in one essay about the future of magazines, he says that unwanted advertising will be a thing of the past when magazines and newspapers start happening online... Oh how I wish that prediction had come true.
His story about traveling to Australia to try to compare a new personal submersible vehicle to raiding the backs of the local aquatic life (namely the local manta rays) is particularly funny.
The short story has been about for a long while but I'd managed to never read it before picking up this book. It's everything you'd expect from Adams, except a lot shorter than usual. It's also dated rather badly due to the satirical ending which will probably be lost on anyone who doesn't know about 80's world (USA) politics.
The novel extract is both brilliant and desperately sad. Brilliant because it's so bleeding funny. desperately sad because it's unfinished. It was a new Dirk Gently book, although apparently he was thinking of reworking the ideas into a Hitch Hiker's format. The plot was pretty much insane but certainly involved time travel. I was really getting into the story, as hard as I was trying not to (because I knew it was only a fragment), and suddenly it just finished. We will never know what the relevance of Desmond the rhinoceros might be to estate agents battling talking kangaroos in the distant future. We'll never know why the femme fatale was missing only the back half of her cat. there's a deep seated tragedy in that.
Twenty years on, Adams is still one of the greatest geniuses to grace the world of comic literature. If the heaven he didn't believe in believes in him, I hope he's happy there and keeping the angels amused with his anecdotes about the sheer inconvenience of the afterlife.
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