|
|
| Cover painting by Robert Giusti |
| LAST CHANCE TO SEE Douglas Adams Mark Carwardine New York: Harmony Books, 1990 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-0-517-58215-2 | ||||
| ISBN 0-517-58215-5 | 220pp. | HC/FCI | $20.00 | |
| Pages 30-31: | "We are currently beginning to arrive at a lot of new ideas about the way that shapes emerge in nature, and it is not impossible to imagine that as we discover more about fractal geometry, the 'strange attractors' that lie at the heart of the newly emerging theories of chaos, and the way in which the mathematics of growth and erosion interact, we may discover that these apparent echoes of shape and texture are not entirely fanciful or coincidental. Maybe." |
| Whimsical and irreverent Douglas Adams may have been. But never let it be said that he was "light in the loafers," or lacked a keen understanding of real science. |
| Page 33: | "The dragon relieved of its excess chickens, galloped off into thick undergrowth." |
| Missing comma: S/B "dragon, relieved". |
| Page 34: | "But whatever malign emotions we tried to pin on the lizard, we knew they weren't the lizards emotions at all, only ours." |
| Missing apostrophe: S/B "lizard's". |
| Page 43: | "It reached the far side of the fence, and then began to range back and forth tetchily, waiting for action, swinging and scraping its heavy tail across the dusty earth. Its rough, scaly skin hung a little loosely over its body, like chain mail, gathering into a series of cowl-like folds just behind its long death's head of a face. Its legs are thick and muscular, and end in claws such as you'd expect to find at the bottom of a brass table leg." |
| Vocabulary: means "irritably". Shifts of tense: S/B "were" and "ended". |
| Page 53: | "I certainly don't like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don't believe in God, or at least not in the one we've invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our particularly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they've invented in America, who supply their servants with toupees, television stations, and, most important, toll-free telephone numbers." |
| Unabashedly irreverent. I devoutly wish he were still on this mortal plane. |
| Page 65: | "Like most colonies, Zaïre had imposed on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upward to its colonial masters. Local officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them from being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do but trip itself up, bump into things, and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot." |
| Shifts of tense: S/B "were" and "continued" and "could". |
| Page 67: | "I speculated footlingly as to what possible cosmic significance there could be to this..." |
| Vocabulary: derives from "footling", a British word meaning trifling or insignificant. |
| Page 137: | "Suddenly we were all in rumbustious bounding mode." |
| Vocabulary: The Free Online Dictionary defines this as "uncontrollably exuberant". |
| Page 189: | "They support hundreds of thousands, even millions, of different species, each of which are competing with one another for survival." |
| Number error: S/B "all of which are". |
| Page 190: | "So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan, and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight—the locals wouldn't stand a chance." |
| And Adams was not only irreverent; he knew a pirate when he saw one. |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.