By James Goss

BBC Books, out January 18

When the Doctor promises a trip to the end of the universe, Romana is unimpressed to find herself at a cricket match. But when the match is abandoned – not due to rain, but bat-wielding Krikkitmen – it’s clear that this isn’t going to be a regular couple of hours at Lord’s.

There seems to be a lot of ‘lost’ or ‘long-forgotten’ Douglas Adams about at the moment. In December we had the new version of the previously incomplete Shada, now with animated linking scenes, next month we have the paperback version of The Pirate Planet (the Target novelisation that he never wrote), and now this hardback first edition of The Krikkitmen, a story initially submitted as a serial idea and then amended into a treatment for a movie.

This novel by James Goss, clocking in at a whopping unTarget-like 360-odd pages, is based on the treatment and notes found in the Douglas Adams archive in St John’s, Cambridge, which immediately makes me think of a vault similar to the one that Missy was incarcerated in under St Luke’s University, possibly with unpublished further instalments of Hitchhiker’s.

Adams was never a man to waste a good idea, with elements of his up-till-then unpublished works often reappearing elsewhere. As such, elements of Shada are re-worked into Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Krikkitmen was used extensively in the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book Life, the Universe, and Everything. Originally pitched in 1976 and featuring Sarah Jane Smith as a companion, the 1980 Paramount movie treatment featured Jane, but Goss sensibly goes for Lalla Ward’s Romana, not least because she is the companion in the other recent Adams adaptations.

The author has done a great job in taking the archival material and creating a cracking read. There’s plenty of Adams’ trademark comedy zingers and no doubt Goss added plenty of his own, but they’re so well integrated that you can’t see the seams. Proving that he can ‘do Adams’ in his City of Death and The Pirate Planet novelisations, he takes on the trickier job of bulking out something that was never filmed, unlike those other two projects. That in itself could be a blessing as it stops one making direct comparisons to televised episodes.

In much the same way that a Terry Nation script tends to rely on the same tropes, so too does a Douglas Adams story. We get a Time Lord prison (very Shada), some pithy world-weary dialogue that wouldn’t be out of place being uttered by Arthur Dent, and a even a key that has been split into five, but most definitely forms the Wicket Gate key, and not the Key to Time. It’s a dizzying adventure as the Doctor and Romana flit across the universe, preventing the destruction of all things, and going full circle ready for the finale.

Bookended with a brief introduction by Adams on what makes a good sci-fi film, and multiple appendices on the writing of the manuscript and the treatment itself, Goss pulls back the curtain to reveal what his sources were and how he set about the task. He even includes a few pages of how the story would have read if Sarah Jane had been used. I particularly like the list of titles that Adams suggested for the movie, from ‘Hactar’s Final Function’ to ‘Doctor in Space/Time’, which surely should also star Leslie Phillips and James Robertson Justice.

Verdict: The more familiar you are with Life, the Universe, and Everything, the stranger the experience is of reading this book. The déjà vu is quite remarkable, though without Arthur, Ford and company being at the heart of it. I’m tempted to say it probably works better as a Hitchhiker’s story, but this novel is far more fleshed-out and accomplished than Adams’ slender tome. I know it’s not a lost Douglas Adams story, but could Mr Goss adapt Doctor Who Meets Scratchman next? 9/10

Nick Joy