And Another Thing…

And Another Thing... was published in hardback on 12 October 2009, thirty years to the day after the first Hitchhiker's book. Penguin issued it in Britain and Hyperion in the United States, and the author was Eoin Colfer, who had been commissioned by Douglas Adams's widow, Jane Belson.

Adams himself had wanted a sixth instalment. He said that five seemed to be the wrong kind of number, that he would like to end the series on a more upbeat note than Mostly Harmless, and that he had ideas from an abandoned Dirk Gently project which he thought might be salvaged for it. He died in 2001 before writing any of it.

Unlike the earlier sequels, the title does not come from a line in the first book. Colfer took it from the fourth novel, from a passage in which a man concedes an argument and then, twenty minutes later, says it.

The story begins with Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian and Random in Club Beta as the Vogons are about to destroy the Earth, and it follows the group on from there, with Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz going in search of a rumoured colony of humans.