Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic

Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic is a novel by the British writer Terry Jones, published in October 1997 by Harmony Books and Pan Books. It was written from an outline provided by Douglas Adams and adapts the story of the Starship Titanic computer game that Adams had conceived.

The liner of the title is sabotaged by Antar Brobostigan and his accountant Droot Scraliontis as part of an insurance fraud, and the result is the catastrophe the book calls a Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure, which leaves the ship crashed on Earth. Three humans are recruited to help put it right, and a good deal of the work involves persuading the ship's central computer to cooperate. The plot also carries a bomb on board and a love triangle between two of the human characters and a journalist from the planet Blerontin. As in the game, the main characters are trying to repair the computer and to improve their class status on a liner where status is a formal matter.

Adams had intended to write the adaptation himself but was occupied with the game, and the commission passed through other hands before Jones, who had voiced the parrot in the game, was asked to write the book to a tight schedule and an expected simultaneous release. Jones was best known for his work with Monty Python.