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Yes.

Extending this comment, Good Omens is an excellent book, but not anything like the Discworld series.

Small Gods is a good discworld book to start on (the best in my opinion, of course everyone will have their own).

And if you like humour, read Good Omens (by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman).

Gaiman's a gem.

After the Dirk Gently books have a go at Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, co-written with Terry Pratchet. I also highly recommended Robert Rankin's Brentford Triangle "trilogy" (in 9 books).

If you like that, Good Omens (the series at least; not read the book) has a bit where it is suggested the M25 is effectively the shape of a demonic curse, designed to cause misery to everyone traveling on it.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I'd also strongly recommend Terry P's Going Postal and Making Money.

I have a long list of non-fiction books I've read and enjoyed. Most recently, I read Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters. Would definitely recommend it!

I had my copy of Good Omens autographed by Gaiman, whence I remarked that I needed the other half now (this was 2011). Gaiman responded, "You'd better hurry up about it."

Sorry, Sir Terry :(

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett + lots of the Discworld novels (also by Terry Pratchett).

The latter have become one of the basic building blocks of my life.

Which drop of rain caused the dam to break? In the book Good Omens there is a demon who considered himself the best not because he was the best deceiver or torturer, but because of his ability to cause mass malcontent.

The real evil isn’t in the experiment, it’s that the researchers found that Facebook makes people’s lives worse. How many suicides are caused by Facebook’s investors? Whether they can mitigate it this way or that is splitting hairs.

Ready Player One was competently directed by freaking Steven Spielberg with a "$155–175 million" budget and still sorta disappointed lots of us who had read the book.

Perhaps some awesome scifi books are just better left to the imagination?

Edit: I felt the same after watching "Ender's Game" (2013).

Edit 2: I felt that the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens" featuring David Tennant and Michael Sheen was absolutely brilliant. I hadn't gotten around to reading the book yet though...

Sourcery is about a power beyond the world taking itself off the world. Literally someone realising: "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" and taking themselves outside the universe for a good telling off. The sourceror turned out to be a girl but whatevs (7th son of a 7th son etc). She nearly caused a bit of a wobble in a universe already a Rizzla paper thickness away from some distressing oddness. However, the potential cause never wanted and eventually averts things going totally Pete.

Good Omens is a damn fine spin on the Christian apocalypse as described in quite some detail in John. There is the full on Angel vs Demon thing with a bloody great Hell Hound. Anyone who knows Jack Russells knows that they have a roughly 50/50 chance vs anything up to and including a nuclear weapon (which will either be shaken to death or sha ..... fzzzzt.) The Dog is almost certainly a JR.

Anyway, I digress. There are clear similarities but distinct differences between the two books.

Sourcery: One individual nearly caused armageddon but took themself away to avoid it

Good Omens: The universe's squishy contents tried to destroy the whole material plane and tripped over its own shoelaces

see my nick, but in addition to stephenson, the books i come back to over and over again for comfort and wisdom include:

- Lord of the Rings: The other bible. Not even the very wise can see all ends; be of good cheer.

- A Wrinkle In Time: 9 year old me, there is such a thing as a tesseract, and there is also Mrs. Beast.

- The Master and Margarita: apocalyptic reading from someone who knew, and a cat who always pays his way.

- the Discworld series: Sir Terry knew our hearts better than most, and sin, young feller, is treatin’ people as things.

- If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveler: a perfect joke that you can tell once, plus a love story.

- Good Omens: Gaiman and Pratchett team up, what’s not to love?

- Moby Dick: And so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

- Lucky Jim: grad school, a survival guide. Come in on the fa la la las, there’s a good chap.

This doesn’t include poetry, which is also in my head constantly.

I think that if they really wanted to end the series, Colfer is the best man for the job. He's no Adams by any means, but he's certainly good, and hopefully he'll at least give us a feel for what Adams wanted.

Gaiman would have been an excellent pick, too: Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett, is as close to Adams' humor as I've found. But Colfer has a much finer sense of whimsy.

BBC Sounds has a load. It's hard to sort out the "full cast audio" from the other audiobooks with a single reader.

Here's Terry Pratchett's "Good Omens": https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b04knthd

Here's a list ordered by date: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/categories/drama?sort=-availabl...

I don't know if these are geo-blocked.

Yep, just went through my list of 38 and only 2 are on unlimited. My list is comprised of relatively popular books that are relatively old, nothing like new or anything. Examples: Army at Dawn, Eternal Golden Braid, Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons, When Genius Failed, Snow Crash, Good Omens, The Signal and The Noise, The Looming Tower. I would expect at least a couple of these to be on there, its not like they're at peak popularity or anything.

But I did chuckle at Piketty's Capital being on unlimited.

“Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW™. CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colourings, and flavourings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn't matter how much you ate, you lost weight[1].

[1] And hair. And skin tone. And, if you ate enough of it long enough, vital signs.”

- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (1990)

Nah, it is a common habit the world over, no matter what the local official system of measurement happens to be.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2010/may...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...

I like the one suggested in the book Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, of measuring faith in Alps.

> To throw them away on some rich flunkie's 5 day project is a total waste.

I'm not going to disagree totally with this, but James May has been doing quite a lot lately to raise the profile of science and engineering, and simply blowing off a project like this with disdain seems a bit shallow. It's part of a larger push by the BBC to get more kids into engineering, and while it's too early to say for definite, there are signs that it's working.

Yes, giving surplus lego to a kid down the street is a good thing, but every now and again it's worth supporting larger projects with greater reach.

I don't know if you've read Good Omens, but there's a bit in that where each demon is reporting on what they've done recently. Several talk about the individuals they've tempted, and the near certainty of a soul each. Then Crowley says he managed to tie up the mobile phone network in all London for about 30 minutes around lunchtime. The others can't see what that has to do with anything, and Crowley is at a loss to explain how the frustration and anger will cause tens of thousands of souls to be one step closer to Hell.

Sometimes the big picture is hard to see. Maybe this isn't an example, maybe this is a worthless stunt, maybe this has no long term effect.

But then again, maybe it has.