A review by andrew_j_r
And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer

2.0

This isn't the story of the Hitchikers Guide to The Galaxy.  It resembles it as much as an unreliable copy made by the Pooflesnithers of Creen, a race who could create a perfect copy of something given enough exact measurements.  Unfortunately for the Pooflesnithers, they lived on a planet where anything that passed through the atmosphere and onto the surface was instantly disorganised, so when they were submitted a picture of, say, the most beautiful woman ever to have lived in any part of the known multiverse, that information would be twisted in several dimensions simultaneously and once created, the resulting travesty of womanhood would be enough to cause the most libidinous of males to "wait around for another one" even if there was a suspicious yellow space ship in orbit with weapons hot.  So disappointed were the Pooflesnithers that they attempted to measure the atmospheric disorganisation - the theory being that  if they put the blueprints of whatever it was they were trying to create  through a filter designed in anti phase with their atmosphere and beamed it through, the atmospheric disorganisation would then recreate the blueprints exactly as they had been originally intended.  However, this did not work and after several attempts they sent one of their kind into space to view the plans before they were disorganised in their atmosphere, hoping that he would remember what the thing was supposed to look like when he came back down to Creen.  Unfortunately, because his memories of how to operate his capsule were also disorganised as he left the planet, as soon as he tried to operate the controls in order to return home his ship would invariably fly into the sun and the whole thing was eventually given up by the Pooflesnithers as a bad idea.
Pity Eoin Colfer never reached the same conclusion.