Quote:
Originally Posted by Manabi
The joke is that the novel's been sorted so that all words are in alphabetical order, for the sake of referencing convenience. You can much more easily find the word you're looking for now.
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The "referencing convenience" is my own description. In reality, the alphabetical order is a joke on readers who thought they're getting the full novel.
Here's how it was originally presented:
http://www.starshiptitanic.com/novel/
Clicking through the links reveal this message line by line:
Quote:
Starship Titanic: The Novel!
by Terry Jones!
Now available online!
The whole text!
Every single word!
In Alphabetical Order!
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The last page is NOT included. Instead, there was a
contest to "reconstruct" the whole novel in the correct order.
The
winner is someone who wrote a program to slowly generate all possible permutations of all words in the novel. The program was never executed (and will take a long time to find the "correct" novel), but the author still got a complementary a copy of the novel signed by Douglas Adams.