Aha! Thought we'd give away the ending that easily, did you?
We will be releasing the fateful final paragraph in due course, but before we do, we want to offer you, the reader, the chance to win a fabulous prize.
This competition comes in two halves.
1) The first part, of course, is to guess the conclusion. Hint: it's less than 50 words.
2) The second part (and this one will generally require a little programming experience) is to reverse-engineer the alphabetised Starship Titanic: The Novel, in order to arrive at the text in its original word order. Hint: here's how we did it in the other direction...
First prize will be a first edition dead-tree copy of the novel (now available in non-alphabetical order from Crown Publishing in the US and Macmillan Publishing/Pan Paperbacks in the UK), signed by both Terry Jones and Douglas Adams. The mind boggles.
Anyone caught cheating by buying the book and keying the whole thing into a computer will be disqualified and told to get a life. We reserve the right to make up the rest of the rules as we go along.
Best of luck!
--The Starship Titanic Web Team
©1997 The Digital Village Ltd/Simon & Schuster Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.