Douglas Adams' death last year permanently dashed the hopes of the few diehard fans who believed he might one day make good on his promise to follow up 1992's Mostly Harmless—the fifth book in his beloved Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series—with a less brutally depressing sequel. The Salmon Of Doubt, a collection of Adams-related ephemera mostly collected posthumously from the hard drives of his various computers, won't make those fans feel much better. Surprisingly, for such a ghoulishly opportunistic-sounding project, Salmon is a lot of fun. While dodging deadlines and struggling for a decade to produce another novel (several tantalizing chapters of which appear here), Adams traveled around the world, writing comedic reports about his strange journeys. He produced commentaries on technology, Bach, and The Beatles, gave occasional speeches, and wrote newspaper columns soliciting reactions and provoking debate on his interactive web site at h2g2.com. Salmon reproduces all these odds and ends, alongside previously published but hard-to-find items like the Hitchhiker's story "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" and the unpleasantly grim "The Private Life Of Genghis Khan." The book also gathers Adams-related material, including news articles about him and interviews he granted various publications (including The Onion A.V. Club, back in 1998). Taken together, the disparate pieces paint a loving portrait of Adams as a respected, hilarious, highly intelligent man with a crippling lack of self-confidence that only seemed to surface when he was trying to write. His habits, his tastes, his obsessions, and his dry, absurd sense of humor are clearly expressed throughout. For Adams fans, Salmon contains crucial insights into the man and enjoyable samplings of his insightful and ironically effortless-looking work. But it's still a disheartening peek into a promising but abruptly aborted future. Like C.S. Lewis' similar posthumous-apocrypha collection, The Dark Tower And Other Stories, Salmon whets readers' appetites for a literary meal that will never come.