BUSY WRITER GETS PYTHONS TO HELP.

Byline: Kevin F. Sherry Daily News Staff Writer

Author Douglas Adams figures that if he can get one member of Monty Python to write a book for him, he might as well sit back and let other folks do all the publicity for him as well.

``I've got teams of people doing interviews,'' Adams said.

He and Monty Pythoners Terry Jones and Eric Idle recently discussed Adams' ploy to let others do all his dirty work.

Jones provided the voice of a semi-deranged narrator parrot for Adams' new CD-ROM adventure called Starship Titanic, and when Adams realized that the game had a decent plot, he recruited Jones, the director of the Pythons' ``Life of Brian'' and ``The Meaning of Life,'' to write the novel for him.

Hence we have ``Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic'' (Harmony Books; $20) - a novel by Terry Jones.

``Douglas can now say wonderful things about the book, and he doesn't have to go through ... all that unpleasant typing,'' Idle said.

In the 1980s, Adams authored a text-only game based on his ``Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' novels. Graphics-based games soon pushed text-only adventures into the footnotes of cyber history, despite the cheesiness of early graphics.

``They were just sort of clumsy, crude, ugly and slow,'' Adams said. ``They didn't have any of that real interactivity.''

Adams decided to wait until graphics caught up with his expectations. Ten years later, the pioneering CD-ROM game Myst let Adams know that the type of game he wanted to create was possible. While Myst had amazing graphics, it lacked in the story department, Adams said.

``Myst is great in terms of creating those sort of worlds,'' he said. ``But nothing happens in it.''

No Enterprise

While directing his 30-person CD-ROM team, Adams avoided the sterile, polished look of ``Star Trek'' ships, and instead thought of his spaceship as a luxury liner. The architecture grabs aspects of Venice, the Queen Mary, the tomb of Tutankhamen and the Chrysler Building.

``It's a palace of pleasure,'' Adams said. ``We went for sort of a '30s look.''

Players can chat with every personality in the CD-ROM game, from human characters to the easily confused self-destruct bomb. In all, the game employs 12 hours of recorded responses that allow players to move around and interact at will.

The ability of a player to carry on a conversation with Starship Titanic takes it beyond the usual ``have gun, will kill'' CD-ROM diversions available today, said Adams, who already had a 20-page outline of the plot prepared when he handed the novel end of the project off to Jones.

``It's like a school essay,'' Jones said. ``You get the title and a certain time to write it.''

That ``certain time'' was just more than a month. Jones was told, ``you have to write this book in five weeks or we will take your children and kill them,'' Adams said.

With that kind of incentive, Jones got right to work and pounded out ``Starship Titanic's'' 245 pages, ostensibly to have its publication ready to coincide with the release of the game.

So, um, where's the CD-ROM?

It's six months late and should be ready by early March, Adams said. Not that Jones did anything all that special.

``He fed the text of all my other books into a computer,'' and out came ``Starship Titanic,'' Adams said. Except, ``it's a lot naughtier because Terry is a much naughtier person.''

Loose nuts?

The novel tells the story of the luxury Starship Titanic, ``The Ship That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong.'' Created by the Blerontins, a society renowned across the galaxy for its canapes, the space-faring Titanic suffers much the same fate as its 1912 namesake.

Ten seconds after its trial launch, shoddy workmanship causes the ship to suffer Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure, which sends it across the galaxy, crashing into the future home of an Earth couple.

One half of that couple was Lucy, who ``had a good brain even though she had lived all her life in L.A.,'' Jones writes. ``Despite the continual exposure to carbon monoxide and people from the film industry, she had remained smart.''

Lucy and her two pals get whisked away from Earth and encounter an overamorous journalist, warring construction-loving aliens who repair any damage they do to the Titanic, and a self-destruct bomb that seems to enjoy phone sex.

Despite the Earthlings' ignorance of their own galaxy, the group eventually returns to Earth, where the journalist character first encounters the planet's freeway systems.

``What sort of transportation system d'you call this?'' he asks. ``The more popular it is, the slower it goes! What genius worked this out?! ... I mean a transportation system with an average speed of just above stationary is not really a transportation system at all! It's more like a storage system!''

Growing up, Adams was always a fan of Monty Python's television show.

``It just seemed to be incredibly intelligent,'' Adams said to great laughter from Jones and Idle.

Adams thinks the Python humor translates well to his own work, even if the Pythons themselves are getting on in years.

``Pythons are basically 10 years older than me, and basically they look it,'' Adams said. ``We're all old farts together now.''

Countered Jones: ``He's 10 years younger, but he's more bald.''

By the end of the year, Adams expects a major announcement - finally - about a movie version of the ``Hitchhiker'' novel.

Jones is content with the novel he wrote for Adams. It somehow ends with the parrot being honored with a medal and golden perch for bravery and service to its planet.

And what's Idle up to?

``I'm writing a novel for John LeCarre,'' he said.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--2) Douglas Adams, left, is counting on Monty Python member Terry Jones to help publicize ``Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic,'' which Jones wrote based on Adams' 20-page outline.