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October 12 marks the 30th anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

We here at Fantasy Book Review are dedicated to the fantasy genre. We do not read and review science fiction books unless they are something most remarkable, books that transcend genres…

As October 12 2009 marks the day that the most remarkeable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor was made available to humanity – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – we thought we would run a feature on this truly magnificent series.

All five books have been reissued with a new cover look and, thanks to the kind people at Pan, we have all five books to read.

In the lead up to the anniversary and the publication of And Another Thing… the sixth book in the trilogy by Eoin Colfer, we will be featuring the forewords of five famous Hitchhiker’s fans: Russell T Davies, Terry Jones, Simon Brett, Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs.

So, without much further ado, here are the words of Russell T Davies on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“Between the ages of five and eighteen, I must have sat through thousands of school assemblies. I can remember only two. One, in Junior School, when the Deputy Head told us that the PG chimps were paid more than the workers picking the tea leaves (good man!), and two, in the autumn of 1979, when Margaret Iles and Suzanne Couling stood up, in Olchfa Comprehensive School, Swansea, and read out the end of Chapter Eighteen of this very book.
Ah, the bowl of petunias, and the whale. ‘Oh no, not again.’ And we sat up. We listened. We laughed. For once, we felt part of an assembly, because we knew this stuff. It was a rare moment for teenagers: a shared knowledge of a piece of writing, a shared love. Because, back then, in those days of post-punk and Green Flash and Anti-Nazi League badges The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was something truly unique. It was cool.
’Cool’ is a horrible word. Too close to cold. It smacks of the beautiful elite. But this book was cool in the best way – wise and true and subversive and, most importantly, forging a connection between people. And here I mean the paperback specifically. Sure, lots of us loved the radio series, and strained to listen to Radio 4 on Long Wave, but there was just something so special about having all that brilliance, and all those jokes, in book form. It was so portable. So available. So ready to be passed around. In my whole life, I can’t remember a book being so shared. We owned it, with pride, so many of us – not just the elite, but the whole range, from swots to rugby boys, from girl-gangs to young offenders, the tall, the short and the lonely, let alone the vast majority of kids with no label. We carried it around, like an iPod, like cigarettes, like a Gideon’s Bible. You’d see that novel, with its cover like neon left out in the rain, jutting out of back pockets and school bags, clutched like a shield, passes from hand to hand like an initiation. Okay, maybe Harry Potter had a similar moment of glory. But you could never fit that into your back pocket. (This new addition still fits, I just checked.) Because that’s what I loved about this version of Hitchhiker’s, above any other; the soft, bendy, riffable paperbackness of it.
It’s vital to remember how much Douglas Adams can mean to kids. As time passes, Hitchhiker’s can acquire something of an elevated air, straddling Oxbridge and Hollywood. But this young thing belongs to the playground! When you’re young, and just emerging from the four walls of home into the wide world outside, that’s exactly when you feel so small, like Arthur Dent, all alone in the universe. That’s when you act as wildly two-headed as Zaphod. That’s when you really need someone to say ‘Don’t Panic’. It’s the perfect age to mutter a heartfelt ‘Oh no, not again,’ a phrase so much wiser than today’s ‘Whatever’. When we laughed out loud at the poor petunias’ punchline, way back in 1979, it wasn’t just because it was funny. It was because we agreed.
I don’t think Douglas Adams is ever included in the lists of great children’s writers. Maybe they don’t ask enough children. But while the Great Man wrote with magnificent intellect and dazzling philosophy, with prose powerful enough to generate a million academic essays, there’s surely the heart of a Great Big Kid inside these pages. And that’s the greatest compliment! All kids invent stories. They imagine games of War, or Doctor Who and the Daleks, or the wonderful logic of Off Ground Touch. But then hormones and kissing and spots takes over, and storytelling is put to aside; or maybe people simply focus on telling the story of their own lives. But the best writers, I think, don’t forget. They carry that childlike lunacy with them forever, its joy and its danger, and Hitchhiker’s is packed with that unique energy, all barmy and brisling and bold. This book can be witty, iconoclastic, godless, savage, sweet, surreal, but above all, it dares to be silly. Fiercely, beautifully silly. No wonder it became a banner, a badge, a totem. for the Class of ‘79. Douglas Adams was writing for us.  
And a good book has a radioactive half-life way beyond our childhoods. Just a few years ago, I was buying a house. The owner showed me around. I looked at the bookshelves, like you do. And there it was. The original paperback. The wet neon. I picked it out, and just smiled; the man smiled back. We didn’t need to say anything, but it was still there, that connection between strangers, almost thirty years later. Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic to fall open at a favourite page.
So, for God’s sake, when you’ve finished this book, don’t seal it away on a shelf. Put it in your pocket. Pass it round. Spread the word. Leave it on a bus! And complete the circle – go on, someone, please, read it out in a school assembly. Because they’ll love it, those kids, I promise; they will find it makes so much sense. Douglas Adams is waiting for them. So hand over this lovely paperback, for the next thirty years.”
Russell T Davies – writer and producer of Doctor Who and Torchwood

Related posts

• Dirk Maggs on Mostly Harmless
• Colfer and Benedictus are rewarded for their courage
• Neil Gaiman on So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
• Simon Brett on Life, the Universe and Everything
• Penguin launches the official Hitchhiker’s sequel with a day long conference at the Royal Festival Hall
• Terry Jones on The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Posted: September 27th, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: Douglas Adams