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Dirk Maggs on Mostly Harmless

October 12 marked the 30th anniversary of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here are Dirk Maggs’s thoughts on the fifth and final book in the series Mostly Harmless:

This is a wonderful, terrible book. Wonderful in that it contains more of Douglas’s unique humour and driving obsessions than many of his other works of fiction. Terrible in its grand and utter finality. 
Many other writers would have happily reunited the inhabitants of the Hitchhiker’s universe in such a way as to leave comfortable room for the next sequel. To send Arthur, Ford and company off on a series of diverting adventures and then return them safely home (wherever that may be) in time for tea (probably not dispensed by a Nutrimat appliance). 
Douglas was only too aware of the expectations surrounding a new Hitchhiker’s book, so much so that the business of writing it was almost as dramatic as the content. Yet he could not turn out work to fit a template, even one he might have devised himself. Of course he would recycle good ideas from defunct (or nearly defunct projects) – his unused Doctor Who and the Krikketmen forming the core of Life, the Universe and Everything, for example, or Shada morphing into the labyrinthine world of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. 
Mostly Harmless is a brave departure. Douglas was determined to challenge his characters and the reader in a maze of parallel plots. This was going to be a roller-coaster ride into the unknown, a tour of his passions and fears. No wonder he found it difficult to settle himself to writing it.
The tales of Douglas being locked in a hotel room in order to meet his deadline aren’t all apocryphal, but there’s a serious point in amongst the dinner party anecdotes. To innovate non-stop is an exhausting process, and the Hitchhiker’s novel represents his predictive imagination at its most extraordinary. The Guide Mark II is a chilling a prescient warning about mixing Artificial Intelligence with Corporate Venality. We are only just waking up to the box-ticking, goal-driven, share-and-enjoy surveillance society Douglas anticipated.
The book is also a snapshot of a creative mind struck by two complementary and equally chilling themes – Mortality and Extinction.
In the years leading up to the writing of this book Douglas’s general interest in the collision of science and the arts had hardened into a deep and abiding interest in the fate of life upon his home planet. His Last Chance To See project – tracking down and observing the Earth’s most threatened species – wasn’t a casual diversion, but an issue that gripped his conscience and fired his imagination.
In Mostly Harmless these themes are played out by characters we have grown to love. There is more than one threatened species in this book; as is the universe we experience every day of our lives, unconscious forces work blindly to react in entirely logical, unsentimental ways. Whether a butterfly flaps its wings or a meteorite strikes a lost intergalactic battleship, the first domino topples to create random – excuse me, Random – patterns. They intersect in a chillingly rational way.
Douglas works well outside the comfort zone of his reader and yet we laugh at the interplay of characters, the unique observational style with which he turns the mundane into the surreal, and the outright slapstick of scenes involving boghogs and security robots.
Then we arrive at the climax of this story and its sudden, shuddering halt. It’s hard not to feel a little bruised. But then we must remember that Conan Doyle tipped Sherlock Holmes over Reichenbach Falls, but eventually gave into sentiment and his bank manager.
When Douglas first proposed that we being Hitchhiker’s full circle and complete the saga on radio – where it all began – I was thrilled to be his choice to finish the job, and intensely curious as to what his ideas were for its ending. With three novels to plan, starting with the epic sweep of Life, the Universe and Everything – which he christened ‘The Tertiary Phase’ – we did not discuss Mostly Harmless in much detail but he admitted that he would like to write another Hitchhiker book ‘with a happier ending’.
In fact, the brave twist in the tail of this story can be seen as ironic, not cataclysmic. Douglas is quietly waiting for us to work out for ourselves that something bigger is going on than the intrigues of Men, Mice and Vogons. Because the premise governing the operation of the Guide Mark II leaves him considerable wiggle room for a further book  about Arthur, Ford and Co. The fact that he did not find time to write it was the tragic part.
Because Douglas hinted that he might have yet more adventures for Arthur, and to provide closure in his absence, the final episode of our radio version of Mostly Harmless – ‘The Quintessential Phase’ – concluded with a coda consisting of several possible happier endings, some of which looped back to previous iterations of Arthur’s life. This provided a less disturbing resolution if listeners chose to listen on; but the end of the tale as Douglas left it was still there to stop at if they’d rather not.
But here’s the thing: regardless of any thoughts upon a future for the Hitchhiker’s characters by the rest of us, the ending of this book is Douglas’s final published word on the subject and, taken on its own terms, is as brave an act by an author with his own creation as can be imagined.
Dirk Maggs – Director, Dramatizer & Co-Producer of BBC 4’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases

Posted: November 8th, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: Douglas Adams

Colfer and Benedictus are rewarded for their courage

Eoin Colfer and David Benedictus both deserve medals for bravery. In having the pluck to step into the shoes of the national treasure’s that are Douglas Adams and AA Milne they have put themselves on a pedestal that people were trying to knock them off before they had even written a word. William Horwood (Kenneth Grahame) and Brandon Sanderson (Robert Jordan) must surely know what difficulties both these authors must have faced.

And Another Thing… and Return to the Hundred Acre Wood were released on the 11th and 5th of October respectively and we take a look at how they have been received.

We will start with David Benedictus’s Return to Hundred Acre Wood. Philip Womack, of the Daily Telegraph, was charmed by a new addition to the Winnie the Pooh saga:

“The introduction of a new character is sure to ruffle some feathers, but Lottie the Otter is an aristocratic, vain, mouth-organ playing creature who doesn’t feel as if she was made up by a committee to compensate for the lack of female characters. The only thing missing from this delightful sequel is the poetry. This book is a joyful and apt addition to the Pooh saga.”

Neville Hawcock of The Financial Times says:

”Benedictus, a journalist and broadcaster who has dramatised Milne’s stories for radio, plainly knows his Pooh. His book captures the originals’ warm, witty, whimsical tone but also carries the narrative forward credibly. Burgess’s copious “decorations”, meanwhile, are small marvels of fidelity to the spirit and draughtsmanship of EH Shepard’s much-loved illustrations.“

Ann Thwaite of The Times is slightly more grudging in her praise:

“Return to the Hundred Acre Wood may well please children, who don’t care when or why a book was written, or who wrote it. If at times the stories seem not as good as we would like them to be, we have to admire and envy Benedictus for the way in which he tackles an impossible challenge, trying so hard to get it right. Pooh and Piglet had offered to help him to get it right, and it was Eeyore, of course, who added, “Not that you are likely to. Nobody ever does.””

So, David Benedictus appears to have achieved the nigh impossible. How has Eoin Colfer fared?

Dave Brendon, of Dave’s blog about Writing says:

”If you’re expecting the Hitchhiker’s books you know and love, that same absolutely crazy but oddly brilliant prose, then you may just be disappointed – Douglas Adams is no longer with us, folks. Nothing anyone writes will ever approach his genius. But is And Another Thing good? Is it a Hitchhiker’s book? Is it zany, hilarious, crazy and absolute fun? Definitely! Eoin did an amazing job, having such legendary boots to fill. Not only did he capture what the Hitchhiker’s Guide books represent and meant to the generations that read them, but he did it with respect and admiration for the work. This isn’t a rip-off or a regurgitation or a parody – this is Hitchhiking.”

Euan Ferguson of the Observer comments:

Within pages, it’s clear this is a triumph. Colfer has pulled off the near-impossible. It’s faithful to Adams’s humour and, more important, it’s also got his rhythm, the cadences and the footfalls that made his style so often (badly) imitated. But Colfer doesn’t shy from introducing his own brand of wit, his own complex logic confettis. It’s the work of an author who can write anyway, with a beautiful, vaulting imagination, and who obviously loves Adams’s style so much he can echo it without falsity or accidental parody. There is not a lazy sentence.”

Paul Simpson of Total Sci Fi Online thinks that:

“Unlike Devil May Care, the recent 007 novel in which Sebastian Faulks was consciously writing "as Ian Fleming", Colfer doesn’t try to imitate Adams’ style, but there is a high degree of similarity. As the book progresses, and we meet new characters, including a Vogon son and heir and the ruler of an offshoot outpost of humanity, the style becomes less Adams and more Colfer, although the Guide entries (which could have done with some pruning) maintain Adams’ slightly anarchic off-kilter view of the world. There are some clever in-jokes, and an acknowledgement upfront that this story may well be dismissed as a mere appendix to Adams’ trilogy in five parts, but there’s a good chance that Adams would have been targeting the same lunacies of everyday life that Colfer attacks in this book.”

Congratulations to both Eoin Colfer and David Benedictus who have have every right to be very proud of their efforts in producing books that are both in keeping with the original classics but done in their own inimitable style.

Posted: October 17th, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: Douglas Adams, Eoin Colfer

Neil Gaiman on So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

October 12 marked the 30th anniversary of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here are fantasy author Neil Gaiman’s thoughts on the fourth book in the series So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:

Douglas Adams was tall. He was brilliant. I’ve met a handful of geniuses, and I’d count him as one of them. He was a frustrated performer, a remarkeable explainer and communicator, and enthusiast. He was an astonishing comic writer: he could craft sentences that changed the way a reader viewed the world, and sum up complex and difficult issues in aptly chosen metaphors. He combined the trappings of science fiction with profound social commentary and a healthy sense of humour to create fresh worlds. He loved computers and was an astonishingly fine public speaker. He was a bestselling author. He was a competent guitarist, a world traveller, an environmentalist, a man who held remarkably wonderful parties, a gourmand.
What he was not, and this may seem somewhat odd, especially when you consider how many of them he wrote and sold, and how famously well he wrote them, was a novelist. And this, I suspect arguably, is the oddest of his novels.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was Douglas’s first attempt to write a novel from scratch.
In many ways it could be seen as an experiment. A transitional novel between the galaxy-spanning romps of the first three Hitchhiker books and the more Earth-bound adventures of Dirk Gently. It was, after all, the first of the three of Douglas’s books not to have originated in the extraordinary period of creativity that took him from the creation of the Hitchhiker’s radio series to the end of his time as script editor of Doctor Who. His first two books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, had strong foundations: they were built on the backs of the scripts that Douglas, and (for the second series) Douglas and John Lloyd, had crafted for the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio 4 series. The third book, Life, the Universe and Everything, was adapted from an unused outline Douglas had written for a Doctor Who film, Doctor Who and the Krikketmen. His next book, the remarkeable Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, was adapted from Douglas’s unfilmed Doctor Who story Shada (with a sprinkling of ideas from the filmed Doctor Who story City of Death).
The first books have been written by Douglas as a young man for a world that expected nothing, as paperback originals. Now Douglas was, for the first time, being published in hardback. He was a bestselling novelist, who had not yet written a book he was proud of. This may partly have been because he was not a novelist.
Now he needed to write a book he had been paid a lot of money to write. His accountant had embezzled most of the money and then killed himself. Douglas Adams had gone to Hollywood on his first, abortive, quest to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made into a film. He had lived there for over a year, doing drafts of the film, did not have a good time and, surprised and a little battered, he had returned home to a small converted stable house off Upper Street in Islington where, eventually, and under pressure, he put off actually writing So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
His publishers, Pan, found themselves, early in 1984, soliciting a book that was, for the most part, unwritten and, for that matter, mostly unplotted. The lenticular image on the original cover showed a walrus that became a dinosaur, because Douglas has mentioned that there would be a walrus in the book. 
There would be no walrus in the book.
It became part of the story of the book that, as the publishing date of the book got closer and the book got no closer to being written, publisher Sonny Mehta had taken a hotel suite and essentially locked Douglas in to write it, editing the pages as they came through. It was a strange way for a book to be written, and something Douglas used as an excuse for any problems that the book had.
But it was a book he was still particularly proud of when it came out. I remember that.
Douglas Adams had returned from America to Islington, and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish occurs in the space that Southern California isn’t. Which is to say that both Douglas’s Outer Space and his Southern California are extremely Californian: the hotel in which rock stars read Language, Truth and Logic by the pool and the bar in which Ford Prefect attempts to pay his bill with an American Express card are not a galaxy apart, and the hooker who has a special service for rich people could exist as easily in one world as another.
Arthur Dent, in previous stories a flat character who existed mostly to boggle at the improbabilities, often infinite, he was confronted with, became someone significantly more like Douglas. Douglas’s return from America was echoed in Arthur Dent’s return from hitchhiking across all of time and space to an Earth that the readers believed to have been destroyed, and his explanation to the world that he had been in America.
It might be seen as a problem for a writer who was considered a social satirist to have, a few pages into the first book in a bestselling series, destroyed the Earth. On the good side it sets you free to explore the vastness of the infinite. On the downside, it rather limits you as an observational humourist, when it comes to specifics, and while Douglas may not have been a novelist, he was definitely an observational humourist.
Still, I think there’s another reason for the restoration of the Earth at the beginning of this book.
Like it or not, and when it came out some people did and some people didn’t,  So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is a love story, and the novel puts an Earth back for there to be a love story on. Underneath all that glitter, Arthur and Fenchurch and unlikely circumstances of their meeting, their love and the travails thereof are the true subjects of the book.
And as we grow older our reading of books changes. As a young man, writing a book about Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I remember picking up on the awkwardness of Chapter 25, and Douglas’s rhetorical question as to whether or not Arthur Dent has…

‘…spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?’ 
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

I took it , at the time, as a manifestation of Douglas’s contempt and discomfort with his audience, and was uncomfortable with it. Rereading it a quarter of a century later, I found myself reading those paragraphs as worried bluster, as if Douglas was scared that he was out of his depth, and was trying to respond to critics or to friends ahead of time. I still suspect that, had there been time to rewrite, to rethink, to revise, that strange breaking of the fourth wall and the author-reader compact, might never have happened.
I do not think it would have been a better book for not having been finished in a hotel bedroom while Sonny Mehta watched videos in the room next door. After all, it is part of its charm that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish reads as if it has not so much been plotted as stumbled upon or backed into. It is surrealist in the way that a book extracted from the author without pause fro inspection, for second thoughts or thousandth thoughts can only be. Characters appear and fade, dreamlike. Reality is frangible. The novel circles one event: a couple making love naked in the clouds, in perfect flying magical dream-sex, an event that is practically a poem.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish has, beneath the elegant veneer, the simplest, easiest, most traditional of plots: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, makes love to her in the clouds and sets off with her to find God’s Final Message To His Creation. And does. After all, for a book suffused from start to finish with gloom and melancholia, a book in which the universe itself is fundamentally perverse, when it is not actually malicious. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is often peculiarly upbeat. Chapter 18 for example, gives us, triumphantly, something unseen in the Hitchhiker universe until now: transient and barely recognisable: joy.

He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones till it now said something it had never said to him before, which was ‘Yes’.
Neil Gaiman – Author of Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and subsequently a famous author

Posted: October 13th, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: Douglas Adams

Simon Brett on Life, the Universe and Everything

As we continue the countdown to October 12 and the 30th anniversary of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, here are Simon Brett’s words on the third book in the trilogy, Life, the Universe and Everything:

I am unique in the history of the world – and indeed the entire universe. I am the only person who ever got a manuscript from Douglas Adams on time. The reason for this rare distinction is that I was the BBC producer who commissioned the first radio script for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and since the pilot episode could not be recorded until we had some words to record, Douglas duly delivered on time. Thereafter, of course, his propensity towards procrastination and missed deadlines became legendary.
I had first met Douglas with a bunch of other Cambridge revue writers and performers, including John Lloyd, Griff Rhys Jones and Mary Allen. He had contributed a few surreal sketches (including a classic about an unsuccessful kamikaze pilot) to a Cambridge Footlights revue to which a group of young radio Light Entertainment producers (including me) had paid a visit. I subsequently produced a radio version of that stage show.
So I saw a lot of Douglas round the BBC. I was aware of his comedy potential, but also of his huge frustration that he couldn’t find a niche for his unusual talents. Most radio comedy round that time was very stratified. Sketches were carefully constructed with beginnings, middles and punchlines, and formats like that didn’t suit the sprawling, insatiable intellectual curiosity of Douglas’s mind.
I was also then producing the topical comedy programme Week Ending, and tried to get him to contribute to that. Never had there been a greater mismatch between programme and writer. A brain like Douglas’s is singularly incapable of writing wacky thirty-second quickies about Margaret Thatcher. Some of his material did appear in The Burkiss Way, another show I was producing, and that was closer to the Adams style, But the show’s main writers, David Renwick and Andrew Marshall (both subsequently to have stellar careers in television comedy), were developing the programme in a way which left little room for outside contributions.
I still thought there was untapped potential in Douglas Adams, and so I asked him to come up with some ideas of his own. On Friday 18 February 1977 we met for lunch in a Japanese restaurant, where he presented me with three ideas. I said that I thought the most promising was the science-fiction comedy which he had entitled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that I would try to persuade my bosses in the Light Entertainment Department to commission a pilot script. The rest, as they say, is history. (And incidentally, neither Douglas nor I could ever remember what the two ideas we rejected were.)
So, on Tuesday 28 June 1977, in the Paris Studio in Lower Regent Street, we recorded the pilot script of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was to be the first and last episode that I produced. Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to continue, but I had recently agreed to take a new job at London Weekend Television. And the ensuing series couldn’t have been in better hands than those of the person I recommended should take over from me – Geoffrey Perkins, a brilliant comedy producer, whose death, like Douglas’s own, came far too early.
On the 12 July I played back the edited recording of the pilot to my immediate bosses. The three of them sat in stony silence for the full half-hour. At the end of the playback the Head of Light Entertainment, Con Mahoney, recognizing that what he had heard was rather different from the department’s usual output, asked me, ‘Simon, is it funny?’ I assured him it was, and from that moment on he gave the project his full support.
Of course it was from that pilot script that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy developed into an international publishing sensation, the ‘trilogy of five’, of which Life, the Universe and Everything is volume three.
In this book you will find all of the trademarks of Douglas Adams’s writing, of which probably the most striking is his sheer glee in the potentialities of the English language. Sometimes the effects are very simple, as when he says of the party spaceship, ‘It tried to right itself and wronged itself instead.’ Other images are more complex, but always note perfect. Here’s a description of the Norse god Thor: ‘He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was the sort of man you only dared cross if you had a team of Sherpas with you.’
Then there are the words Douglas makes up. In a characteristic scene where a mattress engages in conversation with Marvin the Paranoid Android, we encounter ‘flolloped’, ‘globbered’ and ‘vollued’, none of which would have been out of place in Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.
I think Douglas’s was the most original mind I’ve ever encountered. He had a unique ability to make connections between disparate ideas. In the world of Hitchhiker it appears quite logical that a drinks party should hurtle endlessly through space, or that a new mathematical system should be based on people’s behaviour in restaurants.
Life, the Universe and Everything is the book in which Douglas gets closest to actually having a plot. But as he would readily admit, he wasn’t really good at plots, and it isn’t a very good plot. That couldn’t matter less, though. You don’t read Douglas Adams for his plots any more than you read Raymond Chandler for his. You read both authors for their language and the imaginative world that they create.
So enjoy this book. The writing process for Douglas was an agonizingly slow one, but the results were always worth waiting for. And Life, the Universe and Everything has another rare distinction. It is one of the very few books featuring cricket ever to have been a success in the States.
Simon Brett – Producer of the Radio 4 pilot episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Posted: October 3rd, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: Douglas Adams

Penguin launches the official Hitchhiker’s sequel with a day long conference at the Royal Festival Hall

You may not have noticed, but there’s something stirring in the Galaxy… bestselling Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer’s 6th novel in the ever-more increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, will be published on 12th October, the 30th anniversary of publication of the first book in the late, great Douglas Adams’ phenomenally successful series.

Douglas Adams himself once said: “I suspect at some point in the future I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book. Five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number.”

Douglas’ final book in the Hitchhiker’s series ended (as it began) with the complete destruction of Earth. Everyone is dead, which doesn’t leave much of an opening for Eoin to start the sixth book in the series. So how does Eoin bring the eternal pessimist Arthur Dent, his alien best friend Ford Prefect and the two headed Galactic President Zaphod Beelbebrox back from the dead?

London’s Southbank Centre and Penguin Books have joined forces to create Hitchcon’09: a day of celebration and spectacle voyaging deep into the Hitchhiker’s Universe on Sunday 11th October. Special guests include Clive Anderson, Andrew Sachs, Dirk Maggs , Simon Jones  and Harry Shearer, and the original Hitchhiker’s cast of the Radio series will be recreating a Hitchhiker episode live on stage.  Eoin Colfer will be introduced by Ireland’s multi-platinum selling band The Blizzards, playing their single inspired by And Another Thing… Box Office Tel: 0871 663 2500 or www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Eoin Colfer will be going on a national book signing tour, visiting Glasgow, Birmingham, London, Manchester, Cambridge and Cheltenham – full details available at www.6of3.com.

"I really hope you will board the spaceship with me so we can travel through Douglas Adams’ hilarious galaxy together, which will save me having to hang around in your driveway." Eoin Colfer

Posted: September 30th, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: Douglas Adams, Eoin Colfer

Terry Jones on The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

As we continue the countdown to October 12 and the 30th anniversary of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, here are Python Terry Jones’s words on the second book in the trilogy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: 

“I woke up one Sunday morning with a hangover and remembered that I’d bought two tickets for a five-hour silent film (it was the first performance of Abel Gance’s Napoleon).
My wife also had a hangover and said she couldn’t face it, so I rang Mike Palin and he said he had a hangover and couldn’t face it. So then I rang Douglas Adams and he said he had a hangover and couldn’t face it.
So I prepared to sit for five hours on my own, watching a film I wasn’t sure I wanted to see.
However, just as I was opening the front door to leave the house, the phone rang and it was Douglas, who said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and it seems such a terrible idea that I think I ought to do it.’
Douglas wasn’t afraid of ideas even if they seemed like bad ones. Indeed he was totally obsessed with the idea of ideas.
Nobody, I suspect, reads the Hitchhiker books for their plot. Not many, I would suppose, read them for their characters (apart from Marvin). So why is it that we love these books so much? After all, if a novel doesn’t have great characters or a compelling plot, why bother reading it?
In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, there is an interlude in which the Ruler of the Universe talks to his cat about how we know anything or how we know what we perceive is what we are actually perceiving or is what is happening, and he concludes by saying ‘Perhaps I would like a glass of whisky. Yes, that seems more likely.’
And he pours himself a glass of whisky.
It’s one of those magical moments when Douglas’s fascination with ideas comes to the fore. And it’s those magical moments that I love in Douglas’s writing. He’s the only novelist I know who can make ideas a page-turner.
And The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is full of ideas. And humour. That’s the other thing Douglas was so good at: making ideas not only interesting but funny.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opines that every civilization goes through three stages: Survival, Enquiry and Sophistication – the how?, why? and where? stages.
The Guide says: ‘the first phase is characterized by the question How can I eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?’
Then there is the wonderful concept of the A, B and C spaceships, in which all the people in Management, Accountancy, Advertising and Hairdressing are sent off in advance while the creative and productive people stay behind and somehow never make it into space… deliberately. When you look nowadays at the BBC or the National Health Service, you get the feeling that we may have been on the B Ark.
In fact, The Restaurant is full of slightly prophetic elements. The one that makes me shudder, at the edge of today’s economic disaster, is the section where the settlers from the B Ark have made the leaf into legal tender – so money really does grow on trees. But they now realize that there is too much currency available and so, to remedy the situation in fiscal terms, they decide to burn down all the forests.
So welcome to Douglas Adams’s Rollercoaster of Ideas.
Oh, and we had a great day at Abel Gance’s Napoleon. It wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Terry Jones – Python and co-author of Starship Titanic

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

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

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