At last in paperback in one complete volume, here are the five
classic novels from Douglas Adams’s beloved Hitchiker series.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway,
Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised
Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin
a wild journey through time and space.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a
內容試閱：
What Was He Like,Douglas Adams?
He was tall, very tall. He had an air of cheerful diffidence.
Hecombined a razor-sharp intellect and understanding of whathe was
doing with the puzzled look of someone who hadbacked into a
profession that surprised him in a world thatperplexed him. And he
gave the impression that, all in all, he was ratherenjoying
it.
He was a genius, of course. It’s a word that gets tossed around a
lotthese days, and it’s used to mean pretty much anything. But
Douglas wasa genius, because he saw the world differently, and more
importantly, hecould communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d
seen it his wayyou could never go back.
Douglas Noel Adams was born in 1952 in Cambridge, England
shortlybefore the announcement of an even more influential DNA,
deoxyribonucleicacid. He was a self-described “strange child” who
did not learnto speak until he was four. He wanted to be a nuclear
physicist “I nevermade it because my arithmetic was so bad”, then
went to Cambridge tostudy English, with ambitions that involved
becoming part of the traditionof British writerperformers of
which the members of Monty Python’sFlying Circus are the best-known
example.
When he was eighteen, drunk in a field in Innsbruck, hitchhiking
acrossEurope, he looked up at the sky filled with stars and
thought, “Somebodyought to write the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy.” Then he went tosleep and almost, but not quite, forgot all
about it.
He left Cambridge in 1975 and went to London where his many
writ-ingand performing projects tended, in the main, not to happen.
Heworked with former Python Graham Chapman writing scripts and
sketchesfor abortive projects among them a show for Ringo Starr
which containedthe germ of Starship Titanic and with
writer-producer John Lloydthey pitched a series called Snow Seven
and the White Dwarfs, a comedyabout two astronomers in “an
observatory on Mt. Everest–“The ideafor that was minimum casting,
minimum set, and we’d just try to sell theseries on
cheapness”.
He liked science fiction, although he was never a fan. He
supportedhimself through this period with a variety of odd jobs: he
was, for example,a hired bodyguard for an oil-rich Arabian family,
a job that entailedwearing a suit and sitting in hotel corridors
through the night listening tothe ding of passing elevators.
In 1977 BBC radio producer and well-known mystery author
SimonBrett commissioned him to write a science fiction comedy for
BBC RadioFour. Douglas originally imagined a series of six
half-hour comediescalled The Ends of the Earth–funny stories which
at the end of each, theworld would end. In the first episode, for
example, the Earth would bedestroyed to make way for a cosmic
freeway.
But, Douglas soon realized, if you are going to destroy the
Earth, youneed someone to whom it matters. Someone like a reporter
for, yes, theHitchchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And someone else .
. . a man who wascalled Alaric B in Douglas’s original proposal. At
the last moment Douglascrossed out Alaric B and wrote above it
Arthur Dent. A normal namefor a normal man.
For those people listening to BBC Radio 4 in 1978 the show came
as arevelation. It was funny–genuinely witty, surreal, and smart.
The serieswas produced by Geoffrey Perkins, and the last two
episodes of the firstseries were co-written with John Lloyd.
I was a kid who discovered the series–accidentally, as most
listenersdid–with the second episode. I sat in the car in the
driveway, gettingcold, listening to Vogon poetry, and then the
ideal radio line “Ford,you’re turning into an infinite number of
penguins,” and I was happy;perfectly, unutterably happy.
By now, Douglas had a real job. He was the script editor for the
long-runningBBC SF series Doctor Who, in the Tom Baker days.
Pan Books approached him about doing a book based on the radio
series,and Douglas got the manuscript for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
theGalaxy in to his editors at Pan slightly late according to
legend they telephonedhim and asked, rather desperately, where he
was in the book, andhow much more he had to go. He told them.
“Well,” said his editor,making the best of a bad job, “just finish
the page you’re on and we’llsend a motorbike around to pick it up
in half an hour”. The book, a paperbackoriginal, became a surprise
bestseller, as did, less surprisingly, itsfour sequels. It spawned
a bestselling text-based computer game.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sequence used the tropes of
sciencefiction to talk about the things that concerned Douglas, the
worldhe observed, his thoughts on Life, the Universe, and
Everything. As wemoved into a world where people really did think
that digital watcheswere a pretty neat thing, the landscape had
become science fiction andDouglas, with a relentless curiosity
about matters scientific, an instinctfor explanation, and a
laser-sharp sense of where the joke was, was ina perfect position
to comment upon, to explain, and to describe thatlandscape.
I read a lengthy newspaper article recently demonstrating that
Hitchhiker’swas in fact a lengthy tribute to Lewis Carroll
something thatwould have come as a surprise to Douglas, who had
disliked the little ofAlice in Wonderland he read. Actually, the
literary tradition that Douglaswas part of was, at least initially,
the tradition of English Humor Writingthat gave us P. G. Wodehouse
whom Douglas often cited as an influence,although most people
tended to miss it because Wodehouse didn’t writeabout
spaceships.
Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as
timewent on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved
novelist whohad not set out to be a novelist, and who took little
joy in the process ofcrafting novels. He loved talking to
audiences. He liked writing screenplays.
He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing
andexplaining with an enthusiasm that was uniquely his own.
Douglas’sability to miss deadlines became legendary. “I love
deadlines,” he saidonce. “I love the whooshing sound they make as
they go by.”
He died in May 2001–too young. His death surprised us all, and
left ahuge, Douglas Adams—sized hole in the world. We had lost both
the mantall, affable, smiling gently at a world that baffled and
delighted himand the mind.
He left behind a number of novels, as often-imitated as they are,
ultimately,inimitable. He left behind characters as delightful as
Marvin theParanoid Android, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Slartibartfast.
He left sentencesthat will make you laugh with delight as they
rewire the back ofyour head.
And he made it look so easy.
–Neil Gaiman,
January 2002
Long before Neil Gaiman was the bestselling author of novels
like American Gods andNeverwhere, or graphic novels like The
Sandman sequence, he wrote a book called Don’tPanic, a history of
Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
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