When I was in high school in the mid-90s, I emailed Douglas Adams, who freely gave out his email address at the time. I told him how reading "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" got me more interested in my Physics class, and generally helped introduce me to a world beyond computer games.
He wrote back:
"Thanks for your note. Glad you enjoyed the books. I'm glad if I got you interested. But I'm always surprised that people are surprised to find that the world we unexpectedly find ourselves in is interesting.
Best,
Douglas Adams"
Not his most pithy writing to be sure, but I love that I have this personalized bit of Douglas Adams wisdom that nobody else has ever seen (well, now they have).
There's "The Salmon of Doubt", an excellent collection of misc essays and writings of Douglas Adams published after his death, and it contains his last unfinished Dirk Gently novel.
It's about one third finished, and it's really just wild: There's one narrative strand about Dirk Gently, a private detective, receiving mysterious anonymous payments and deciding to follow random strangers, one about a paragliding genius architect who's all by himself in a weird future architect's utopia, and one about an escaping rhinocerous that's mainly narrated in terms of what it smells.
It's fantastically creative and incredibly sad that we won't get to read AD's ending, although I doubt that he actually knew where he was going with it at the time he wrote the bits that are there. It's this grand setup that really leaves you wondering what it means and how it's supposed to come together.
I'd encourage anyone to read it and try to come up with an ending. It feels like a fiendishly hard puzzle, and really gets you in the authors head. And do let me know if you have a good one!
There were four episodes of a Dirk Gently TV series done by the BBC which I really found both clever and charming in just the right way for Dirk Gently. Some of it grated, but in a way that I feel it was correctly intended to. It's a shame it was cancelled before it could do a bit more exploration. They seemed to be onto a good thing.
The US TV Series I also enjoyed, but it's much more of a radical departure from the books than the British TV show is. But it's chaotic, it has interesting characters, and the whole crazily chaotic storyline is choreographed well and ties together cleverly.
Oh, that US series! Never has a book license been touched more gently (pun really not intended, can't think of a good replacement to avoid it). "Yeah, we can't turn this into an at least tolerably good TV series, let's do this completely unrelated things instead". And yet they captured the spirit so well!
The BBC series was really excellent. Stephen Mangan was perfectly cast. I enjoyed it way more than Sherlock or anything else at the time that took itself too seriously.
In 1988 I was working on a Mac software package and I remember the thrill of his returned “Customer Registration” card arriving. We had a small display cabinet and it went in there (along with Stanley Kubrik’s and as few others)
The Radio Series was the best, followed by the scripts to the radio series (more random access!)
The TV series was actually pretty good too (like a Tom Baker Doctor Who (Adams was also a Who editor/writer during that time and had access to all manner of polyurethane monster kit!))
I also loved the Dirk Gently books but I always felt like they needed more of a denouement. Every passage before the end was like a hand carved chocolate frog, and the endings were said frog hitting a publisher at speed.
In my senior year of high school, it was midterms and I had to study. I had a horrible problem with procrastination. So there I was in the library about to start studying when I happened upon the first book of his "trilogy". I finished it without stopping to study. And then I found the next two books in the trilogy and devoured those too. I loved those books and luckily I passed my exams. It was stressful at the time knowing I had to study, but today I remember that time fondly.
In case you are unaware, the hhgttg “trilogy” is actually 5 (or 6, depending on your view) books long. “So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish” and “Mostly Harmless” are definitely worth a read!
I remember there being a collection of the first 3 called the Complete Hitchhiker's Guide. In typical Adam's fashion, after the 4th book was released a new compendium was released called the More than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide. That titling should have continued, so we'd have gotten the Even More than Complete Hitchiker's Guide and, finally, the Completest Complete Hitchiker's Guide.
I definitely felt like the series dropped off hard after Life, The Universe, And Everything. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish was kind of meandering, and Mostly Harmless was just plain depressing and a terrible ending for the series. So my personal advice would be to stop after the third book.
Oh blubbering nebulae of bureaucratic slime,
Hearken to this most dolorous rhyme!
For Douglas Adams, that scribe of renown,
We vomit forth verses of gelatinous brown.
With squelching syntax and belching prose,
We honor his mind where improbability flows.
Hitchhiker’s Guide! A tome most absurd,
Turning logic to gibbering, flailing bird.
Behold the beauty of bureaucrats vile,
Whose forms in triplicate stretch mile by mile.
For Adams, dear Adams, saw through the farce,
And sculpted with words a galactic arse.
The number 42! Oh cosmic decree!
A joke of the universe, but not for thee!
With Marvin the Paranoid, sighing so deep,
And whales who contemplate death in their sleep.
O Adams, grand spinner of nonsense profound,
May your soul in hyperspace ever be found.
Yet should you return, we promise you this:
More poetry! More Vogon! More hideous bliss!
I remember tuning in to the first episode on BBC Radio 4, having heard about it the previous evening. It was so absolutely tuned into my way of thinking it could have been written just for me. Even now, as they say, the pictures are better on radio. Other adaptations have always disappointed me, apart from the subsequent books, for the same reason.
Douglas Adams was a great loss when he died, but what we had from him was the best.
Exactly my feelings. The CD boxed set, now scratched and basically unplayable, is still one of my prized possessions. I've probably listened to it hundreds of times, often back to back.
Sadly the CDs were a little different to the original radio broadcasts due to rights issues. Notably Marvin 'humming like Pink Floyd' on the surface of Magrathea was missing :(
One of my greatest regrets in life is seeing a "ticket" on the back of an EE trade magazine to see Douglas Adams give a presentation. I believe the event was in San Diego, and I was living in Arizona. The event was that upcoming weekend. I was tempted to drive out for the event, but thought, "nah, that's a torturous drive, I'll catch him another time." He died within a year.
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." This line alone did nearly as much to shape my adolescent sense of humor as all of Mel Brooks' movies combined.
Hitchhikers guide was a personality defining read for me when i was younger.
I also recommend this video:
Parrots, the Universe and Everything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc
I recommend 'The Cyberiad' by Stanislaw Lem. Get the Michael Kandel translation.
As an Adams fan since high school I was floored when I eventually read The Cyberiad and realized that Lem had laid all of the groundwork fourteen years earlier. It's very much the proto Hitchhiker's Guide. It's got it all: Intergalactic protagonists on a series of highly absurd adventures, enabled by fantastical tech, and a playful approach to themes at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and contemporary physics.
It is laugh out loud funny. Especially once you get into the first, second, and third sallys. The humor is fiendishly clever. Lem is incredibly punny and it blows my mind to know that it was translated from Polish(!). I hope Michael Kandel gets his due for keeping the spirit of this book intact, because it really hinges on some very clever use of language.
> Just this week i was looking for more humour writing like Douglas Adams, PG Wodehouse.
They are both masters of producing an absolutely perfect phrase that could have come from no-one but them—so's Pterry, by the way—but otherwise it'd never occur to me to lump them together. They seem radically different tonally to me.
Readit News
He wrote back:
"Thanks for your note. Glad you enjoyed the books. I'm glad if I got you interested. But I'm always surprised that people are surprised to find that the world we unexpectedly find ourselves in is interesting.
Best, Douglas Adams"
Not his most pithy writing to be sure, but I love that I have this personalized bit of Douglas Adams wisdom that nobody else has ever seen (well, now they have).
It's about one third finished, and it's really just wild: There's one narrative strand about Dirk Gently, a private detective, receiving mysterious anonymous payments and deciding to follow random strangers, one about a paragliding genius architect who's all by himself in a weird future architect's utopia, and one about an escaping rhinocerous that's mainly narrated in terms of what it smells.
It's fantastically creative and incredibly sad that we won't get to read AD's ending, although I doubt that he actually knew where he was going with it at the time he wrote the bits that are there. It's this grand setup that really leaves you wondering what it means and how it's supposed to come together.
I'd encourage anyone to read it and try to come up with an ending. It feels like a fiendishly hard puzzle, and really gets you in the authors head. And do let me know if you have a good one!
The US TV Series I also enjoyed, but it's much more of a radical departure from the books than the British TV show is. But it's chaotic, it has interesting characters, and the whole crazily chaotic storyline is choreographed well and ties together cleverly.
The Radio Series was the best, followed by the scripts to the radio series (more random access!)
The TV series was actually pretty good too (like a Tom Baker Doctor Who (Adams was also a Who editor/writer during that time and had access to all manner of polyurethane monster kit!))
I also loved the Dirk Gently books but I always felt like they needed more of a denouement. Every passage before the end was like a hand carved chocolate frog, and the endings were said frog hitting a publisher at speed.
E.g. the babelfish at 2m5s: https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=125
It’s a real shame the movie totally failed to understand the concept, and also didn’t match the visual wit of the TV series.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
-Douglas Adams
Oh blubbering nebulae of bureaucratic slime, Hearken to this most dolorous rhyme! For Douglas Adams, that scribe of renown, We vomit forth verses of gelatinous brown.
With squelching syntax and belching prose, We honor his mind where improbability flows. Hitchhiker’s Guide! A tome most absurd, Turning logic to gibbering, flailing bird.
Behold the beauty of bureaucrats vile, Whose forms in triplicate stretch mile by mile. For Adams, dear Adams, saw through the farce, And sculpted with words a galactic arse.
The number 42! Oh cosmic decree! A joke of the universe, but not for thee! With Marvin the Paranoid, sighing so deep, And whales who contemplate death in their sleep.
O Adams, grand spinner of nonsense profound, May your soul in hyperspace ever be found. Yet should you return, we promise you this: More poetry! More Vogon! More hideous bliss!
Dead Comment
Douglas Adams was a great loss when he died, but what we had from him was the best.
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." This line alone did nearly as much to shape my adolescent sense of humor as all of Mel Brooks' movies combined.
What's so unpleasant about being drunk?
You ask a glass of water.
???
Bits of me keep passing out
Just this week i was looking for more humour writing like Douglas Adams, PG Wodehouse. I came across this award which seems interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollinger_Everyman_Wodehouse_P...
I plan to read some of them this year.
As an Adams fan since high school I was floored when I eventually read The Cyberiad and realized that Lem had laid all of the groundwork fourteen years earlier. It's very much the proto Hitchhiker's Guide. It's got it all: Intergalactic protagonists on a series of highly absurd adventures, enabled by fantastical tech, and a playful approach to themes at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and contemporary physics.
It is laugh out loud funny. Especially once you get into the first, second, and third sallys. The humor is fiendishly clever. Lem is incredibly punny and it blows my mind to know that it was translated from Polish(!). I hope Michael Kandel gets his due for keeping the spirit of this book intact, because it really hinges on some very clever use of language.
They are both masters of producing an absolutely perfect phrase that could have come from no-one but them—so's Pterry, by the way—but otherwise it'd never occur to me to lump them together. They seem radically different tonally to me.
I am a huge fan of Sir Terry Pratchett and definitely second that recommendation as well, both offer a wonderfully unique perspective.