Douglas Adams

His most known series is the 'Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. It comes in at least five major versions: Radio series, Book, Play, Television series, and computer game, and they are all different in major ways. There are also minor versions and variations which include The Script of the Radio Series, Two Records based on the radio series, (but rearranged and parts remade) a number of versions of the book with different introductions, and the book 'Don't Panic' which includes segments which didn't make it into any of the others. Even the seemingly simple task of deciding whether the title should be 'Hitch-Hikers', 'Hitchhikers', or 'Hitch Hikers' has become a major religious dispute, since all have been used. To wrap up, Douglas Adams, in the course of writing THHGTTG, spoke extensively about the concept of parallel universes. We know where he got his job experience.

Regardless of version, the core story of THHGTTG is about an Englishman called Arthur Dent who, in short sequence, has his house knocked down, and then his planet blown up (Hitch-hikers is one of the few stories that starts out with the Earth being destroyed in order to speed up the plot) and is then thrown out of the spaceship which did the job. He is having the archetypal Bad Day. The reason he is thrown out of the spaceship rather then blown up on the Earth is because his friend, Ford Prefect, rescues him. Ford is actually an alien. Ford is also an experienced Galactic hitch-hiker, and this is how hitched them a lift on the spaceship. Alas, Ford is also not much of a forward planner, hence the ejection out the ship's airlock into the blackness of space. Ford is also a field researcher for an electronic book called 'The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy' and this is how the book, radio and stage plays, computer game, and television series gets it's name. Except for the hyphen.

Douglas Adams first thought up the name while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Switzerland. There is a bizarre story attached that that, as well. Did you expect less?

If you are concerned with what happens to Ford and Arthur after being thrown out of the spaceship, then read the books. There are five of them, and they are a Trilogy. Get used to it.

He has written two other books, one called 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' and 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul', which are about an English Detective called Dirk Gently who solves unusual crimes. The phrase 'unusual crimes' requires some explanation. In the first book, he investigates how Richard McDuff's sofa gets stuck, how the Professor does his magic tricks, the origins of the poem 'Kubla Kahn' and as an afterthought, who murdered Gordon Way. It is necessary to read this book at least twice for it to make any sense whatsoever. Three times gives you a feeling that maybe you know what's going on. I have read DGHDA thirteen times straight through, and innumerable times in small bits. One day I plan to read it backwards. I am still finding internal links in the book, and things I had missed before.

TLDTTOTS is another Dirk Gently mystery, this time involving Heathrow Airport, Coke Machines, Mental hospitals, Norse Mythology, and the incidental murder of a Record Producer. It also is complicated in the sense that after being told the answer, you still don't understand the question.

All of Adam's fiction share this quality: they are the equal of a dozen ordinary books, and should be read as many times. They are a bit like reading one of those 'choose your own adventure' books straight through, and trying to match up all the causalities once you're finished. He is, in a word, Amazing.

Read all his stuff, possibly in this order:

• The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• The Restaraunt at the End of the Universe
• Live, the Universe, and Everything
• So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish
• Mostly Harmless
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
• The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
• Last Chance to See (Non-fiction)

And play his two computer games:

• The Hitch-Hikers guide to the galaxy (renowed as being a groundbreaking game in the genre of adventure games, including the idea of deliberately lying to the player. People still, a decade later, wear 'I Got the Babel Fish' T-shirts.)
• Starship Titanic (Which I don't have yet, but plan too soon.)

You can mail him at askdna@tdv.com, or go to the The Digital Villiage.

It would be interesting, one day, to find out how much of the modern computer industry has been shaped by his visions. If often seems that programmers from my generation are driven by pizza, coke and the Hitch-Hikers Guide.