"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time is a collection of writings by Douglas Adams, edited by Peter Guzzardi. In the book we find newspaper articles, essays, e-mails, previously unpublished scenes with characters from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the unfinished Dirk Gently book Salmon of Doubt. This is not something you should read if you’re not already a fan of Douglas Adams. But if you are, you MUST read it. There is such a concentrated amount of pure brilliance in it that I went blind, almost.

The Salmon of Doubt is comprised of three parts; Life, The Universe, And Everything. Life consists largely of material previously published in newspapers. A lot of them are anecdotal. In one entitled My Nose he writes;

“In about the first five minutes of the first [rugby] match I ever played, I managed to break my nose on my own knee...”

I found this part especially tickling since it so happens that my girlfriend has managed the very same feat. He did it whilst playing rugby; she did it sitting down, which I guess is much worse when you think about it, but still. The love of my life has something in common with the man who inspired me to become a writer, and this brings me joy in so many ways I should make a list.

In the Life part there are also interviews and these along with his articles give the reader a great sense of who Douglas Adams really was. Having read Hitchhiker’s Guide and Dirk Gently I already had an image of Douglas as a comic genius, and now I know that there lay a great amount of intelligence and scientific interest behind all of this. He had a great interest in animals and once climbed Kilimanjaro dressed in a rhino suit to help save this endangered animal. He knew a lot about a lot, and was so clever in his writing that he hid his intelligence in comedy, and thus enabled the fourteen year old me to understand complicated scientific and philosophical ideas. I could never have grasped half of the things in the Hitchhiker’s books at that age if it wasn’t for Douglas great skill of placing words in the right order.

In The Universe we find this very true statement:

“1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

In this second part we get a look into Douglas’ fascination with technology, and I guess interconnected with that, his total disbelief in God. Douglas Adams was an atheist and has a lot of good arguments to support it. (I was going to write ‘his belief’ instead of it, but the word belief seemed to turn the sentence into an oxymoron.) This atheism stuff might scare some religious people away from reading this book, but I think you should do so anyway. We atheists do not bite, we just love the facts, and we want to share them with everyone who’s willing to listen to reason.

“He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.”

In the final part And Everything we find the fiction. Zaphod comes back for a short adventure and the Mongol Genghis Kahn is exposed as a love deprived man who’s tired of slaughtering innocents. This is also where Dirk Gently comes back in Salmon of Doubt and sets off to meet a destined rhinoceros named Desmond (lots of rhinos in this book, I know). This unfinished book is written as a Dirk story, but in e-mails Douglas expressed thoughts about turning these ideas into a sixth and final part of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy. He felt that the fifth part, Mostly Harmless, ended on a sad note because he had a sad year, and he really wanted to swing the story around and write a happy ending for himself and all his fans.

Unfortunately this never happened. Douglas Adams died aged 49 of a heart attack whilst at the gym. At the end of the book we find a small article written by his friend Richard Dawkins only days after Adam’s passing. It’s a great goodbye for all the fans out there. In a sense the entire book is a goodbye, and also a celebration of one of the great thinkers of our time.

I adored this book. This came as no surprise. Anything written by Douglas Adams is to me what cocaine was to Wall Street in the 80’s. I just can’t get enough of it. I have “Don’t Panic” tattooed on my lower left arm for Ford’s sake! However, I can’t give it a full five out of five grade. This is not because of quality, but quantity. I want more, and there is none. This has made me so twitchy and jumpy that I’ll have to go back and read The Guide all over again to calm my nerves.

Still; 4/5 and a big swing of the towel in his honour.

And to end this I’ll throw in another insightful Adams quote because there’s just so many and they are all so damned brilliant.

“Life... is like a grapefruit. It’s orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.”