Just How Important is Douglas Adams?

  

So, I've been reading on a biography of the late great Douglas Adams as part of my mulling over a claim I'm thinking about making to the effect that Adams is arguably the most important science fiction writer of the last few decades (say from about 1977 onwards). And as an offshoot of that, the importance of someone whose impact largely came through novelizations (of the original radio scripts) suggests that during the modern era science fiction has increasingly been dominated by media (unlike fantasy, which has been thrived in both print and film/series).

I don't have any explanation of why this is so, but the more I think it over the more it seems to be the case. The long-awaited SILMARILLION came out in 1977, about a quarter century after it'd been promised, and was on the NYTBR bestsellers list for twenty-one weeks in a row. Shortly afterwards the era of the Tolk-Clones got well and truly underway.  I can't really make myself believe that THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, which seemed to be on the verge of publication in 1979, wd if published about a quarter century later in circa 2004 wd have been seen as anything but nostalgic, a summing up of an era that was long past.

 --John R.

--current reading: about the dancing bears of Numenor (NoMe .335)