I read a lengthy newspaper article recently demonstrating that Hitchhiker’s was in fact a lengthy tribute to Lewis Carroll (something that would have come as a surprise to Douglas, who had disliked the little of Alice in Wonderland he read). Actually, the literary tradition that Douglas was part of was, at least initially, the tradition of English Humor Writing that gave us P. G. Wodehouse (whom Douglas often cited as an influence, although most people tended to miss it because Wodehouse didn’t write about spaceships).
