Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

by Neil Gaiman

one of the most magical things about Douglas’s writing, as with that of his literary hero P. G. Wodehouse, was that you knew the person writing was on your side, that he was not laughing at you, but that you were in on the joke.

“I felt I had to do it, because I’d set out to be a freelance writer, had one disaster after another, ended up having to be supported by my parents and so on, and I thought, ‘Well, here is someone offering me a solid job with a regular paycheck, which may not be exactly what I want to do, but I’m not showing any success in doing what I want to do, and this is pretty close to what I want to do; I am in trouble and I will take this job.’

ZAPHOD: There’s nothing wrong with my sense of reality. I have it thoroughly serviced every fortnight. — Cut from radio series script, Episode Three.

“Writing comes easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.

“I usually get very depressed when writing. It always seems to me that writing coincides with terrible crises breaking up my life. I used to think these crises had a terrible effect on my being able to write; these days I have a very strong suspicion that it’s the sitting down to write that precipitates the crises. So quite a lot of troubles tend to get worked out in the books. It’s usually below the surface. It doesn’t appear to tackle problems at a personal level, but it does, implicitly, even if not explicitly.

Adams had a tendency to have ideas that didn’t always fit into the framework of what he was doing at the time. The enjoyable thing about the computer game is that the most bizarre ideas could be incorporated into it with ease. Also Adams’s love of problem-solving (crosswords and such) was given full rein.

If you are having trouble in thinking up character names you are probably using the wrong kind of coffee. Have you tried an Italian blend?

The whole point of Doctor Who is that, if you take the second letter of each of the fifty-ninth words of all the episodes over the last twenty years of broadcast and run them together backwards, the original location of the lost city of Atlantis is revealed. I hope this answers your question.

So, by lifting out the original audiobook performance and dropping it in to the relevant scene, Douglas was able to fulfill his dream of performing the role, albeit four years after his death. Which is precisely the sort of technological absurdism that would have appealed to him.

When you think of what we know about the universe, and the data we have to go on, it’s a pretty huge gap. Even the information we have is not only just what we happen to have been told but the interpretation that we have put on the little electrical signals which tell us that somebody’s told us this.

Thy micturations are to me As plurdled gabbleblotchits in a lurgid bee Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurte And livid glupules frart and slipulate Like jowling meated liverslime