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

by Neil Gaiman

As many novelists have discovered, the public loves a good detective. What’s more, they’re damn difficult to kill off. Just ask Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

the unfortunate necessity of getting regular amounts of sleep.”

It is unfinished not just in the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man and his work, stops in mid-flow, but in the more important sense that the text up to that point is also unfinished.

One might be inclined to call radio the unsung medium were it not for the fact that passing fans of radio might stone you to death with transistors for doing so. Radio might not have the glitzy reputation of its more visual rivals but it has a very dedicated fan-base and they are only too happy to ‘sing’ about it given the opportunity.

Independence Day UK scored above its inspiration in a number of ways, not least by not banging on about how wonderful America was every five minutes until the audience were forced to drown themselves in their popcorn rather than endure another word.

This is just perfect.

But to mention these flaws is rather to miss the point of Douglas’s writing. When he does it, it works.

Douglas is one of those inspired creators who is impervious to such overarching technical issues—his genius lay in the detail. And it is precisely in the film’s adherence to the broad, sweeping generalities of Douglas’s work, rather than paying attention to what it was in the minutiae that made it so effective, that it fails.

But then people will see universal meanings everywhere.

There is no doubt that Douglas—were he not somewhat distracted—would have dismissed the significance of the two events, though one imagines the coincidence would have amused him.

“It’s now on in Penn State. Which I had to have pointed out to me is in America, and not a prison.

“But we know only too well by now that there aren’t that many purists amongst Douglas’s fans—we’re used to having the continuity pulled out from underneath our feet.

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying, “And another thing…” twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.

At Eastercon Colfer also recalled meeting James Thrift, Douglas’s half brother, after he had delivered the novel a month ahead of schedule. “You’re too short and too prompt,” Thrift told him, and Colfer now accepts he’s broken all the Hitchhiker’s taboos in this regard.

So long Douglas and thanks for all the words.

DEEP THOUGHT “The name is a very obvious joke.”

But literature is full of depressives. Marvin is simply the latest and most metal.

it’s the little characters on the fringes, that the audience can make of what they will, that really involve the audience.”

This page will instantly exude appropriate waves of sympathy and understanding.

Finally, the man without whom this book would have been highly improbable: Douglas Adams, who never made any jokes about how late I was with the manuscript.