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

by Neil Gaiman

Apocryphal stories have grown up about Douglas Adams’s almost superhuman ability to miss deadlines. Upon close inspection, they all appear to be true.

Although Adams later declined to discuss it, his then girlfriend had left him—as he said in an interview given about that time, “She went off with this bloke on, to me, the spurious grounds that he was her husband.”

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

The Meaning of Liff has been successfully translated into Dutch and Finnish editions, despite the fact that this is clearly impossible.

After that we were going to do a program called God, and program all God’s attributes into it, and you’d have all the different denominations of God on it… you know, a Methodist God, a Jewish God, and so on… I wanted to be the first person to have computer software burned in the Bible Belt, which I felt was a rite of passage that any young medium had to pass through.

Could you include a short autobiography, including anything that you consider contributing to your work? Born 1952. Haven’t died yet.

I’d always promised myself that when I had some money I wouldn’t do something silly like buying a flashy car. So, as soon as Hitchhiker’s went to number one in the bestseller lists, I went out and bought a Porsche 911. I hated it. Driving it around in London was like taking a Ming vase to a football match.

Dirk Gently is a detective and a rather improbable one at that. He’s smug, he’s fat, he’s bespectacled, he’s a smartass, he sends out ludicrous bills with positively ridiculous expenses claims and, worst of all, he’s probably right.

Once they had decided where they were going to go, and in search of which animals, all they had to do was arrange a time. This was not to prove an easy task. But, by May 1988, after a year of anxious juggling and rearranging, the pair were ready to probe the darker recesses of man’s inhumanity to everything else he shares the planet with.

He spoke at Douglas’s funeral, and would go on to dedicate his groundbreaking book The God Delusion to him, appending the Hitchhiker’s quote, “Isn’t it enough to see that the garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy appeared in cinemas. Unfortunately, to quote that most remarkable of source material, “this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

And Another Thing…, the sixth in the Increasingly Giving Up on the Whole Idea of Being the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, is obviously not written by Douglas Adams—even for a writer so skilled at late delivery, this would be pushing it.