Towel Day! Honoring Douglas Adams

 For Towel Day, here is a salute to The Great Humorist, Douglas Adams

            A gentle giant of a man (he was six feet, five inches tall), Douglas Noel Adams (1952 – 2001) (whose initials, DNA, he was especially proud of) deserves to stand alone in his own special category in the same way Ray Bradbury and William Gibson do. He was a soft and giddy soul who loved a good story, good food, and a good joke. He is remembered best, of course, for his radio-show-turned-novel, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (1979), which has become a must-read for anyone who loves comedy, much less science fiction.

            He got his start in writing after college doing comedic shows in London. It was there, in the 1970’s that he was discovered by Graham Chapman of Monty Python, and collaborated with him on various works. Adams helped to write at least one Python episode and appeared in a couple of skits as an extra. But his ability to act was hampered in comedy, as he would always start laughing right before the punch-line. As such, he stayed with the printed page, where his hysterical nature helped rather than hurt.

            Adams did some work on various other television and radio programs before becoming a script editor for Doctor Who in 1977, helping to achieve some of the best episodes of all time. He wrote The Pirate Planet, which was the second serial in the Key to Time series. He also wrote the episode, Shada, which never aired, but was eventually released to video. He had a hand with at least two episodes using the pseudonym of David Agnew (which was the collective name given to the collaborative writing of Adams, Graham Williams and David Fischer). One of these, The City of Death, is sometimes attributed to him, but was based largely on David Fischer’s storyline. Under Adams, it was determined that female Time Lords could choose their own shape when regenerating. He also made numerous suggestions for funny lines and zinging one-liners that helped make the Tom Baker era one of the greatest periods in the Doctor Who franchise.

            Douglas began working on The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy radio program while simultaneously working on Doctor Who. The first of six episodes aired on BBC Radio 4 in March of 1978. It was a low-key affair, but received good reviews. A Christmas episode aired in December of that year. Nevertheless, a second series wasn’t forthcoming on the grounds that nobody had been listening, or so the network executives said. Douglas then wrote and released a novel based on the radio show script. When the book was published in 1979, it made #1 on the Sunday Times Best Seller list. Yep, somebody had been listening, all right!

            The franchise took off from there. Realizing he had a big hit, Douglas left the Doctor Who television show to concentrate on developing Hitchhikers’. A second series of radio programs aired in 1980, which was followed by a second book. In all, there would eventually be five books in the Hitchhikers’ Guide “trilogy.” They were: The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992). A short story titled, Young Zaphod Plays it Safe (1986), completes the set. All these can usually be found together in one volume, called The Complete Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (or sometimes, The More Than Complete Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy).

            The success of the radio show and books led to a six-episode television series. It aired on BBC Two in January and February of 1981. The ending was slightly different from the radio show. In fact, every incarnation of The Hitchhikers’ Guide has had slight variations from one media format to the next. A second series was conceived, but stalled, and was never made.

            Aside from Doctor Who and the Hitchhikers’ series, Adams unfortunately wrote little else in the way of science fiction. He was notoriously non-prolific, and often brutally ignored deadlines for scripts and books. (He was once famously sequestered in a hotel room with his editor in order to force him to complete So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.) He was often quoted as saying, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” He wrote the plot of a video game called Starship Titanic, but the book version was written by Terry Jones of Monty Python. Two fantasy adventure novels, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long, Dark, Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), are excellent reading for those who want the complete Douglas Adams experience, but are fantasy rather than sci-fi. A co-written work called The Meaning of Liff (1983) contains funny definitions for made-up words (which later inspired comedian Rich Hall to invent sniglets as a feature of HBO’s television program, Not Necessarily The News). His travels to distant parts of the world in search of endangered animals developed into a book called Last Chance to See (2002). This book featured his account of his journey to Madagascar, which he loved. This, in turn, later inspired a scene in a later movie production of Hitchhikers’ Guide, in which Trillian asks Arthur Dent to go to Madagascar with her.

            Adams was a rather famous atheist, and often spoke of his disdain for religion. As such, he was rather close friends with a number of famous people in the atheistic community, particularly biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene. At one of the many house parties Douglas loved to host, he introduced Dawkins to Lala Ward, the actress who played Romana II in the Doctor Who series. Lala later became Mrs. Dawkins thanks to that introduction.

            Douglas died in 2001 after suffering a heart attack during his workout. Since then, he has been sorely missed and several posthumous works have been published based on his earlier work. The Salmon of Doubt (2002) is a collection of unpublished works, including an unfinished novel. Additional radio episodes of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy were produced, which have been dubbed the “Tertiary, Quandry and Quintessential” phases (with the original two series’ that Douglas wrote being the Primary phase and Secondary phase). They are available for free download as podcasts via several websites. Some additional Hitchhikers’ adventures follow even these. A sixth book, titled, And Another Thing… (2009), was commissioned with the support of Adams’ widow, Jane Belson, and written by Eoin Colfer.

            A film version of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy was finally made and released in 2005. Plans to make a film version were perpetually underway during Adams’ lifetime, but always seemed to bog down. This time, freed of any disagreements with the author, production executives decided to do more or less what they wished, and simply used snippets of all the best-loved pieces according to fan ratings. Martin Freeman (who played Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit) was cast as Arthur Dent. Zooey Deschanel (who later starred in the TV series, New Girl) was cast as Trillian. Rap artist Mos Def was cast as Ford Prefect while Sam Rockwell (the lead actor in the film, Moon, 2009, and the inept inventor Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2, 2010), was cast as Zaphod Beeblebrox. The voice of Alan Rickman was used for Marvin the paranoid android. The movie came out as a kind of patchwork quilt, and fans thought that the attempt at compressing a storyline which spanned five books into a mere 100 minutes was rather ham-handed. Nevertheless, the movie was a modest hit, making 21 million at the box office in its opening weekend. It could have been better, but all in all, wasn’t half bad.

            Meanwhile, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, and Douglas Adams, remain one of the most beloved ceramics in the overall mosaic of sci-fi.