Who is Douglas Adams

Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 - 11 May 2001) was an English author, dramatist, and musician. He is best known as the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Hitchhiker's began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime) as well as a television series, a comic book series, a radio play, a computer game, and a feature film that was completed after Adams' death. The series has also been adapted for live theatre using various scripts; the earliest such productions used material newly written by Adams. He was known to some fans as Bop Ad (after his illegible signature), or by his initials "DNA"; Adams was proud of the coincidence that he was born in Cambridge the year before the elucidation of the structure of DNA in the same city.

In addition to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of the science fiction television series Doctor Who and served as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and he co-wrote two Liff books and Last Chance to See, itself based on a radio series. Adams also originated the idea for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was produced by a company that Adams co-founded, and adapted into a novel by Terry Jones. A posthumous collection of essays and other material, including an incomplete novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002. His Science Fiction-Humour books are similar to the style of Jasper Fforde, Neil Gaiman and Rob Grant.

His fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist, a confirmed atheist, and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Macintosh computer, and other "techno gizmos". The biologist Richard Dawkins dedicated his book The God Delusion'' to Douglas Adams and in it described how Adams came to understand evolution. Douglas was a keen technologist, writing about such topics as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely known. Toward the end of his life he was a sought-after lecturer on topics including technology and the environment.

Category: Image - :Hitchhiker's Guide (book cover).jpg|frame|The cover of the first novel in the Hitchhiker's series, from a late 1990s printing. The cover features the 42 Puzzle devised by Douglas Adams.

'''The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy''' is a science fiction comedy series created by Douglas Adams. Originally a radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978, it was later adapted to other formats, and over several years it gradually became an international multi-media phenomenon. Adaptations have included stage shows, a series of five books first published between 1979 and 1992 (the first of which was titled The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), a 1981 TV series, a 1984 computer game, and three series of three-part comic book adaptations of the first three novels published by DC Comics between 1993 and 1996. There were also two series of towels, produced by Beer-Davies, that are considered by some fans to be an "official version" of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, as they include text from the first novel.A wiki devoted to the history of H2G2 themed towels. A Hollywood-funded film version, produced and filmed in the UK, was released in April 2005, and adaptations of the last three books to radio were broadcast from 2004 to 2005. Many of these adaptations, including the novels, the TV series, the computer game, and the earliest drafts of the Hollywood film's screenplay, were all done by Adams himself, and some of the stage shows introduced new material written by Adams.

The title The Hitchhikers Guide to the GalaxyThe spelling of Hitchhiker's Guide has varied in different editions. For consistency this article always spells it this way. See Spelling of Hitchhikers Guide. is often abbreviated "HHGTTG" (as used on fan websites) or "H2G2" (first used by Neil Gaiman as a chapter title in Category: Dont Panic - : The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion|Don't Panic and later by the online guide run by the BBC). The series is also often referred to as "'The Hitchhiker's Guide", "Hitchhiker's", or simply "The Guide'". This title can refer to any of the various incarnations of the story of which the books are the most widely distributed, having been translated into more than 30 languages by 2005. The title can also refer to the fictional guidebook The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an eccentric electronic travel guide prominently featured in the series.

The various versions follow the same basic plot, but they are in many places mutually contradictory, as Adams rewrote the story substantially for each new adaptation. In all versions, the series follows the adventures of Arthur Dent, a hapless Englishman who, with his friend Ford Prefect, an alien from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and researcher for the eponymous guidebook, escapes the demolition of Earth by a bureaucratic alien race called the Vogons. Zaphod Beeblebrox, Fords semi-cousin and the Galactic President, unknowingly saves the pair from certain death. He brings them aboard his stolen spaceship, the Heart of Gold, whose crew rounds out the main cast of characters: Marvin, the Paranoid Android, a depressed robot, and Trillian, formerly known as Tricia McMillan, a woman Arthur once met at a party who he soon realises is the only other human survivor of Earth's destruction. After this, the characters embark on a quest to find the legendary planet of Magrathea and the Question to the Ultimate Answer.

BBC Radio 4 is a domestic UK radio station that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967.History of the BBC: 1960s

Radio 4 is part of the Royal Navy's system of Last Resort Letters. In the event of a suspected catastrophic attack on the United Kingdom, submarine commanders check for a broadcast signal from Radio 4 to verify annihilation of the homeland.http://www.slate.com/id/2208219/

:For the Australian political activist see Albert Langer. For the Puritan author and minister see Arthur Dent (Puritan).

Arthur Philip Dent is a fictional character, the hapless protagonist and antiheroToland, Bill. "Deep in space lurks the Flying Spaghetti Monster", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 22, 2005. Accessed October 16, 2008. "Arthur Dent, the timid anti-hero of the "Hitchhiker's Guide" movie, radio show and book series, begins wandering the universe after aliens vaporize Earth to make room for an intergalactic superhighway."Johnston, Philip. "Home front", The Daily Telegraph, August 3, 2004. Accessed October 16, 2008. "Arthur Dent, the book's anti-hero, finds that his house is to be knocked down to make way for a new road." in the comic science fiction series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Along with Ford Prefect, Dent barely escapes the Earths destruction as it is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur spends the next several years, still wearing his dressing gown, helplessly launched from crisis to crisis while trying to straighten out his lifestyle. He rather enjoys tea, but seems to have trouble obtaining it in the far reaches of the galaxy. In time, he learns how to fly and carves a niche for himself as a sandwich-maker.

In the radio, LP and television versions of the story, Arthur is played by Simon Jones, no relation to Peter Jones, the voice of the Guide. In Ken Campbell's stage production from 1979, Chris Langham took the part. In the theatrical movie he is played by Martin Freeman. In The Illustrated Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy'', he is portrayed by Jonathan Lermit.

Ford Prefect (also called Ix) is a fictional character in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by the British author Douglas Adams. He is the only character other than the protagonist, Arthur Dent, to appear throughout the entire Hitchhiker's'' saga.

Zaphod Beeblebrox is a fictional character in the various versions of the humorous science fiction story The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams who based him on his Cambridge contemporary, Johnny Simpson.

He is from a planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, and is a "semi-half-brother" of Ford Prefect, with whom he "shares three of the same mothers". Because of "an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine", his direct ancestors from his father (Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second) are also his direct descendants (see Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth).

Marvin, the Paranoid Android is a fictional character in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. Marvin is the ships robot aboard the starship Heart of Gold. He was built as a prototype of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology. Marvin is apparently afflicted with severe depression and boredom, in part because he has a "brain the size of a planet" which he is seldom able to use. Indeed, the true horror of Marvin's existence is that no task he could be given would occupy even the tiniest fraction of his vast intellect. Marvin claims he is 50,000 times more intelligent than a human, (or 30 billion times more intelligent than a live mattress) though this is, if anything, a vast underestimation. When kidnapped by the bellicose Krikkit robots and tied to the interfaces of their intelligent war computer, Marvin simultaneously manages to plan the entire planet's military strategy, solve "all of the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except his own, three times over," and compose a number of lullabies. He seemed to find this last the hardest, and only one, "How I Hate the Night", is known.

Marvin's voice was performed by Stephen Moore on radio and television, while Alan Rickman played this role in the film. David Learner operated his body on television, having previously played and voiced the part for the stage version, and Warwick Davis wore the Marvin costume for the feature film.

He is "probably... the most popular character to appear in the Guide", according to Geoffrey Perkins, producer of the radio series. There was a short-lived fanclub called "The Marvin Depreciation Society".

Tricia McMillan, also known as Trillian is a fictional character from Douglas Adams' series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. According to the movie version, her middle name is Marie. Physically, she is described as "a slim, darkish humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes."The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy'' Chapter 4.

Slartibartfast is a character in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a comedy/science fiction series created by Douglas Adams. The character appears in the first and third novels, the first and third radio series (and the LP adaptation of the first radio series), the 1981 television series and the 2005 feature film. The character was modeled after actor John Le Mesurier.