A Brief Glance At Douglas Adams 

Douglas Noël Adams (March 11, 1952 - May 11, 2001) was an English author, comic radio dramatist, and musician. He attended Cambridge where he earned a BA in English literature in 1974 (and later an MA). He married Jane Belson in 1991 and their daughter was born in 1994. He is best known as the author of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series. He worked as a radio and television writer and producer before the publication of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in 1979. Hitchhiker's started life as a BBC Radio 4 series, 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 towel, a comic book series, 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".

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's phenomenal success sent the book straight to number one on the UK Bestseller List and in 1984 Douglas Adams became the youngest author to be awarded a Golden Pan. He won a further two (a rare feat), and was nominated - though not selected - for the first Best of Young British Novelists awards. He sold over 15 million books, and was a best seller in German, Swedish and many other languages. Of all of his works, he said that one of his all-time personal favourites was written in 1990 when he teamed up with zoologist Mark Carwardine and wrote "Last Chance to See" - an account of a world-wide search for rare and endangered species of animals.

Douglas died unexpectedly in May 2001 of a sudden heart attack. He was 49. He had been living in Santa Barbara, CA with his wife and daughter. At the time of his death he was working on the screenplay for the feature film version of Hitchhiker.

The Books Of The Trilogy -- The Hitchiker's Guide 

Available From Amazon -- Own Your Own Piece Of The Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to...

So Long, and Thanks for A...

The Restaurant at the End...

Life, the Universe and Ev...

Mostly Harmless

The World Of The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy 

...or, the best darn trilogy ever written in five books.

How shall we begin? This is the story of Arthur Dent, who, seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, is plucked off the planet by his friend, Ford Prefect, who has been posing as an out-of-work actor for the last fifteen years but is really a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which is not an Earth book, never published on Earth and, until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman . Together Ford and Arthur begin a journey through the galaxy aided by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the words "Don't Panic" written on the front. ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.") In their travels they meet:
~~ Zaphod Beeblebrox - the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch President of the Galaxy
~~ Trillian - Zaphod's girl friend, formerly Tricia McMillan, whom Arthur once tried to pick up at a cocktail party
~~ Marvin - a brilliant but chronically depressed robot (the paranoid android)
~~ Veet Voojagig - former graduate student obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years

To find the answers to these burning questions: Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time in between wearing digital watches? Read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But remember . . . don't forget to bring a towel.

• The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  One Thursday lunchtime the Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the galaxy is a very strange and startling place.
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
  Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons is a curious time to have a cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his curious comrades in arms as they hurtle through space powered by pure improbability - and desperately in search of a place to eat.
• Life, The Universe and Everything
  The unhappy inhabitants of the planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their heads - so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals stand between the killer robots of Krikkit and their goals of annihilation...
• So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish
  Left at the end of LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING with the address for God's Final Message To His Creation, Arthur Dent let this crucial information slip his mind.
• Mostly Harmless
  It's easy to become disheartened when your planet has been demolished for an unnecessary hyperspacial express route, the woman you love has vanished in a misunderstanding about the nature of space/time, the spaceship in which you are traveling crashed in flames on a remote and Bob-fearing planet, and all you have to fall back on are a few sandwich-making skills.

Douglas Adams Audio Books 

The Hitch Hiker's Guide t...

Mostly Harmless

So Long, and Thanks for A...

The Restaurant at the End...

Life, the Universe and Ev...

The Search For The Ultimate Answer 

According to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", a race of pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent beings constructed the second greatest computer in all of time and space, Deep Thought, to calculate the Ultimate Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years of pondering the question, Deep Thought provides the answer: "forty-two". The reaction:

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number forty-two. Many theories were proposed, but he rejected them all. His response was:

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do.' I typed it out. End of story.

The Expanded World Of The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy 

...it's more than just books!

• The Original Hitch Hiker's Radio Scripts
  So you think you know all there is to know about Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy? You've read the books, You've seen the TV programme, (you've even got your towel ready), you've listened to the show on the radio, But you haven't read or seen anything like THE ORIGINAL HITCH HIKER RADIO SCRIPTS! Unavailable for years, here are the complete, unedited scripts from the original BBC "Hitch Hiker Radio Show", as broadcast in the United States on the National Public Radio.
• The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The Adventure Game
  Beyond question, the most mind-bogglingly hilarious story Infocom has ever produced is The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, written and designed by Douglas Adams, author of the bestselling novel, and Steve Meretzky, the award-winning designer of Infocom's Planetfall and Sorcerer.

The Electric Monk 

The Dirk Gently Books 

• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
  Dirk Gently is a private detective who is more interested in telekinesis, quantum mechanics and lunch than fiddling around with fingerprint powder, so his investigations tend to produce startling and unexpected results. A simple search for a missing cat uncovers a bewildered ghost, a secret time-traveler, and the devastating secret that lies behind the whole human history and threatens to bring it to a premature end. Sadly the cat dies.
• The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
  When a passenger check-in desk at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, shot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame the usual people tried to claim responsibility. First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board...

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency On Audio 

Dirk Gently

by Douglas Adams

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List Price: $34.95
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AWARDS & NOMINATIONS 

• In over 50 years of the Hugos (the highest awards in science fiction, voted for each year by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGG) is the only radio show ever to be nominated. It was on the shortlist in 1979 (in the category "Best Dramatic Presentation") and lost to Superman, the movie.
• Radio adaptation awards include:
  
  Imperial Tobacco Award, 1978
  
  
  Sony Award, 1979
  
  
  "Best Programme for Young People" category of the 1980 Society of Authors/Pye Awards for Radio.
• The TV series won three 1981 BAFTAs, in the categories of -"Best TV Graphics", "Best VTR Editing" and "Best Sound".
• In December 1982 Douglas had three books in both the New York Times bestseller list and the Publishers' Weekly bestseller list - the first British author to have achieved this since Ian Fleming.
• When Douglas won his first Golden Pan (for 1,000,000 paperback sales of HHGG) in 1984, it was the quickest that any Pan book had ever reached that figure, and Douglas was the youngest winner (i.e. age at time of writing), since Anne Frank. He won two further Golden Pans, for Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, The Universe & Everything.
• HHGG computer game won an award from Thames TV in 1985.
• The unabridged audio book of HHGG which Douglas read for Dove Audio was nominated for the "Best Spoken Word Recording" Grammy in 1991.
• The "Making Of HHGG " video was nominated for "Best Documentary" in the 1993 Video Home Entertainment Awards.
• In 1996, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was placed at number 24 in the Waterstone's Books/Channel Four list of the One Hundred Greatest Books of the Century.

The Meaning of Liff Books 

The Best Dictionaries EVER!

• The Meaning of Liff:
  Published by Harmony Books Random House Crown ~~ 1984
  
  In Life (and, indeed, in Liff), there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.
  On the other hand, the world is littererd with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.
  Our job, as wee see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.
• The Deeper Meaning of Liff:
  Published by Harmony Books ~~ 1990
  
  Does the sensation of Tingrith make you yelp? Do you bend sympathetically when you see someone Ahenny? Can you deal with a Naugatuck without causing a Toronto? Will you suffer from Kettering this summer? Probably. You are almost certainly familiar with all these experiences, but just didn't know that there are words for them. Well, in fact, there aren't - or rather there weren't, until Douglas Adams and John Lloyd decided to plug these egregious linguistic lacunae by getting a few beers and a notebook and sitting on the beach for a couple of weeks. They quickly realized that just as there are an awful lot of experiences that no one has a name for, so there are a lot of awful names of places you will never need to go to. What a waste. What a terrible, senseless waste of the linguistic resources this planet. Did you know that at the current rate at which new places and things are being generated, we will exhaust all possible names for them by the year 2015?

Douglas Adams Video Tribute 

Last Chance To See 

Some years ago Douglas Adams wrote The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a story about the world being unexpectedly demolished by hideous creatures from another planet. It was meant as a joke... Now, animal by animal, tree by tree, the world is being demolished around us; not by Vogons, on other planets, Douglas Adams decided it was time to think about the absurdities of life on Earth, and what we are doing to it. He teams up with zoologist and photographer Mark Carwardine, and together they set off around the world - to China in search of one of the rarest and most endangered animals on Earth.

In 1997 Douglas read his account of what happened on BBC Radio 4, and The Digital Village launched the Last Chance To See website to coincide with the show.

Read "Last Chance to See" For Yourself 

Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine

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Bureaucracy 

"Everyone, at one time or another, feels bound up in an endless swathe of red tape."

One wouldn't have thought that the task of forcing a bank to acknowledge a change-of-address card would be a good basis for a computer game, but then one wouldn't have thought that such a task would involve llama food, rabid political toucans, strange men with walkie-talkies and being lost in the Zalagasan Jungle. Douglas Adams worked with Infocom veteran W.E.B. "Fred" Morgan to create what is possibly the most original, almost certainly the most enjoyably frustrating computer game of all time. Like the Hitch Hiker's game, it's pretty tough to get hold of at the moment, but TDV may be changing that in the near future...

"Bureaucracy" page at Pete Scheyler's Infocom site

Douglas Adams Interview ~~ May 2001 

Adams' Film Writing Credits: 

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) (screenplay)
2. Starship Titanic (1998) (video game)
3. Doctor Who: Shada (1992) (TV) (written by)
4. Hyperland (1990) (TV)
5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984) (video game)
6. Doctor Who: The Five Doctors (1983) (TV) (episode "Shada" footage) (uncredited)
7. "The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" (1981) TV Series (BBC Radio series) (novels The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) (uncredited) (written by)
   ... aka The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (USA: video title)
8. "Doctor Who" (8 episodes, 1978-1979)
   - City of Death: Part 4 (1979) TV Episode (written by) (as David Agnew)
   - City of Death: Part 3 (1979) TV Episode (written by) (as David Agnew)
   - City of Death: Part 2 (1979) TV Episode (written by) (as David Agnew)
   - City of Death: Part 1 (1979) TV Episode (written by) (as David Agnew)
   - The Pirate Planet: Part 4 (1978) TV Episode (written by)
   (3 more)
9. "Not the Nine O'Clock News" (1979) (TV) (unknown episodes)
10. "Doctor Snuggles" (1979) (TV mini-series) (writer) (episode "The Great Disappearing Mystery")
11. "Doctor on the Go" (1977) (TV) (writer)
    - For Your Own Good... (1977)
12. Out of the Trees (1976) (TV)
13. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (1974)
    ... aka Monty Python (UK: new title)
    - Party Political Broadcast (1974) TV Episode (written by)

MFAQ 

Hyperland 

In 1990, Douglas Adams collaborated with the BBC to produce a vision of information in the future - a vision that, with hindsight, turned out to be remarkably accurate...

In this one-hour documentary produced by the BBC in 1990, Adams falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest. A software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cutting-edge research by the SF Multimedia Lab and NASA Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it's interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn't: these days, no one's heard of the SF Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of VR in 2005 could be outdone by a modern PC with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted - for while Douglas Adams was creating Hyperland, a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web...

(I was able to find some video of "Hyperland" on YouTube.)

A Video Clip From Hyperland 

The Hitchhiker's Guide Log Book -- 

Remember - Don't Panic!

How many times have you read the Hitchhiker's Trilogy? What do you think of Dirk Gently? Any other Douglas Adams tidbits to share? Drop me a line here and thanks for visiting my lens.

Chadrew I absolutely loved his Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. They're full of imagination and incredibly hilarious! Posted August 30, 2008

WritingforYourWealth wonderful lens for a great author :) Posted August 24, 2008

CleanerLife Such a loss, but he certainly left his own unique mark on the world. Thanks for a great tribute! Posted August 12, 2008

I remember reading The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and I was just in my 4th grade and I'm too young to understand everything. But I remembered something about the elevator suggesting to go up when you want to go down and the vulture that said, "Okay", then flew away. I would like to read that again. I was just wondering if you accept my military personal checks for payment? Posted July 24, 2008

ElizabethJeanAllen Great lens. 5* and Lensroll to The Weekend Reader Posted June 18, 2008

EelKat I just made a new group, for Sci-Fi lenses. Sending along an invitation to come join it! http://www.squidoo.com/groups/Sci-FiLovers Posted March 30, 2008

katiyana I have the complete collection in one volume - but nothing is better than the Hitchhiker's Guide - one of my favorite books, and we were blessed to have him in the world... Posted March 28, 2008

lissie At least you didn't quote any Vogon poetry! I remember rolling on he floor laughing at the radio show, then reading the books and then being disapointed by the TV show because the characters didn't look right! Thanks for the fish! Posted March 17, 2008

Regal-Realm my sister and I grew up quoting Douglas Adams on basically everything. When she turned 42 years of age, she rang me and shouted with glee "I am the Answer!!" Fantastic lens, absolutely superb job. 42 stars :D Posted March 09, 2008

700islands I love Douglas Adams too. I first heard the radio series when I was at university. I had that little box set of tapes where the inset card for each was a different shiny metallic card. I still have those. Posted February 10, 2008

 

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His Memorial Service 

May 11, 2001

Douglas Noel Adams
1952 - 2001

The order of service for his funeral:

The Schubler Chorals - Johann Sebastian Bach

Sue Adams, Jane Garnier, James Thrift

Mary Allen

The Marriage of Figaro - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Simon Jones

Terry Jones

I Wannabe (A Rockstar) - Margo Buchanan

Michael Nesmith

Chris Ogle

Imagine - John Lennon

Hey Jude - The Beatles

Drive My Car - The Beatles

Paperback Writer - The Beatles

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