Books by Douglas Adams
Born: 03/11/1952; Died: 05/11/2001Douglas Adams Biography & Notes
Douglas Noel Adams (March 11, 1952- May 11, 2001), known to some fans as Bop Ad or Bob (after his illegible signature), or by his initials "DNA", was a cult British comic radio dramatist, amateur musician and author, most notably of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (HHGG or H2G2). 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 towel, a computer game and a feature film that was completed after Adams's death.
In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of science fiction staple Doctor Who, and served the series as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and co-author credits on 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 realized 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 fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Apple Macintosh, and other "techno gizmos." He was a keen technologist, using such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known.
Adams was a self-described "radical atheist." Towards the end of his life, he was a sought-after lecturer on topics including technology and the environment. Since his death at the age of 49, he is still widely revered in science fiction and fantasy fandom circles.
Douglas Adams was born to Janet (Donovan) Adams (now Janet Thrift) and Christopher Douglas Adams in Cambridge, England. His parents had one other child together, Susan, who was born in March 1955. His parents separated and divorced in 1957, and Douglas, Susan, and Janet moved in with Janet's parents, the Donovans, in Brentwood, Essex. Douglas's grandmother kept her house as an official RSPCA refuge for hurt animals, which "exacerbated young Douglas's hayfever and asthma."
Christopher Adams remarried in July 1960, to Mary Judith Stewart (born Judith Robertson). From this marriage, Douglas Adams had a half-sister, Heather. Janet remarried in 1964, to a veterinarian, Ron Thrift, providing two more half-siblings to Douglas: Jane and James Thrift.
Education and early works
Adams first attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood, Essex. He took the exams and interviewed for Brentwood School at age six, and attended from 1959 to 1970. Adams attended different divisions of the school, including the Prep School and the Middle School. While at the prep school, he had an English class, taught by Frank Halford, where Halford awarded Adams the only ten out of ten of his entire teaching career for a creative writing exercise. Adams remembered this for the rest of his life, especially when facing writer's block. Some of Adams's earliest writing was published at the school, such as a report on the school's Photography Club in The Brentwoodian (in 1962) or spoof reviews in the school magazine Broadsheet (edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone). Adams also had a letter and short story published nationally in the UK in the boys' magazine The Eagle in 1965. Adams also met Griff Rhys Jones at the school; the two appeared together in a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 1968. He was six feet tall (1.83 m) by the time he was 12, and he stopped growing only at 6'5" (1.96 m).
On the strength of a bravura essay on religious poetry that mixed the Beatles with William Blake, he was awarded a place at St John's College, Cambridge to read English, entering in 1971. Adams attempted early on to get into the Footlights Dramatic Club, with which several other names in British Comedy had been affiliated. He was, however, turned down, and started to write and perform in revues with Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith, forming a group called "Adams-Smith-Adams." Later, on another attempt to join Footlights, Douglas Adams was encouraged by Simon Jones and Adams found himself working with Rhys Jones, among others. In 1974, Adams graduated with a B.A. in English literature.
Some of his early work appeared on BBC2 (television) in 1974, in an edited version of the Footlights Revue from Cambridge, that year. A version of the same revue performed live in London's West End led to Adams being "discovered" by Monty Python's Graham Chapman. The two formed a brief writing partnership, and Adams earned a writing credit in one episode (episode 45: "Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Liberal Party") of Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the sketch, a man who had been stabbed by a nurse arrives at his doctor's office bleeding profusely from the stomach, when the doctor makes him fill out numerous senseless forms before he can administer treatment (a joke he later incorporated into the Vogons' obsession with paperwork). Adams also contributed to a sketch on the album for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Douglas also had two "blink and you miss them" appearances in the fourth series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. At the beginning of Episode 42, "The Light Entertainment War," Adams is in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to the on-screen captions), pulling on gloves, while Michael Palin narrates a sketch that introduces one person after another, and never actually gets started. At the beginning of Episode 44, "Mr Neutron," Adams is dressed in a "pepperpot" outfit and loads a missile onto a cart, driven by Terry Jones, who is calling out for scrap metal ("Any old iron..."). The two episodes were first broadcast in November 1974. Adams and Chapman also attempted a few non-Python projects, including Out of the Trees.
Some of Adams's early radio work included sketches for The Burkiss Way in 1977 and The News Huddlines. He also co-wrote, again with Graham Chapman, the 20 February 1977 episode of Doctor on the Go, a sequel to the Doctor in the House television comedy series.
As Adams had difficulty selling his jokes and stories, he took a series of "odd jobs" in order to have some income. A biography from an early edition of one of the HHGG novels provides the following description of his early career:
After graduation he spent several years contributing material to radio and television shows as well as writing, performing, and sometimes directing stage revues in London, Cambridge and at the Edinburgh Fringe. He has also worked at various times as a hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard, radio producer and script editor of Doctor Who.
Adams held the job as a bodyguard in the mid-1970s. He was employed by an Arab family, which had made its fortune in oil (and were from Qatar, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica). He had a couple of favourite anecdotes about the job: one story related that the family once ordered one of everything from a hotel's menu, tried all of the dishes, and sent out for hamburgers. Another story had to do with a prostitute, sent to the floor Adams was guarding one evening. They acknowledged each other as she entered, and an hour later, when she left, she is said to have remarked, "At least you can read while you're on the job."
In 1979, Adams and John Lloyd wrote the scripts for two half-hour episodes of Doctor Snuggles: "The Remarkable Fidgety River" and "The Great Disappearing Mystery" (episodes seven and twelve). John Lloyd was also co-author of two episodes from the original "Hitchhiker" radio series (Fit the Fifth and Fit the Sixth (a.k.a. Episodes Five and Six, see explanation below)), as well as The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff. Lloyd and Adams also collaborated on an SF movie comedy project based on The Guinness Book of World Records, which would have starred John Cleese as the UN Secretary General, and had a race of aliens beating humans in athletic competitions, but the humans winning in all of the "absurd" record categories. This latter project never proceeded past a treatment.
After the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide became successful, Adams was made a BBC radio producer, working on Week Ending and a pantomime called Black Cinderella Two Goes East. He left the position after six months to become the script editor for Doctor Who.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a concept for a science-fiction comedy radio series pitched by Adams and radio producer Simon Brett to BBC Radio 4 in 1977. Adams came up with an outline for a pilot episode, as well as a few other stories (reprinted in Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion) that could potentially be used in the series.
According to Adams, the idea for the title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria (though he joked that the BBC would instead claim it was Spain "because it's easier to spell"), gazing at the stars. He had been wandering the countryside while carrying a book called the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe when he ran into a town where, as he humorously describes, everyone was either "deaf" and "dumb" or only spoke languages he couldn't. After wandering around and drinking for a while, he went to sleep in the middle of a field and was inspired by his inability to communicate with the townspeople. He later said that due to his constantly retelling this story of inspiration, he no longer had any memory of the moment of inspiration itself, and only remembered his retellings of that moment. A postscript to M. J. Simpson's biography of Adams, Hitchhiker, provides evidence that the story was in fact a fabrication and that Adams had conceived the idea some time after his trip around Europe.
Despite the original outline, Adams was said to make up the stories as he wrote. He turned to John Lloyd for help with the final two episodes of the first series. Lloyd contributed bits from an unpublished science fiction book of his own, called GiGax. However, very little of Lloyd's material survived in later adaptations of Hitchhiker's, such as the novels and the TV series. The TV series itself was based on the first six radio episodes, but sections contributed by Lloyd were largely re-written.
BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first radio series weekly in the UK in March and April 1978. Following the success of the first series, another episode was recorded and broadcast, which was commonly known as the Christmas Episode. A second series of five episodes was broadcast one per night, during the week of 21 January - 25 January 1980.
While working on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such as The Pirate Planet) Adams developed problems keeping to writing deadlines that only got worse as he published novels. Adams was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish was completed. He was quoted as saying, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
The books formed the basis for other adaptations, such as three-part comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo illustrated edition, published in 1994. This latter edition featured a 42 Puzzle designed by Adams, which was later incorporated into paperback covers of the first four "Hitchhiker's" novels (the paperback for the fifth re-used the artwork from the hardcover edition). Adams also began attempts to turn the first Hitchhiker's novel into a movie in 1980, making several trips to Los Angeles, California, and working with a number of Hollywood studios and potential producers. When he died in 2001 in California, he had been trying again to get the movie project green-lit with Disney. The screenplay finally got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick, was green-lit in September 2003, and the resulting movie was released in 2005.
Radio Producer Dirk Maggs had consulted with Adams in 1993 about creating a third radio series, based on the third novel in the Hitchhiker's series. They also vaguely discussed the possibilities of radio adaptations of the final two novels in the five-book "trilogy." As well as the movie, this project was only realized after Adams's death. The third series, The Tertiary Phase, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004 and is now available on audio CD. Douglas Adams himself can be heard playing the part of Agrajag. So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly Harmless made up the fourth and fifth radio series, respectively (on radio they were titled The Quandary Phase and The Quintessential Phase) and these were broadcast in May and June of 2005, and subsequently released on Audio CD. The last episode in the last series (with a new, "more upbeat" ending) concluded with, "The very final episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is affectionately dedicated to its author."
Adams sent the script for the HHGG pilot radio programme to the Doctor Who production office in 1978, and was commissioned to write The Pirate Planet (see below). He had also previously attempted to submit a potential movie script, called "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen," which later became his novel Life, the Universe, and Everything (which in turn became the third Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). Adams then went on to serve as script editor on the show for its seventeenth season in 1979. Altogether, he wrote three Doctor Who serials starring Tom Baker as the Doctor:
* The Pirate Planet (the second serial in the "Key To Time" arc, in Season 16)
* City of Death (with producer Graham Williams, from an original storyline by writer David Fisher. It was transmitted under the pseudonym "David Agnew")
* Shada (only partially filmed and not broadcast due to industrial disputes)
Adams was also known to allow in-jokes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to appear in the Doctor Who stories he wrote and other stories on which he served as Script Editor. Conversely, at least one reference to Doctor Who was worked into a Hitchhiker's novel. In Life, the Universe and Everything, two characters travel in time and land on the pitch at Lord's Cricket Ground. The reaction of the radio commentators to their sudden appearance is very similar to a scene in the eighth episode of the 1965-66 story The Daleks' Master Plan, which has the Doctor's TARDIS materialise on the pitch at Lord's, with the reactions of the match's commentators.
Elements of Shada and City of Death were reused in Adams's later novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in particular the character of Professor Chronotis. Big Finish Productions eventually remade Shada as an audio play starring Paul McGann as the Doctor. Accompanied by partially animated illustrations, it was webcast on the BBCi website in 2003, and subsequently released as a two-CD set later that year. An omnibus edition of this version was broadcast on the digital radio station BBC7 on 10 December 2005.
Adams is credited with introducing a fan of his, the zoologist Richard Dawkins, to Dawkins' future wife, Lalla Ward, who had played the part of Romana in Doctor Who.
When he was at school, he wrote and performed a play called Doctor Which.
Adams included a direct reference to Pink Floyd in the original radio version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which he describes the main characters surveying the landscape of an alien planet while Marvin, their android companion, hums Pink Floyd's "Shine on You Crazy Diamond". See also Pink Floyd trivia or Hitchhiker's radio series trivia.
Adams's official biography shares its name with the song "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd. Adams was friendly with their guitarist David Gilmour and, on the occasion of his 42nd birthday (the number 42 having especial significance, being The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything), was invited to make a guest appearance at one of their 1994 concerts in London, playing rhythm guitar on the songs "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse". Adams chose the name for Pink Floyd's 1994 album, The Division Bell by picking the words from the lyrics to one of its tracks. Gilmour also performed at Adams's Memorial Service.
Pink Floyd and their lavish stage shows were also the inspiration for the Adams-created fictional rock band "Disaster Area", described in the Hitchhiker's Guide as not only the loudest rock band in the galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. One element of Disaster Area's stage show was to send a space ship hurtling into a sun, probably inspired by the plane that would crash into the stage during some of Pink Floyd's live shows, usually at the end of "On The Run". The 1968 Pink Floyd song “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” may also have influenced part of the ideas behind Disaster Area.
Procol Harum
Douglas Adams was a good friend with Gary Brooker, the lead singer, pianist and songwriter of the progressive rock band Procol Harum. Adams is known to have invited Brooker to one of the many parties that Adams held at his house. On one such occasion Gary Brooker performed the full (4 verse) version of his hit song A Whiter Shade of Pale. Brooker also performed at Adams's Memorial Service.
Adams also appeared on stage with Brooker to perform In Held Twas in I at Redhill when the band's lyricist Keith Reid was not available. On several other occasions he had been known to introduce Procol Harum at their gigs.
Adams also let it be known that while writing he would listen to music, and this would occasionally influence his work. On one occasion the title track from the Procol Harum album Grand Hotel was playing when "suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that came out of nowhere and didn't seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought ... it sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floorshow going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe. And so that was where the idea for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from."
Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG together with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. In 1986 he participated in a weeklong brainstorming session with the Lucasfilm Games team for the game, Labyrinth. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy (also by Infocom, but not based on any book). Adams was also responsible for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was published in 1999 by Simon and Schuster. Terry Jones wrote the accompanying book, entitled Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, since Adams was too busy with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the h2g2 collaborative writing project which was the most prominent attempt at making The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy a reality.
In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme Hyperland also featuring Tom Baker as a "software agent" (similar to the "Assistants" used in several versions of Microsoft Office, derived from their failed "Bob" program), and interviews with Ted Nelson, which was essentially about the use of hypertext. Although Adams didn't invent hypertext, he was an early adopter and advocate of it, and his influence should not be underestimated. This was the same year that Tim Berners-Lee used the idea of hypertext in his HTML.
In between Adams's first trip to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine in 1985, and their series of travels that formed the basis for the radio series and non-fiction book Last Chance to See, Adams wrote two other novels with a new cast of characters. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was first published in 1987, and was described by its author as "a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics." It received many rave reviews from American newspapers upon its publication in the USA. Adams borrowed a few ideas from two Doctor Who stories he had worked on: City of Death and Shada.
A sequel novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was published a year later. This was an entirely original work, Adams's first since So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Reviewers, however, were not as generous with praise with the second volume as they had been with the first. After the obligatory book tours, Adams was off on his round-the-world excursion which supplied him with the material for Last Chance to See.
Religion
Adams was a self-declared "radical atheist", though he used the term for emphasis, so that he would not be asked if he in fact meant agnostic. He stated in an interview with American Atheists that this was easier and conveyed the fact that he really meant it, had thought about it a great deal, and that it was an opinion he held seriously. He was convinced that there is no God, having never seen one shred of evidence to convince him otherwise, and devoted himself instead to secular causes like environmentalism.
Environmentalism
Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of a number of endangered species. This activism included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the kakapo, and the publication of a tie-in book of the same name. In 1992, this was made into a CD-ROM combination of audio book, eBook and picture slide show a decade before such things became fashionable. His environmental activism is also recounted in the book The Salmon of Doubt in a short account of a hike he once made across the plains of Africa while wearing a rhino suit.
Animal Rights
Adams and Mark Carwardine contributed another essay to the book The Great Ape Project. This book, edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer launched a wider-scale project in 1993, which calls for the extension of moral equality to include all great apes, human or nonhuman.
Technology
Adams was a serious fan of technology. Though he did not buy his first word processor until 1982, he had considered one as early as 1979. He was quoted as saying that until 1982, he had difficulties with "the impenetrable barrier of jargon. Words were flying backwards and forwards without concepts riding on their backs." In 1982, his first purchase was a 'Nexus'. In 1983, when he and Jane Belson went out to Los Angeles, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England, Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 100. In Last Chance to See he mentions his Cambridge Z88.
Adams's posthumously published work, The Salmon of Doubt, features multiple articles written by Douglas on the subject of technology, including reprints of articles that originally ran in MacUser magazine, and in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. In these, Adams claims that one of the first computers he ever saw was a Commodore PET, and that his love affair with the Apple Macintosh first began after seeing one at Infocom's headquarters in Massachusetts in 1983 (though that was actually very likely an Apple Lisa).
Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out in 1984 until his death in 2001. Adams was also an "Apple Master," one of several celebrities whom Apple made into spokespeople for its products (other Apple Masters included John Cleese and Gregory Hines). Adams's contributions included a rock video that he created using the first version of iMovie with footage featuring his daughter Polly. The video can still be seen on Adams's .Mac homepage. Adams even installed and started using the first release of Mac OS X in the weeks leading up to his death. His very last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. Adams can also be seen in the Omnibus tribute included with the Region One/NTSC DVD release of the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide using Mac OS X (version 10.0.x) on his PowerBook G3.
Adams used e-mail extensively from the technology's infancy, adopting a very early version of e-mail to correspond with Steve Meretzky during the pair's collaboration on Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While living in New Mexico in 1993 he set up another e-mail address and began posting to his own USENET newsgroup: alt.fan.douglas-adams. Many of his posts are now archived through Google. Challenges to the authenticity of his identity later led Adams to set up a message forum on his own website to avoid the issue.
Personal life
In the early 1980s, Adams had an affair with married novelist Sally Emerson, to whom he dedicated his book Life, the Universe, and Everything. Emerson returned to her husband after splitting with Adams in 1981, and Adams was soon afterward introduced by friends to Jane Belson, with whom he later became romantically involved. Belson was the "lady barrister" mentioned in the jacket-flap biography printed in his books during the mid-1980s ("He [Adams] lives in Islington with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh"). The two lived in Los Angeles together during 1983 while Adams worked on an early screenplay adaptation to make Hitchhiker into a Hollywood movie. When the deal fell through, they moved to London, and after several separations and an aborted engagement, they were married on 25 November 1991. Adams and Belson had one daughter together, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born on 22 June 1994, in the year that Adams turned 42. In 1999, the family moved from London to Santa Barbara, California, where they lived until Adams's death. Following his funeral, Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London, where they currently reside.
Adams died of a heart attack at the age of 49, while working out at a private gym in Montecito, California. He was survived by his wife Jane and daughter Polly. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in Highgate Cemetery in north London.
In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, containing many short stories, essays, and letters, and eulogies from Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry (in the UK edition), Christopher Cerf (in the U.S. edition), and Terry Jones (in the U.S. paperback edition). It also includes eleven chapters of his long-awaited but unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, which was to be a new Dirk Gently and/or HHGG novel, or neither.
Other events after Adams's death included the completion of Shada, radio dramatizations of the final three books in the Hitchhiker's series, and the completion of the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of science fiction staple Doctor Who, and served the series as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and co-author credits on 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 realized 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 fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Apple Macintosh, and other "techno gizmos." He was a keen technologist, using such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known.
Adams was a self-described "radical atheist." Towards the end of his life, he was a sought-after lecturer on topics including technology and the environment. Since his death at the age of 49, he is still widely revered in science fiction and fantasy fandom circles.
Douglas Adams was born to Janet (Donovan) Adams (now Janet Thrift) and Christopher Douglas Adams in Cambridge, England. His parents had one other child together, Susan, who was born in March 1955. His parents separated and divorced in 1957, and Douglas, Susan, and Janet moved in with Janet's parents, the Donovans, in Brentwood, Essex. Douglas's grandmother kept her house as an official RSPCA refuge for hurt animals, which "exacerbated young Douglas's hayfever and asthma."
Christopher Adams remarried in July 1960, to Mary Judith Stewart (born Judith Robertson). From this marriage, Douglas Adams had a half-sister, Heather. Janet remarried in 1964, to a veterinarian, Ron Thrift, providing two more half-siblings to Douglas: Jane and James Thrift.
Education and early works
Adams first attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood, Essex. He took the exams and interviewed for Brentwood School at age six, and attended from 1959 to 1970. Adams attended different divisions of the school, including the Prep School and the Middle School. While at the prep school, he had an English class, taught by Frank Halford, where Halford awarded Adams the only ten out of ten of his entire teaching career for a creative writing exercise. Adams remembered this for the rest of his life, especially when facing writer's block. Some of Adams's earliest writing was published at the school, such as a report on the school's Photography Club in The Brentwoodian (in 1962) or spoof reviews in the school magazine Broadsheet (edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone). Adams also had a letter and short story published nationally in the UK in the boys' magazine The Eagle in 1965. Adams also met Griff Rhys Jones at the school; the two appeared together in a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 1968. He was six feet tall (1.83 m) by the time he was 12, and he stopped growing only at 6'5" (1.96 m).
On the strength of a bravura essay on religious poetry that mixed the Beatles with William Blake, he was awarded a place at St John's College, Cambridge to read English, entering in 1971. Adams attempted early on to get into the Footlights Dramatic Club, with which several other names in British Comedy had been affiliated. He was, however, turned down, and started to write and perform in revues with Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith, forming a group called "Adams-Smith-Adams." Later, on another attempt to join Footlights, Douglas Adams was encouraged by Simon Jones and Adams found himself working with Rhys Jones, among others. In 1974, Adams graduated with a B.A. in English literature.
Some of his early work appeared on BBC2 (television) in 1974, in an edited version of the Footlights Revue from Cambridge, that year. A version of the same revue performed live in London's West End led to Adams being "discovered" by Monty Python's Graham Chapman. The two formed a brief writing partnership, and Adams earned a writing credit in one episode (episode 45: "Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Liberal Party") of Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the sketch, a man who had been stabbed by a nurse arrives at his doctor's office bleeding profusely from the stomach, when the doctor makes him fill out numerous senseless forms before he can administer treatment (a joke he later incorporated into the Vogons' obsession with paperwork). Adams also contributed to a sketch on the album for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Douglas also had two "blink and you miss them" appearances in the fourth series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. At the beginning of Episode 42, "The Light Entertainment War," Adams is in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to the on-screen captions), pulling on gloves, while Michael Palin narrates a sketch that introduces one person after another, and never actually gets started. At the beginning of Episode 44, "Mr Neutron," Adams is dressed in a "pepperpot" outfit and loads a missile onto a cart, driven by Terry Jones, who is calling out for scrap metal ("Any old iron..."). The two episodes were first broadcast in November 1974. Adams and Chapman also attempted a few non-Python projects, including Out of the Trees.
Some of Adams's early radio work included sketches for The Burkiss Way in 1977 and The News Huddlines. He also co-wrote, again with Graham Chapman, the 20 February 1977 episode of Doctor on the Go, a sequel to the Doctor in the House television comedy series.
As Adams had difficulty selling his jokes and stories, he took a series of "odd jobs" in order to have some income. A biography from an early edition of one of the HHGG novels provides the following description of his early career:
After graduation he spent several years contributing material to radio and television shows as well as writing, performing, and sometimes directing stage revues in London, Cambridge and at the Edinburgh Fringe. He has also worked at various times as a hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard, radio producer and script editor of Doctor Who.
Adams held the job as a bodyguard in the mid-1970s. He was employed by an Arab family, which had made its fortune in oil (and were from Qatar, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica). He had a couple of favourite anecdotes about the job: one story related that the family once ordered one of everything from a hotel's menu, tried all of the dishes, and sent out for hamburgers. Another story had to do with a prostitute, sent to the floor Adams was guarding one evening. They acknowledged each other as she entered, and an hour later, when she left, she is said to have remarked, "At least you can read while you're on the job."
In 1979, Adams and John Lloyd wrote the scripts for two half-hour episodes of Doctor Snuggles: "The Remarkable Fidgety River" and "The Great Disappearing Mystery" (episodes seven and twelve). John Lloyd was also co-author of two episodes from the original "Hitchhiker" radio series (Fit the Fifth and Fit the Sixth (a.k.a. Episodes Five and Six, see explanation below)), as well as The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff. Lloyd and Adams also collaborated on an SF movie comedy project based on The Guinness Book of World Records, which would have starred John Cleese as the UN Secretary General, and had a race of aliens beating humans in athletic competitions, but the humans winning in all of the "absurd" record categories. This latter project never proceeded past a treatment.
After the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide became successful, Adams was made a BBC radio producer, working on Week Ending and a pantomime called Black Cinderella Two Goes East. He left the position after six months to become the script editor for Doctor Who.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a concept for a science-fiction comedy radio series pitched by Adams and radio producer Simon Brett to BBC Radio 4 in 1977. Adams came up with an outline for a pilot episode, as well as a few other stories (reprinted in Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion) that could potentially be used in the series.
According to Adams, the idea for the title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria (though he joked that the BBC would instead claim it was Spain "because it's easier to spell"), gazing at the stars. He had been wandering the countryside while carrying a book called the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe when he ran into a town where, as he humorously describes, everyone was either "deaf" and "dumb" or only spoke languages he couldn't. After wandering around and drinking for a while, he went to sleep in the middle of a field and was inspired by his inability to communicate with the townspeople. He later said that due to his constantly retelling this story of inspiration, he no longer had any memory of the moment of inspiration itself, and only remembered his retellings of that moment. A postscript to M. J. Simpson's biography of Adams, Hitchhiker, provides evidence that the story was in fact a fabrication and that Adams had conceived the idea some time after his trip around Europe.
Despite the original outline, Adams was said to make up the stories as he wrote. He turned to John Lloyd for help with the final two episodes of the first series. Lloyd contributed bits from an unpublished science fiction book of his own, called GiGax. However, very little of Lloyd's material survived in later adaptations of Hitchhiker's, such as the novels and the TV series. The TV series itself was based on the first six radio episodes, but sections contributed by Lloyd were largely re-written.
BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first radio series weekly in the UK in March and April 1978. Following the success of the first series, another episode was recorded and broadcast, which was commonly known as the Christmas Episode. A second series of five episodes was broadcast one per night, during the week of 21 January - 25 January 1980.
While working on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such as The Pirate Planet) Adams developed problems keeping to writing deadlines that only got worse as he published novels. Adams was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish was completed. He was quoted as saying, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
The books formed the basis for other adaptations, such as three-part comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo illustrated edition, published in 1994. This latter edition featured a 42 Puzzle designed by Adams, which was later incorporated into paperback covers of the first four "Hitchhiker's" novels (the paperback for the fifth re-used the artwork from the hardcover edition). Adams also began attempts to turn the first Hitchhiker's novel into a movie in 1980, making several trips to Los Angeles, California, and working with a number of Hollywood studios and potential producers. When he died in 2001 in California, he had been trying again to get the movie project green-lit with Disney. The screenplay finally got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick, was green-lit in September 2003, and the resulting movie was released in 2005.
Radio Producer Dirk Maggs had consulted with Adams in 1993 about creating a third radio series, based on the third novel in the Hitchhiker's series. They also vaguely discussed the possibilities of radio adaptations of the final two novels in the five-book "trilogy." As well as the movie, this project was only realized after Adams's death. The third series, The Tertiary Phase, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004 and is now available on audio CD. Douglas Adams himself can be heard playing the part of Agrajag. So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly Harmless made up the fourth and fifth radio series, respectively (on radio they were titled The Quandary Phase and The Quintessential Phase) and these were broadcast in May and June of 2005, and subsequently released on Audio CD. The last episode in the last series (with a new, "more upbeat" ending) concluded with, "The very final episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is affectionately dedicated to its author."
Adams sent the script for the HHGG pilot radio programme to the Doctor Who production office in 1978, and was commissioned to write The Pirate Planet (see below). He had also previously attempted to submit a potential movie script, called "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen," which later became his novel Life, the Universe, and Everything (which in turn became the third Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). Adams then went on to serve as script editor on the show for its seventeenth season in 1979. Altogether, he wrote three Doctor Who serials starring Tom Baker as the Doctor:
* The Pirate Planet (the second serial in the "Key To Time" arc, in Season 16)
* City of Death (with producer Graham Williams, from an original storyline by writer David Fisher. It was transmitted under the pseudonym "David Agnew")
* Shada (only partially filmed and not broadcast due to industrial disputes)
Adams was also known to allow in-jokes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to appear in the Doctor Who stories he wrote and other stories on which he served as Script Editor. Conversely, at least one reference to Doctor Who was worked into a Hitchhiker's novel. In Life, the Universe and Everything, two characters travel in time and land on the pitch at Lord's Cricket Ground. The reaction of the radio commentators to their sudden appearance is very similar to a scene in the eighth episode of the 1965-66 story The Daleks' Master Plan, which has the Doctor's TARDIS materialise on the pitch at Lord's, with the reactions of the match's commentators.
Elements of Shada and City of Death were reused in Adams's later novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in particular the character of Professor Chronotis. Big Finish Productions eventually remade Shada as an audio play starring Paul McGann as the Doctor. Accompanied by partially animated illustrations, it was webcast on the BBCi website in 2003, and subsequently released as a two-CD set later that year. An omnibus edition of this version was broadcast on the digital radio station BBC7 on 10 December 2005.
Adams is credited with introducing a fan of his, the zoologist Richard Dawkins, to Dawkins' future wife, Lalla Ward, who had played the part of Romana in Doctor Who.
When he was at school, he wrote and performed a play called Doctor Which.
Adams included a direct reference to Pink Floyd in the original radio version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which he describes the main characters surveying the landscape of an alien planet while Marvin, their android companion, hums Pink Floyd's "Shine on You Crazy Diamond". See also Pink Floyd trivia or Hitchhiker's radio series trivia.
Adams's official biography shares its name with the song "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd. Adams was friendly with their guitarist David Gilmour and, on the occasion of his 42nd birthday (the number 42 having especial significance, being The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything), was invited to make a guest appearance at one of their 1994 concerts in London, playing rhythm guitar on the songs "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse". Adams chose the name for Pink Floyd's 1994 album, The Division Bell by picking the words from the lyrics to one of its tracks. Gilmour also performed at Adams's Memorial Service.
Pink Floyd and their lavish stage shows were also the inspiration for the Adams-created fictional rock band "Disaster Area", described in the Hitchhiker's Guide as not only the loudest rock band in the galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. One element of Disaster Area's stage show was to send a space ship hurtling into a sun, probably inspired by the plane that would crash into the stage during some of Pink Floyd's live shows, usually at the end of "On The Run". The 1968 Pink Floyd song “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” may also have influenced part of the ideas behind Disaster Area.
Procol Harum
Douglas Adams was a good friend with Gary Brooker, the lead singer, pianist and songwriter of the progressive rock band Procol Harum. Adams is known to have invited Brooker to one of the many parties that Adams held at his house. On one such occasion Gary Brooker performed the full (4 verse) version of his hit song A Whiter Shade of Pale. Brooker also performed at Adams's Memorial Service.
Adams also appeared on stage with Brooker to perform In Held Twas in I at Redhill when the band's lyricist Keith Reid was not available. On several other occasions he had been known to introduce Procol Harum at their gigs.
Adams also let it be known that while writing he would listen to music, and this would occasionally influence his work. On one occasion the title track from the Procol Harum album Grand Hotel was playing when "suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that came out of nowhere and didn't seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought ... it sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floorshow going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe. And so that was where the idea for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from."
Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG together with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. In 1986 he participated in a weeklong brainstorming session with the Lucasfilm Games team for the game, Labyrinth. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy (also by Infocom, but not based on any book). Adams was also responsible for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was published in 1999 by Simon and Schuster. Terry Jones wrote the accompanying book, entitled Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, since Adams was too busy with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the h2g2 collaborative writing project which was the most prominent attempt at making The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy a reality.
In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme Hyperland also featuring Tom Baker as a "software agent" (similar to the "Assistants" used in several versions of Microsoft Office, derived from their failed "Bob" program), and interviews with Ted Nelson, which was essentially about the use of hypertext. Although Adams didn't invent hypertext, he was an early adopter and advocate of it, and his influence should not be underestimated. This was the same year that Tim Berners-Lee used the idea of hypertext in his HTML.
In between Adams's first trip to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine in 1985, and their series of travels that formed the basis for the radio series and non-fiction book Last Chance to See, Adams wrote two other novels with a new cast of characters. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was first published in 1987, and was described by its author as "a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics." It received many rave reviews from American newspapers upon its publication in the USA. Adams borrowed a few ideas from two Doctor Who stories he had worked on: City of Death and Shada.
A sequel novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was published a year later. This was an entirely original work, Adams's first since So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Reviewers, however, were not as generous with praise with the second volume as they had been with the first. After the obligatory book tours, Adams was off on his round-the-world excursion which supplied him with the material for Last Chance to See.
Religion
Adams was a self-declared "radical atheist", though he used the term for emphasis, so that he would not be asked if he in fact meant agnostic. He stated in an interview with American Atheists that this was easier and conveyed the fact that he really meant it, had thought about it a great deal, and that it was an opinion he held seriously. He was convinced that there is no God, having never seen one shred of evidence to convince him otherwise, and devoted himself instead to secular causes like environmentalism.
Environmentalism
Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of a number of endangered species. This activism included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the kakapo, and the publication of a tie-in book of the same name. In 1992, this was made into a CD-ROM combination of audio book, eBook and picture slide show a decade before such things became fashionable. His environmental activism is also recounted in the book The Salmon of Doubt in a short account of a hike he once made across the plains of Africa while wearing a rhino suit.
Animal Rights
Adams and Mark Carwardine contributed another essay to the book The Great Ape Project. This book, edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer launched a wider-scale project in 1993, which calls for the extension of moral equality to include all great apes, human or nonhuman.
Technology
Adams was a serious fan of technology. Though he did not buy his first word processor until 1982, he had considered one as early as 1979. He was quoted as saying that until 1982, he had difficulties with "the impenetrable barrier of jargon. Words were flying backwards and forwards without concepts riding on their backs." In 1982, his first purchase was a 'Nexus'. In 1983, when he and Jane Belson went out to Los Angeles, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England, Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 100. In Last Chance to See he mentions his Cambridge Z88.
Adams's posthumously published work, The Salmon of Doubt, features multiple articles written by Douglas on the subject of technology, including reprints of articles that originally ran in MacUser magazine, and in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. In these, Adams claims that one of the first computers he ever saw was a Commodore PET, and that his love affair with the Apple Macintosh first began after seeing one at Infocom's headquarters in Massachusetts in 1983 (though that was actually very likely an Apple Lisa).
Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out in 1984 until his death in 2001. Adams was also an "Apple Master," one of several celebrities whom Apple made into spokespeople for its products (other Apple Masters included John Cleese and Gregory Hines). Adams's contributions included a rock video that he created using the first version of iMovie with footage featuring his daughter Polly. The video can still be seen on Adams's .Mac homepage. Adams even installed and started using the first release of Mac OS X in the weeks leading up to his death. His very last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. Adams can also be seen in the Omnibus tribute included with the Region One/NTSC DVD release of the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide using Mac OS X (version 10.0.x) on his PowerBook G3.
Adams used e-mail extensively from the technology's infancy, adopting a very early version of e-mail to correspond with Steve Meretzky during the pair's collaboration on Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While living in New Mexico in 1993 he set up another e-mail address and began posting to his own USENET newsgroup: alt.fan.douglas-adams. Many of his posts are now archived through Google. Challenges to the authenticity of his identity later led Adams to set up a message forum on his own website to avoid the issue.
Personal life
In the early 1980s, Adams had an affair with married novelist Sally Emerson, to whom he dedicated his book Life, the Universe, and Everything. Emerson returned to her husband after splitting with Adams in 1981, and Adams was soon afterward introduced by friends to Jane Belson, with whom he later became romantically involved. Belson was the "lady barrister" mentioned in the jacket-flap biography printed in his books during the mid-1980s ("He [Adams] lives in Islington with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh"). The two lived in Los Angeles together during 1983 while Adams worked on an early screenplay adaptation to make Hitchhiker into a Hollywood movie. When the deal fell through, they moved to London, and after several separations and an aborted engagement, they were married on 25 November 1991. Adams and Belson had one daughter together, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born on 22 June 1994, in the year that Adams turned 42. In 1999, the family moved from London to Santa Barbara, California, where they lived until Adams's death. Following his funeral, Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London, where they currently reside.
Adams died of a heart attack at the age of 49, while working out at a private gym in Montecito, California. He was survived by his wife Jane and daughter Polly. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in Highgate Cemetery in north London.
In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, containing many short stories, essays, and letters, and eulogies from Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry (in the UK edition), Christopher Cerf (in the U.S. edition), and Terry Jones (in the U.S. paperback edition). It also includes eleven chapters of his long-awaited but unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, which was to be a new Dirk Gently and/or HHGG novel, or neither.
Other events after Adams's death included the completion of Shada, radio dramatizations of the final three books in the Hitchhiker's series, and the completion of the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer ( 2010)
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series, which contains five books, is already renowned as the longest trilogy in the history of the universe, but most fans felt fairly certain it was over when author Douglas Adams died in 2001. Adams would no doubt be delighted to know that he has once again bamboozled the literary world, this time from beyond the grave. Arthur Dent, the galaxy's most irrepressible defeatist, has been given a second (or is it a sixth?) life by Adams's fellow Brit, Eoin Colfer, who helms a wildly popular series of his own called ARTEMIS FOWL. After five books worth of intergalactic shenanigans that would turn the average person's brain into a gelatinous paste, Arthur has finally made it back to his version of the Earth, only to discover that it is once again scheduled for routine explosion. While Arthur seems perfectly content to experience annihilation, provided he has time for a cup of tea, the relentlessly enthusiastic Galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox thinks a bit of heroism is in order. Colfer wrote the book under enormous pressure from Adams's legion of rabid fans, but he did not panic and produced a hilarious conclusion to the series, at least until the next book.
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And Another Thing... Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Part Six of Three by Eoin Colfer ( 2009)
Working with the blessing of Douglas Adams's widow, the author of the Artemis Fowl series offers a sixth installment of the popular series that has gained legions of fans through its blend of science fiction, fantasy, humor, and absurdity. One million first printing.
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Bach Brandenburg Concertos 1-4 by Johann Sebastian Bach ( 1998) |
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The Deeper Meaning Of Liff A Dictionary Of Things There Aren't Any Words For Yet--but There Ought To Be by Douglas Adams, John Lloyd ( 2005)
Does the sensation of Tingrith(1) make you yelp? Do you bend sympathetically when you see someone Ahenny(2)? Can you deal with a Naugatuck(3) without causing a Toronto(4)? Will you suffer from Kettering(5) 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(6). They quickly realized that just as there are an awful lot of experiences that no one has a name for, so there are an awful lot of names for places you will never need to go to. What a waste. As responsible citizens of a small and crowded world, we must all learn the virtues of recycling(7) and put old, worn-out but still serviceable names to exciting, vibrant, new uses. This is the book that does that for you: The Deeper Meaning of Liff—a whole new solution to the problem of Great Wakering(8) 1—The feeling of aluminum foil against your fillings. 2—The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves. 3—A plastic packet containing shampoo, mustard, etc., which is impossible to open except by biting off the corners. 4—Generic term for anything that comes out in a gush, despite all your efforts to let it out carefully, e.g., flour into a white sauce, ketchup onto fish, a dog into the yard, and another naughty meaning that we can’t put on the cover. 5—The marks left on your bottom and thighs after you’ve been sitting sunbathing in a wicker chair. 6—God knows what this means 7—For instance, some of this book was first published in Britain twenty-six years ago. 8—Look it up yourself. |
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The Deeper Meaning of Liff A Dictionary of Things That There Aren't Any Words for Yet, but Ought to Be by Douglas Adams, John Lloyd ( 1993)
The best-selling author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the creator of "Not the Nine O'Clock News" present a zany dictionary of such items as "the precise instant at which scrambled eggs are ready."
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Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams ( 1997)
A ghost-horror-detective-time travel-romance-comedy epic from the bestselling author of the hilarious Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams ( 2008) |
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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams ( 1998)
This darkly satirical sf mystery is somewhat of a departure from Douglas Adams's internationally bestselling HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series. Richard MacDuff, a bemused computer programmer, is propelled into a series of mysterious but inextricably interconnected events, involving the odd behavior of an extremely absentminded Cambridge professor, the senseless murder of his boss, the true meaning of Coleridge's two most famous poems, and a horse stuck in a bathroom. Only Richard's old college friend Dirk Gently, a somewhat shady, possibly psychic, and perennially underemployed PI, can trace the pattern to its source: an ancient ghost searching for a hidden time machine. Although DIRK GENTLY has never reached the same popularity as the HITCHHIKER'S books, it has a certain cult classic status. Fans of the British television series DOCTOR WHO will find DIRK GENTLY of interest, as it borrows plot elements from two scripts that Douglas Adams wrote for the series: "City of Death" and "Shada" (the filming of the latter was never completed due to a labor dispute). DIRK GENTLY'S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY was followed by a second Dirk book, THE LONG DARK TEATIME OF THE SOUL. A third book in the series, THE SALMON OF DOUBT, was incomplete at the time of Adams's death; the work-in-progress, along with some of Adams's collected writings, was published in 2002.
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Douglas Adams The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy/the Restaurant at the End of the Universe/Life, the Universe and Everything/So Long, and Thanks F by Douglas Adams ( 1994) |
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Douglas Adams by Douglas Adams ( 1986)
Dirk Gently attempts to solve the mysteries of the universe, with help from his sidekick, Richard.
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Douglas Adams at the BBC A Celebration of the Author's Life and Work by Douglas Adams ( )
Simon Jones, who played Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, presents a look back at the life and work of a writer who has captivated the imagination of millions.
When Douglas Adams created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for BBC Radio 4, it was the genesis of a science fiction comedy legend. Yet his career at the BBC had begun in Light Entertainment, with contributions to The Burkiss Way, Week Ending, and other sketch shows of the time. He went on to script edit a series of Doctor Who, and to write a series of Hitchhiker and Dirk Gently books. In programme, Simon Jones takes an A-Z look at Douglas Adams's career, taking in extracts from the many radio and TV programmes he contributed to. These include personal appearances on Wogan, Tomorrow's World, and Desert Island Discs, his own radio programmes such as Last Chance to See (about the search for endangered species) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future (a look at impending technology), and even a 'lost' segment of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which Adams wrote specially for Radio 4's Steafel Plus in 1982. Also included are some of the many tributes paid to Adams following his untimely death in May 2001. This is a fascinating and in-depth audio biography of a man whose brilliant work has inspired, enraptured, and entertained millions of people worldwide. |
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Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic by Terry Jones, Douglas Adams ( 1997)
In this thoroughly satisfying and completely disorienting novel based on a story line by Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), Terry Jones recounts an unforgettable tale of intergalactic travel and mishap. The saga of "the ship that cannot possibly go wrong" sparkles with wit, danger, and confusion that will keep readers guessing which reality they are in and how, on earth, to find their way out again.At the center of the galaxy, a vast, unknown civilization is preparing for an event of epic proportions: the launching of the greatest, most gorgeous, most technologically advanced Starship ever built-the Starship Titanic. An earthling would see it as a mixture of the Chrysler Building, the tomb of Tutankhamen, and Venice. But less provincial onlookers would recognize it as the design of Leovinus, the galaxys most renowned architect. He is an old man now, and the creation of the Starship Titanic is the pinnacle achievement of his twenty-year career. The night before the launch, Leovinus is prowling around the ship having a last little look. With mounting alarm he begins to find things are not right: unfinished workmanship, cybersystems not working correctly, robots colliding with doors. How could this have happened? And how could this have happened without his knowing?Something somewhere is terribly wrong.On the following day, in an artificial event staged for the media, the Starship Titanic will leave its construction dock under autopilot and, a few days later, make its way to the terminal to pick up passengers for its maiden voyage. Although the ship will be deserted during its very first flight, it is nevertheless a major event, watched by all the galaxys media.Hugely, magnificently, the fabulous ship eases its way forward from the construction dock, picks up speed, sways a bit, wobbles a bit, veers wildly, and just before it can do massive damage to everything around it, appears to undergo SMEF (Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure).In just ten seconds, the whole, stupendous enterprise is over. And our story has just begun.Somehow three earthlings, one Blerontin journalist, a semideranged parrot, and a shipful of disoriented robots must overcome their differences. It's the only way to save the Starship Titanic ("The Ship That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong") from certain destruction and rescue the economy of an entire planet-not to mention to survive the latest threat, an attack by a swarm of hostile shipbuilders. . . .
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Health Monitoring of Structural Materials and Components Methods With Applications by Douglas Adams ( 2007) |
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Health Monitoring of Structural Materials and Components Methods With Applications by Douglas Adams ( 2007) |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy The Tertiary Phase by Douglas Adams ( 2005)
Director Dirk Maggs reunited the original cast of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show for this adaptation of Douglas Adams's LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING, the third book in the Hitchhiker's series. Using clever audio sampling, both the original (and now deceased) radio voice of the Guide, Peter Jones, and the late Douglas Adams himself (as the vengeful, multiply-reincarnated Agrajag) also take part in the six-episode production, which was broadcast on BBC Radio, and now collected here.
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The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams ( 2005)
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY is not just a book--it's a phenomenon. It's based on a BBC radio series that also spawned four other books, a TV series, a 2005 film, a text-based computer adventure game, and a website. As the story begins, Arthur Dent is having a bad day. First, the town council knocked his house down to build a local bypass. Then a fleet of alien spaceships blew up his planet to make way for an intragalactic bypass. Can things get any worse? Possibly. Having been rescued from the Earth's destruction by his friend Ford Prefect, Arthur embarks upon a hectic, hysterically funny adventure that includes torturously bad poetry, a depressed robot, the two-headed President of the Galaxy (currently on the lam), and the legendary planet-building planet of Magrathea. Arthur's only consolation is the wise advice printed on the cover of that classic tome, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY: "Don't Panic." HITCHHIKER'S has developed a cult classic status that extends beyond SF fans, and people enjoy swapping quotes from it in much the same way that they exchange quotes from MONTY PYTHON. Although there is an extensive crop of British writers who write humorous fantasy in much the same vein, such as Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt, no one has quite been able to make the splash in satirical SF that Adams has.
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ( 2004)
Packed with an Astounding Amount of New and Never-Before-Collected Material.
Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches? No one but Douglas Adams could have pared life’s meaning down to these three questions, and they remain as inspired and head-scratchingly clever today as they did twenty-five years ago when they appeared in the first edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Showcasing his quick wit, comic genius, and wide-ranging intelligence, Hitchhiker’s has become nothing less than a cult classic and cultural phenomenon. To celebrate its quarter century and the extraordinary legacy of Adams, this gorgeously designed, mostly harmless deluxe edition gathers never-before-collected photographs, original artwork, memorabilia (from the strange to the sublime), and wisdom gleaned from a first read or first encounter as Douglas’s friends remember how the galaxy was forever changed a mere twenty-five years ago (not to mention the original text of the novel) into a one-of-a-kind Guide as stunning as two suns setting over Magrathea. Whether you are well versed in the antics of Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered Earthman plucked from his planet seconds before it’s demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, and Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy posing as an out-of-work actor, or are hitching a ride for the first time, this is the book that has everything you’ll nee to know about anything.So please do not be alarmed. Definitely don’t panic. Just be sure to grab a towel. |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Secondary Phase by Douglas Adams ( 2009) |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Tertiary Phase by Douglas Adams ( 2005)
Director Dirk Maggs reunited the original cast of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show for this adaptation of Douglas Adams's LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING, the third book in the Hitchhiker's series. Using clever audio sampling, both the original (and now deceased) radio voice of the Guide, Peter Jones, and the late Douglas Adams himself (as the vengeful, multiply-reincarnated Agrajag) also take part in the six-episode production, which was broadcast on BBC Radio, and now collected here.
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Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ( 1995) |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Primary Phase by Douglas Adams ( 2008) |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Quintessential Phase by Douglas Adams ( 2007) |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams Live in Concert by Douglas Adams ( 2007) |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Quintessential Phase by Douglas Adams ( 2006) |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ( )
Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last 15 years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.
Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.") and a galaxy full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; and Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years. Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time in between wearing digital watches? For all the answers stick your thumb to the stars. And don't forget to bring a towel! |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Complete Radio Series by Douglas Adams ( 2008) |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ( 1997)
Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor. Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from "The Hitchhiker's Guide" ('A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have') and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox--the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years. Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time between wearing digital watches? For all the answers stick your thumb to the stars. And don't forget to bring a towel!
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Quandary Phase (Dramatized) by Douglas Adams ( )
Don't panic! The Hitchhiker's saga returns once again with a brand new full-cast dramatisation of So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, the fourth book in Douglas Adams's famous 'trilogy in five parts'. The Earth has miraculously reappeared and, even more miraculously, Arthur Dent has found it. Returning to his cottage after...well...ages, he falls in love with the girl of his dreams.
But Ford Prefect is onto something which might well burst Arthur's bubble. There is, after all, something very fishy about his girlfriend's feet, and what has happened to all the dolphins? Perhaps, at last, all will be revealed in God's Last Message to His Creation.... Simon Jones returns as Arthur, Geoffrey McGivern as Ford, and Stephen Moore as Marvin. William Franklyn is the Book, and there is a whole host of famous guest stars. This extended edition features 30 minutes of material not heard on BBC Radio 4. |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Quintessential Phase (Dramatized) by Douglas Adams ( )
Panic! It's the last ever instalment of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, with a brand new full-cast dramatisation of Mostly Harmless, the final book in Douglas Adams's famous 'trilogy in five parts'. While frequent flyer Arthur Dent searches the universe for his lost love, Ford Prefect discovers a disturbing blast from the past at The Hitchhiker's Guide HQ. Meanwhile, on one of many versions of Earth, a blonder, more American Trillian gets tangled up with a party of lost aliens having an identity crisis. And just when Arthur thinks he has found his true vocation on the backwater planet of Lamuella, the original Trillian turns up with more than a little spanner in the works. A stolen ship, a dramatic stampede and a new and sinister Guide lead to a race to save the Earth...again. But this time, will they succeed?
Simon Jones returns as Arthur, Geoffrey McGivern as Ford, Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox, Susan Sheridan as Trillian, Sandra Dickinson as Tricia McMillian, and Stephen Moore as Marvin. William Franklyn is the Book, alongside a host of famous guest stars. This extended edition features 30 minutes of material not heard on BBC Radio 4. |
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Tertiary Phase (Dramatized) by Douglas Adams ( )
Don't panic! The Hitchhiker's saga continues with a brand new full-cast dramatisation of Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in Douglas Adams's famous 'trilogy in five parts'.
Stranded on prehistoric Earth, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect find escape in the form of a time-travelling sofa. But as 11 homicidal, bat-wielding robots proceed to blow up Lords Cricket Ground, it seems that Arthur is far from Home and Dry. In fact, he is not even Home and Vigorously Towelling Himself Off. Soon he is on an explosive quest to save the Universe, equipped with only a rabbit bone, a worn dressing gown, and a spaceship which looks remarkably like an Italian bistro. Many of the cast of the original BBC Radio 4 series have been reunited for this new dramatisation including Simon Jones as Arthur Dent, Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect, Susan Sheridan as Trillian, Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Stephen Moore as Marvin the Paranoid Android. |
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The Hitchhiker's Quartet by Douglas Adams ( 1986)
Four science fiction novels and a short story describe the humorous adventures of Arthur Dent.
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The Hitchhiker's Trilogy by Douglas Adams ( 1984) |
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Hitchhikers Companion Original Galaxy Radio Scripts by Douglas Adams ( 1985) |
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The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ( 2001) |
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The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ( 1994)
State-of-the-art, digitally generated graphic images and tricky visual puns accompany the complete text of the cult classic story of one young man's zany adventures in outer space.
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Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine ( 1992)
The best-selling science fiction humorist Douglas Adams accompanies a world-class zoologist on an around-the-world trip in search of exotic, endangered creatures. By turns hilarious and poignant, this is a treat for Adams fans and anyone who cares about Earth's wildlife.
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Life, The Universe And Everything by Douglas Adams ( 1995) |
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Life, the Universe And Everything by Douglas Adams ( 2006) |
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Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams ( 2005)
This international bestseller is the third installment (of five) in the zany space opera known as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent have been stranded for five years on prehistoric Earth. They escape from this predicament via a Chesterfield sofa and arrive at a cricket match, where they are immediately faced with their next challenge: preventing the release of an imprisoned race of xenophobic aliens bent on exterminating all other life forms in the universe. Fans of the BBC TV show DOCTOR WHO will be interested to note that the novel is a reworked treatment for a proposed film based on the series. And more detail-oriented types may want to know that the American version of the book has some additional text concerning the galactic rudeness of the word Belgium, which allows Belgium to be used throughout as profanity instead of a four-letter word beginning with F that's used in the British edition.
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Life, the Universe and Everything/Audio Cassette by Douglas Adams ( 1992)
Arthur Dent and Ford Perfect learn why Earth has been shunned by the rest of the Galaxy, receive a visit from Wowbagger the Infinitely prolonged, and journey through space and time.
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Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams ( )
The unhappy inhabitants of 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 white killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of total annihilation.
They are Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered space and time traveler, who tries to learn how to fly by throwing himself at the ground and missing; Ford Prefect, his best friend, who decides to go insane to see if he likes it; Slartibartfast, the indomitable vice president of the Campaign for Real Time, who travels in a ship powered by irrational behavior; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-head honcho of the Universe; and Trillian, the sexy space cadet who is torn between a persistent Thunder God and a very depressed Beeblebrox. How will it all end? Will it end? Only this stalwart crew knows as they try to avert "universal" Armageddon and save life as we know it, and don't know it! |
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The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams ( 2009) |
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The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams ( 1991)
Sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. A passenger check-in desk at London's Heathrow Airport goes up in a ball of flame and Dirk Gently becomes very inquisitive.
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The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul & Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams ( 1999)
Private Detective Dirk Gently's search for a missing cat leads him to both a ghost and a time-traveller, and his investigation of an exploding desk at Heathrow Airport uncovers cosmic forces.
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More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams ( 1990)
Contains the unabridged texts of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," "Life, the Universe, and Everything," "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish," and "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe"
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Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams ( 1993)
Douglas Adams is back with the amazing, logic-defying, but-why-stop-now fifth novel in the Hitchhiker Trilogy. Here is the epic story of Random, who sets out on a transgalactic quest to find the planet of her ancestors. Line drawings.
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The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts by Douglas Adams, Geoffrey Perkins ( 1995)
The original, complete, and totally unedited scripts from the now famous BBC "Hitchhiker Radio Show." Join Douglas Adams on an epic adventure in time and space--including some helpful advice on how to see the universe for less than 30 Altairian dollars a day.
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The Prostitute in the Family Tree Discovering Humor and Irony in the Bible by Douglas Adams ( 1997)
Douglas Adams thinks the Bible is very funny, but that we don't often get it. By missing humor and irony in biblical passages, readers miss more than an opportunity for laughter. They often miss the passage's intended meanings.
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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams ( 2006) |
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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams ( )
Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons is a curious time to have a craving for tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his curious comrades in arms as they hurtle across space powered by pure improbability, and desperately in search of a place to eat.
Among Arthur's motley shipmates are Ford Prefect, a longtime friend and expert contributor to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the three-armed, two-headed ex-president of the galaxy; Tricia McMillan, a fellow Earth refugee who's gone native (her name is Trillian now); and Marvin, the moody android who suffers nothing and no one very gladly. Their destination? The ultimate hot spot for an evening of apocalyptic entertainment and fine dining, where the food (literally) speaks for itself. Will they make it? The answer: hard to say. But bear in mind that the Hitchhiker's Guide deleted the term "Future Perfect" from its pages, since it was discovered not to be! |
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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams ( 2001) |
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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams ( 2005)
As this popularly acclaimed, internationally best-selling sequel to THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY opens, the hapless Earthman Arthur Dent has just escaped certain death on the planet Magrathea. He now faces certain death from a Vogon spaceship, unless the ghost of ex-Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox's grandfather can lend a spectral helping hand. As he must, because Zaphod must fulfill a mission he's totally forgotten about--to search for the man who truly rules the universe. Naturally, there's time for everyone to stop for a bite to eat at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe first....In general, these first two books--THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY and this volume--are considered to be the definitive books in the HITCHHIKER'S series. Part of the reason why this is so may be because these first two books follow to a significant degree the plotline of the BBC radio series that inspired them, although the events are somewhat rearranged and some additional incidents added. The subsequent books take the story in an entirely new direction, far past the timeline of the radio series.
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The Salmon of Doubt Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams ( 2003)
On Friday, May 11, 2001, the world mourned the untimely passing of Douglas Adams, beloved creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, dead of a heart attack at age forty-nine. Thankfully, in addition to a magnificent literary legacy—which includes seven novels and three co-authored works of nonfiction—Douglas left us something more. The book you are about to enjoy was rescued from his four computers, culled from an archive of chapters from his long-awaited novel-in-progress, as well as his short stories, speeches, articles, interviews, and letters.
In a way that none of his previous books could, The Salmon of Doubt provides the full, dazzling, laugh-out-loud experience of a journey through the galaxy as perceived by Douglas Adams. From a boy’s first love letter (to his favorite science fiction magazine) to the distinction of possessing a nose of heroic proportions; from climbing Kilimanjaro in a rhino costume to explaining why Americans can’t make a decent cup of tea; from lyrical tributes to the sublime pleasures found in music by Procol Harum, the Beatles, and Bach to the follies of his hopeless infatuation with technology; from fantastic, fictional forays into the private life of Genghis Khan to extended visits with Dirk Gently and Zaphod Beeblebrox: this is the vista from the elevated perch of one of the tallest, funniest, most brilliant, and most penetrating social critics and thinkers of our time. Welcome to the wonderful mind of Douglas Adams. From the Hardcover edition. |
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So Long And Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams ( 2001) |
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So Long and Thanks for the Fish by Douglas Adams ( 1986) |
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So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams ( 1999)
The fourth outrageous adventure in the bestselling "Hitchhiker's" series. Back on Earth with nothing more to show for his long, strange travel through time and space than a ratty towel and a plastic shopping bag, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription, the mysterious disappearance of Earth's dolphins, and the discovery of his battered copy of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" all conspire to give Arthur the sneaking suspicion that something otherworldly is indeed going on.
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So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams ( 2006) |
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Starship Titanic by Terry Jones, Douglas Adams ( 1998)
Arguably the greatest collaboration in the whole history of comedy!Bestselling author Douglas Adams wrote the storyline based on his CD-ROM game of the same name (as this novel, not as him, obviously).Terry Jones of Monty Python wrote the book. In the nude! Parents be warned! Most of the words in this book were written by a naked man!So. You want to argue with that? All right, we give in.Starship Titanic is the greatest, most fabulous, most technologically advanced interstellar cruise line ever built. It is like a cross between the Queen Mary, the Chrysler Building, Tutankhamens tomb, and Venice. Furthermore, it cannot possibly go wrong. . . .Sadly, however, seconds after its launch it undergoes SMEF, or Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. And disappears. Except, everything's got to be somewhere. Coming home that night, on a little known planet called Earth, Dan and Lucy Gibson find something very large and very, very shiny sticking into their house. . .
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Starship Titanic The Official Strategy Guide by Douglas Adams ( 1998)
NO OTHER GUIDE HAS:SOLUTIONS so complete we despise you for needing to use them!HINTS so subtle youve got to be a bit of a smart-ass to understand them!DESCRIPTIONS of natural language parsing engines and object-oriented programming by people who ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT THEYRE TALKING ABOUT!UNCENSORED PHOTOS of DOUGLAS ADAMS in the VERY ACT OF WRITING!ILLUSTRATIONS from people who've won REAL OSCARS!INSIGHTS into the SECRET LIVES of PROGRAMMERS!NO-HOLDS-BARRED back stories to all the CHARACTERS!
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Two Complete Novels Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency/the Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams ( 1995)
Following themes of zany space exploration, time travel, and mystery, two novels that examine the dimensions of the universe and the human soul feature Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
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The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams ( 2005)
First, they try to knock his house down. Then, they blow up his planet. Can Arthur Dent's day get any worse? Well, yes. Join the dressing gown-clad Earthman and his companions--Betelgeusian reporter Ford Prefect; the former President of the Galaxy, two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox; ex-astrophysicist Trillian; and Marvin the Paranoid Android--in a wild and zany journey in time and space, with stops to visit the planet-building planet of Magrathea, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the man who secretly rules the galaxy, and the site of God's last message to His creation. Originally conceived as a radio program for the BBC, the internationally bestselling Hitchhiker's series also spawned a TV series, a 2005 film, a text-based computer game, and a popular website. This omnibus contains all five books in the cult classic science fiction series (THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY; THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE; LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING; SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH; and MOSTLY HARMLESS), plus the short story "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe."
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The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ( 2002)
In this collection of novels, Arthur Dent is introduced to the galaxy at large when he is rescued by an alien friend seconds before Earth's destruction, and embarks on a series of amazing adventures with his new companion.
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The Universe of Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/the Restaurant at the End of the Universe/Life, the Universe and Everything/So L by Douglas Adams ( 1989)
Dirk Gently attempts to solve the mysteries of the universe, with help from his sidekick, Richard.
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Vida, El Universo Y Todo Lo Demas/ Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams ( 2005)
Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect learn why Earth has been shunned by the rest of the Galaxy and journey through space and time.
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