Don't Panic

Neil Gaiman writing about Douglas Adams is sort of a perfect fit for my tastes, and I had a good time reading about how H2G2 in all its many and varied forms came to be. It's strange to look at what Adams and the world thought of his many creations in 1988, even before Mostly Harmless came out and long before we lost him so tragically. This is a window into the entertainment, technology, and process of the time with a very young Gaiman impersonating Adams' voice as he is still finding his own. A good read for any H2G2 fans though probably not much new information.

A moving tribute. It's a biography with two subjects, Adams as well as the Hitchhiker's canon, both much larger than life; Gaiman treats both with respect (but not adulation) and with warm humor. The other authors, well, they try. (The book is actually a 2009 update of a 1987 work, and it shows: the latter half feels hastily put together, its tone more checklist than paean).

Despite the wait-what-happened discomfort in the second half, it's a very good book: informative, caring, with insights and context that I, a lower-case-eff fan, appreciate enough to make me want to reread the “trilogy”; and poignant enough to make me ache again over his death.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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The idea in question bubbled into Douglas Adams's mind quite spontaneously, in a field in Innsbruck. He later denied any personal memory of it having happened. But it's the story he told, and, if there can be such a thing, it's the beginning. If you have to take a flag reading THE STORY STARTS HERE and stick it into the story, then there is no other place to put it.

It was 1971, and the eighteen year-old Douglas Adams was hitch-hiking his way across Europe with a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europethat he had stolen (he hadn't bothered ‘borrowing' a copy of Europe on $5 a Day, he didn't have that kind of money).

He was drunk. He was poverty-stricken. He was too poor to afford a room at a youth hostel (the entire story is told at length in his introduction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts in England, and The Hitchhiker's Trilogy in the US) and he wound up, at the end of a harrowing day, flat on his back in a field in Innsbruck, staring up at the stars. “Somebody,” he thought, “somebody really ought to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.”

He forgot about the idea shortly thereafter.

Five years later, while he was struggling to think of a legitimate reason for an alien to visit Earth, the phrase returned to him. The rest is history, and will be told in this book.

Don't Panic

Hitchhiker's

The Hitchhiker's Trilogy

This is not a complaint

The Hitchhiker's Trilogy

The Hitchhiker's Trilogy

Dirk Gently

The Last Chance to See

Don't Panic