I’ve been a fan of Douglas Adams since I was in junior high. A friend of mine thrust a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at me and said, “If you like Monty Python, you’ll probably like this.”

He was right. I devoured the whole four-part trilogy (as it was then) and found that Douglas Adams was one of those rare authors who could make me laugh my head off — and make me think.

I came back to his writing over the years, somehow managing to read his two Dirk Gently novels out of order, but understand them just fine nevertheless, and later howling over nearly every entry in The Meaning of Liff. I’ve recently been re-reading his work, and finding that Douglas Adams still makes me laugh, and think, and look at things in a new way.

A few years ago I wrote a guest post at the now-inactive Insatiable Booksluts blog called Things I Wish I Could Say to Roger Zelazny. I’ve posted it locally here. I thought it might be worth doing another one like that, so Douglas Adams is the lucky recipient.

Should I say something pithy about that, as I reach the age in real life (mid-40s, gazing into the yawning abyss of “late 40s”) that Adams bowed out at? I mean, this was a man who dared to posit an intergalactic bestseller list with titles such as Where God Went Wrong, More of God’s Greatest Mistakes, and Who is This God Person Anyway? No, I probably shouldn’t. Really shouldn’t. Definitely should not. (But then, crap, I just implied dying in mid-life of a heart attack was “bowing out.” Shit.)

Anyway.

For those who don’t know, Douglas Adams was a British author born in in 1952. In addition to writing for Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the mid-1970s, he wrote three episodes of Dr. Who (during the Tom Baker years). What he became known for was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It started as a BBC radio drama in 1978, and was published as a novel in 1979. I first read the series in 1986-1987, when it was still “a trilogy in four parts” consisting of the eponymous first novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982) and So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish (1984.) The final book, Mostly Harmless, was published in 1992.

Adams also wrote two novels about an unusual private eye, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul (1988). (If you’re a fan of the recent TV adaptation starring Samuel Barnett and Elijah Wood (as I am), it may be either a disappointment or a relief that it has almost nothing to do with the books. It’s weird in its own way.)

Anyway. Here are a few things I wish I could say to Douglas Adams, if I could.

You created one of the most enduring books never to have existed.

People can have their Necronomicon, their Red Book of Westmarch, even their Aristotle’s Treatise on Comedy. I keep returning, in my mind, to the one that gives you solid, on-the-ground information that is mostly reliable about where you are and what to do while you’re there.

While I lived in Iceland and spent a lot of time travelling in Europe and Canada, I realized I needed a book like this too, so I started working on my own Hitchhiker’s Guide. A nice turnabout, since your original inspiration for HHGG was an actual guide for hitchhikers. I can’t say my own little book was of much use to anyone but myself, and there are many blank pages in it, but it proved pretty handy. Even though I only literally hitchhiked once, in Denmark, and that was mostly by accident.

I have some more words to add to The Meaning of Liff.

While living in Iceland, I brought along my copy of The Meaning of Liff because it amused me to have a non-essential dictionary with me, in addition to the very necessary Icelandic and Icelandic-English and English-Icelandic ones, costing hundreds of dollars, that I needed for my studies. (While I think everyone experiences a feeling like “ely,” I sadly have not yet had occasion to “pabbay.”) I didn’t realize the other foreigners I lived with in the dormitory would also find The Meaning of Liff just as hilarious.  A few of us were moved to find new meanings for Icelandic place names, for phenomena we felt were lacking the proper terms.  I humbly submit a few of them here:

• Dunstable (adjective): Descriptive of someone who is easy to deceive by feigning ignorance.
• Firenze (noun): The experience of having a carbonated drink go up your nose as a result of laughing or hearing something unexpected.
• Grindavík (noun): The fifty-year-old Icelandic woman who sits behind you in the theatre, hacking, snorting, and spluttering all the way through what would otherwise be a deeply moving play.
• Heimaey (noun): The traditional cry of the Icelandic egg-collector, when, having slipped off the cliff, falls the length of his rope and is suddenly brought up short.
• Hekla (noun): One who always has an opinion on everything and is always convinced it is more right than anyone else’s.
• Selfoss (adjective): Descriptive of one who has lived in Iceland all through the winter as a foreigner who resents the coming influx of inferiorily-adapted tourists.
• Snæfellsnes (noun): The sensation of desperately needing to sneeze but not being able to because there are no bright lights around.
• Uppsala (noun): When something that is on sale has a higher price than it does normally.

 

There is something striking about the solitary nature of your protagonists.

I don’t know whether it has to do with their Britishness, or the time in which you wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide and Dirk Gently, or something else, but your main characters don’t have a lot of interpersonal relationships. I never noticed it the first few times I read about Arthur Dent, even though it’s clear as day. Arthur barely has any family to mention, his only friend we meet is Ford Prefect, who is not human at all, and shortly after introducing these characters, Arthur loses his entire species when the Vogons destroy the Earth to make way for their interplanetary bypass. Despite Arthur joining up with Zaphod, Trillian and depressed android Marvin, they’re still not much of a found family, as it were.  I think that’s part of why So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish always struck me as different. It’s one of the rare books in which Arthur attempts to establish old friendships, and establish a new relationship, falling in love while he’s at it.

And as for Dirk Gently — well. In the books, he’s a misanthrope who cares about helping people, but we don’t get to know much about where he comes from and who his friends are.

The funny thing is, most of these characters seem just fine being largely strangers to each other while they have bizarre adventures together. Part of me wishes there was more depth there.  But part of me thinks, maybe they’re all just introverts. Even Zaphod, despite his proclivities, doesn’t share much of himself with anyone; not even, thanks to some brain surgery, with himself. And that’s fine. Besides, one of the overarching themes of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is humankind’s irrelevance in a huge, absurd universe, but that things can sometimes work out in an absurd way. I think it’s reassuring that we can live in such a place and still laugh about it.

My God, I worried about turning 42 sometimes.

Not because I was afraid of getting “old” (well, as a teenager that did seem like it would feel “old” when I got to it), but because, well: 42. If it was the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything, then surely it was a fateful number.  In my teens I latched on to the idea that maybe I’d die when I reached that age.

Fortunately I did not.

We live in an increasingly horrifying and surreal world.

All right, fine, maybe I am just getting old. But here in the future we’re so primitive that we now think having a telephone that also takes your picture is a pretty neat idea. I can only imagine what you might make of that, and I wish sometimes you could be here to see how things are turning out. I wonder what you’d have to say about it.

I aspire to be a frood who generally knows where his towel is.

Metaphorically, of course. But when I learned a few years ago I could be one literally as well, with a “42” towel from ThinkGeek, I couldn’t resist. I’ve never had to cast it over the eyes of a Giant Bugblatter Beast of Traal to make good an escape, or soak it with nutrients to save as emergency rations, but it’s good to have on hand.

Of course, I realize knowing where your towel is is an ongoing process. I have the strong sense that the people you wrote about (and, perhaps, for) were folks who had just lost their towel and were in the often maddening process of finding it. Ford, who literally knew where his towel was, may have overconfidently assumed he knew where it was metaphorically, as well — and I’m not sure he did.

May we all have the honesty of Ford, the doubt of Arthur, and the gestalt of Dirk. And, of course, wrestle from time to time with the true meaning of Liff.

*  *  *

Any fans out there of Douglas Adams? What would you say to him, if you could? Or, conversely, let me know in the comments what author you wish you could have had the opportunity to talk to!

 

P.S. For the curious: the “42” towel from ThinkGeek is no longer available, sadly. However, you can get a cover for your e-reader or tablet that looks like the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (from the movie) from Geekify. And there are a number of Milliways/Restaurant at the End of the Universe products out there; I used a sticker designed by tillieke, available from TeePublic, on my thermos.