Don't Panic

by Neil Gaiman

  Which was why the sales kit that went out to Pan Books’ sales representatives in late Summer 1984 began as follows:

  The great test of a promotion person is to devise a promotion for a book about which one knows absolutely zilch.

  The same goes for a representative selling such a book. At the time of writing Douglas Adams is holed up somewhere, I believe, in the West Country, incommunicado, as they say.

  Prayers are held every morning in the editorial department along the lines of, “Please God grant to Douglas Adams the gift of inspiration along with his daily bread so that he can deliver the manuscript in time for us to make publication date.” We just hope we have a fund of goodwill up there! But of course you know that all the Hitch Hiker promotions have been devised without sight of a book. That’s what makes working on them such fun…

  In the sales pack were such assorted goodies as badges, and posters showing birds under glass bowls. Also there was Douglas’s promo piece for the book, a plot description that began:

  EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE FIRST THREE BOOKS BUT NEVER THOUGHT TO ASK.

  It deals with that most terrible and harrowing experience in life—trying to remember an address which somebody told you but you didn’t write down.

  At the end of Life, the Universe and Everything Arthur Dent was told where to find God’s Final Message to His Creation, only he can’t remember where it was. He tries everything he can to jog his memory, meditation, mind reading, hitting himself about the head with blunt objects—he even tries to combine them all by playing mixed doubles tennis—but none of it works.

  Still it plagues him—God’s Final Message to His Creation. He can’t help feel[ing] it must be important.

  In desperation he decides to throw himself off a cliff in the hope that his life will then flash before his eyes on the way down. As to what will happen when he reaches the bottom—he decides he’ll meet that challenge when he gets to it. He lost all faith in the straightforward operation of cause and effect the day he got up intending to catch up on some reading and brush the dog and ended up on prehistoric Earth with a man from Betelgeuse and a spaceship-load of alien telephone sanitisers.

  He picks a nice day, a nice cliff, and does it… he falls… he remembers…

  He remembers an awful lot of other things besides, which throws him into such a state of shock that he misses the ground completely and ends up in the top of a tree with scratches, bruises, and a lot to think about. All his past life on Earth takes on a completely new meaning…

  Now he really wants to find God’s Final Message to His Creation, and knows where to look.

  Arthur Dent is going home.

  Although a fascinating book outline, this is light-years away from the book that eventually came out.

  Before starting the book, Douglas had received a lecture from Sonny Mehta, Pan’s Editorial Director, and Ed Victor, his agent, on getting the book in on time.

  “To begin with, I had been slightly unwilling to write another Hitchhiker’s book. Then I went off to do long promotional tours, and got very involved in the writing of the computer game, which took a lot of time. And then I had to write another version of the screenplay.

  “So I kept putting off the book over and over, taking on all these other things I would do, and then ended up having to write the book in a terribly short space of time, still not absolutely certain that I wanted to do it.”

  In order to make the deadline (remember, the presses had been booked to print the book, the quantities—even the reprint times—had been worked out in advance) the book had to be written in less than three weeks.

  The last time a situation like this had occurred was with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, when Douglas had wound up in monastic seclusion, hidden away from the world and doing nothing but writing for a month.

  Once more the job of finding Douglas somewhere to write fell to Jacqueline Graham of Pan, who recalls, “I’d just got back from maternity leave and I was asked by Sonny Mehta to find a suite in a central London hotel—near to Hyde Park, so Douglas could go jogging—with air conditioning, and a Betamax video for Sonny. I rang around, and Sonny chose the Berkeley. They had a very posh suite, with a small bedroom and a big bedroom—Sonny gave Douglas the small bedroom, as, he said, Douglas wouldn’t be needing it very much.”

  Sweating over his typewriter, Douglas sat and wrote. He was allowed out twice a day for exercise. Sonny Mehta sat next door, watching videos and acting as on-the-spot editor.

  At this time, Douglas sent another synopsis of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish to Pan and his American publishers. While this bore rather more relation to the book that eventually came out than the original synopsis, it concluded:

  Along the way they meet some new people and some old, including:

  Wonko the Sane and his remarkable Asylum.

  Noslenda Bivenda, the Galaxy’s greatest Clam opener.

  An Ultra-Walrus with an embarrassing past.

  A lorry driver who has the most extraordinary reason for complaining about the weather.

  Marvin the Paranoid Android, for whom even the good times are bad.

  Zaphod Beeblebrox, ex-Galactic President with two heads, at least one of which is saner than an emu on acid.

  And introducing…

  A Leg.

  It may be observed that not all of these characters made it into the book as it eventually came out.

  Douglas explained: “The Leg was something I rather liked actually, and it came curiously enough, out of the film script. But as soon as I took it out of context it fell apart, and I couldn’t get it to work elsewhere.

  “Do you remember the robot who had the fight with Marvin? I never had any clear visual description of the battletank, but it was going to appear in the movie at one point, and I wanted to give it lots of mechanical legs. The idea was that it was like a dinosaur—a dinosaur has one subsidiary brain to control its tail, and I thought this machine would have lots of subsidiary brains to deal with different bits of it. After the thing smashed itself to bits, the one thing that would be left with some kind of independent existence would be one of its legs.

  “It was actually one of my favourite new things that I came up with in the film script. Of course, we don’t know what will happen with the film script, but that bit will almost certainly never make it into the completed version, not because it’s not good, but because it’s completely detachable from the rest and because the script’s too long.

  “The Galaxy’s greatest Clam opener… I don’t remember very much about that. It had something to do with a seafood restaurant in Paris. There was someone I had in mind for the character: he was the only person who could open this particular type of clam, which was one of the great gastronomic experiences. I’m not sure why it was one of the great gastronomic experiences, but I think it was because whenever you ate it you got a flicker of memory all the way back to the primeval ooze. It might have had some plot function, but I can’t remember what, and anyway, it didn’t make it beyond the very early version.

  “The Ultra-Walrus with the embarrassing past… well, this is very self-indulgent, I’m afraid. I got the idea after watching Let it Be and feeling very sorry for this obviously very embarrassed policeman having to go and make the Beatles stop playing. I mean knowing this is actually an extraordinary moment: the Beatles are playing live on a rooftop in London. And this poor policeman’s job was to go and tell them to stop it. I thought that somebody would be so mortified that they would do anything not to be in this embarrassing position.

  “So I thought of someone who was placed in such an embarrassing position, one he hated so much, that he would just want not to be there. The thought goes through his mind, ‘I would do anything rather than do what I now have to do,’ whereupon someone appears and says to him, ‘Look, you have the option to either go and do this thing you don’t want to do… or I can offer you a life on a completely different planet.’ So he opts to go and be this strang
e sort of walrus creature. And it’s a rather dull life as a walrus, but on the other hand he’s perpetually grateful for the fact that he wasn’t in this incredibly embarrassing position, and had ended up a walrus.

  “The reason I made it a walrus, was… well, first of all I didn’t know what the alternative life would be, and then when Gary Day Ellison, who designed the cover, showed me that lenticular picture I thought, ‘I might as well make him a walrus.’ It’s because Gary always designs a cover that can clearly not have any function in relation to the book, and if I still had a chance I’d always try and work it in somehow. Not that it ever actually happened that way.”

  In November the book was released in England and America. The English cover was all black, with a lenticular picture of a dinosaur that changed into a walrus (and vice versa) stuck on the front. (There are no dinosaurs or walruses in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.) The American cover, marginally more logically, showed some leaping dolphins. (There are no dolphins in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, but there are more dolphins than there are walruses or dinosaurs.)

  It was in October that the world’s most expensive Hitchhiker’s book was sold. At a dinner-party at Douglas’s, British inventorial entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair spotted a pre-publication copy of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and asked if he could have it. Douglas refused, pointing out it was the only copy he had, whereupon Sir Clive whipped out his cheque book, and offered Douglas £1,000 for the charity of his choice, providing he could have the book.

  Douglas had him make the cheque out to Greenpeace.

  However, Douglas’s hesitation to give the book away may have had less to do with the fact it was his only copy, and more to do with the fact that it was not a book with which he was altogether happy.

  So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is very different from the other Hitchhiker’s books, and the critical reaction to it was mixed. For many of the fans it was a disappointment: they wanted more Zaphod, more Marvin, more space; they wanted Arthur to make it, with Trillian; they wanted to find out how the Agrajag problem resolved and why Arthur Dent was the most important being in the universe (and even funnier than the frogs); they wanted towel jokes and extracts from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  What they got was a love story. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is no longer science fiction, and, for much of the book, it is no longer humour (although it is often funny, and has certain science fiction elements in it). It was not the book the fans were expecting, and many of them were disappointed.

  Many of the mainstream critics, however, preferred it, finding the gentler pace and the relatively down-to-earth tone easier to cope with, and coming up with such quotes as “Fish is the best evidence yet that Adams is not simply a funny sci-fi writer but a bomb-heaving satirist” (Time); others commented that it read as if it had been written in a hotel room in two weeks, with such comments as “a work in which bits and pieces of different sketches orbit around a non-existent plot” (The Times). So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish went on to sell as well as any of the other books, and won the City Limits ‘best book’ award for 1985 (voted on by the readership of the London listings magazine).

  Talking to Adams about the book, one would find a mix of emotions: relief and slight embarrassment that it sold as well as it did, added to the feeling that he had ‘used up a life’ with the book.

  Why weren’t the expected characters in the book? “Partly because they didn’t fit, and partly because I didn’t want to do them. It was like a chore—people were saying, ‘Let’s have a Zaphod bit,’ and I didn’t feel like doing a Zaphod bit!”

  This attitude of “I am not going to buckle down to the wishes of the fans” comes across in the book, to its detriment, most obviously in Chapter 25, where, having asked, somewhat rhetorically, whether or not Arthur Dent ever indulges the pleasures of the senses other than flying and drinking tea, Douglas comments, “Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.” It is patronising and unfair. And undoubtedly would have been cut from a later draft of the manuscript had there been one.

  Douglas continued, “You see, I didn’t even want to do Marvin, but then what happened was that I finally had an idea of something I wanted to do that would have to involve Marvin, which is the way it should be. I didn’t have that with Zaphod, or I couldn’t. But when I needed the extra element for that scene it looked like a job for Marvin.

  “It’s very strange, that walking across the desert scene, when they find the Message*. I felt very haunted by that when I wrote it—it’s not particularly funny or anything, but curiously enough I was very proud of it. I actually felt very sorry for, and sympathetic with Marvin in that I felt close to the character in a way that sometimes I hadn’t because I was just doing it out of duty.

  “But yes, the book is lighter weight than the others. In a sense I came close to owning up to that on the last page.”

  It was hard not to see parallels between Arthur Dent’s return from space—which involves him telling everybody he’s just returned from California—and Douglas Adams’s return from a not altogether happy year in Los Angeles to the safer environs of Islington. And while he maintains that Fenchurch is no relation to Jane (Adams’s then fiancée and later wife), Fenchurch being based more on his memories of adolescent love, he admits there is an element of this in the book.

  “It wouldn’t be fanciful to say that there is an echo of my return from LA in there. But I do think that one problem with the book, and there are many, is that up to that point I had been writing pure fantasy, which I’d had to do as I’d destroyed the Earth in the first reel, so to speak. So my job was to make the fantastical and dreamlike appear to be as real and solid as possible, that was always the crux of Hitchhiker’s.

  “Whereas in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish a curious kind of thing happened. I got back to the everyday and somehow for the first time it seemed to be unreal and dreamlike. It was rather in reverse. I think it’s largely because I thought I’d get rid of this problem of not having the Earth there to relate to by just bringing it back, and I suppose a part of me knew, a part of me said that you can’t really do that. So therefore it wasn’t the real Earth, and therefore it was bound to become unreal and dreamlike, and that was really a problem with the book.

  “Also, you see, the character of Arthur Dent has undergone a fundamental change by then, because up to that point he has been our representative in a fantastical world, he has been Everyman, the person we can relate to, and through whose eyes we have seen the strange things that have happened. Now suddenly it’s been turned around, and we have a real everyday Earth, and this character who, far from being our representative, has just spent the last eight years of his life alternately living in a cave on prehistoric Earth or being flung around the galaxy.

  “So he is no longer someone through whose eyes we can see things. The whole thing has turned upside down, and I don’t think I had got to grips with that until I was too far committed.

  “That’s why I am starting afresh now, because I feel all the lines have gotten rather too tangled.”

  Whatever happened to the ‘jumping off a cliff’ plot? “It was a structural idea I came up with which I still think is neat as a structure, but doesn’t work as a book. The book would start with him leaping off a cliff, with the idea that just before you die your life flashes before you. There was something he wanted to remember, and he’d deal with what happened when he got to the bottom when he got there. So the entire book would be a flashback which would come from what he thought and he remembered as he fell down the cliff. I decided after hacking away at that for a while that it’s a short story structure, but not a novel structure. Some people might argue (and with, I think, a certain amount of justice) that I didn’t achieve a novel structure in the end, so what was I making a fuss about?

  “But I suppose one reason why a lot of that stuff went, why it never m
aterialised, was I had the feeling during that period of the whole world looking over my shoulder while I was writing. Every time someone would write to me and say, ‘What are you going to do with this character?’ or, ‘Why don’t you do this to resolve this situation?’ then you instantly shy away from it and think it’s no longer yours to control.

  “It seemed to me like there was too much to tie up and mop up in Hitchhiker’s, so that trying to write it like that would just be a continual task of knotting up the loose ends, when in fact it might be better just to think of something completely different to do…”

  So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was to be the last word on Hitchhiker’s. At least in novel form; there were still to be the computer games, the film, the towel, possibly more television and more radio—even this book. But in novel form the story had gone as far as it was going to go.

  At least for then.

  Douglas said so.

  * This passage was read out at Douglas’s memorial service.

  20

  DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR TOWEL IS?

  A towel, as explained at length in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is a jolly useful thing.

  A towel is also a fairly obvious piece of merchandising.

  While the merchandising properties of a number of artefacts mentioned in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy have obvious commercial potential—Joo Janta sunglasses, for example, which turn black when danger threatens, or Disaster Area records, or even the Guide itself—technology has not yet reached the point where these things could be manufactured in bulk nor, indeed, at all.

  Not so with towels.

  At one point Marks and Spencer* considered marketing the towel of the book; however, nothing came of this.

  In 1984 Douglas had lunch with Eugene Beer, of Birmingham publicists Beer-Davies. (Eugene was handling the publicity for the Hitchhiker’s computer game.) During the course of this lunch, Douglas mentioned the abortive Marks and Spencer towel project. Eugene immediately saw the potential in real, authorised, moneymaking towels, with the relevant page of Hitchhiker’s emblazoned on it. He began marketing them, taking out an advert in Private Eye, and sending complimentary towels all over the place.