Don't Panic

by Neil Gaiman

  The book was published as ‘Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic—a novel by Terry Jones’** and was frankly bedeviled with problems. The formatting of Douglas’s introduction was all over the shop—something which the harried editors at Pan either didn’t notice or spotted but assumed was deliberate. Despite a wide-ranging US promotional tour, the UK edition was delayed and given very little publicity. In fact the delay was because of the wide-ranging US tour, with Pan executives chasing after Terry and Douglas to get back the corrected proof.

  Neither the novel nor the game received particularly laudatory reviews—although the game did win at least one award—and since neither was really by Douglas, we shall skip over them here and move on to TDV’s second creation, h2g2.com.

  I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course—the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.

  — Douglas Adams, introduction to h2g2.com.

  For years, Douglas had talked about marketing some sort of search engine called ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet’, and in April 1999—live on a special edition of Tomorrow’s World—he finally achieved this goal, although by then the name had been sensibly shortened to h2g2. In respect of this, TDV changed its name to h2g2 Ltd.

  But this wasn’t just a search engine for the web. Instead, it was an attempt to create a global repository of knowledge—serious, irreverent, essential or arcane—which could be read by anyone and—more importantly—written by anyone. It was a sort of microcosm of the Internet, on the Internet—a situation strangely redolent of Zarniwoop’s creation of an artificial universe in his office in the second radio series of Hitchhiker’s.

  Anyone (anyone with net access, at least) could sign up to become a field researcher for the Guide and submit entries on any subject. An army of voluntary editors ensured that material was properly spelt and not libelous, obscene, offensive, advertising or really, really lame jokes. A small team was employed to head the whole operation—and for the first time ever a select few people were able to genuinely cite their profession as ‘writer for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’.

  h2g2.com’s launch generated great interest, with more than three thousand researchers registering themselves within twenty-four hours of the Tomorrow’s World programme. Douglas worked tirelessly to promote the site and its “global Internet community” and there was even a deal signed to allow access via WAP mobile phones. By December 1999, with exactly two weeks left to go in the twentieth century (Douglas poured great scorn on millennial pedants), a constantly updated databank of information and opinion from thousands of roving researchers was available anywhere in the world via a small, handheld device. Okay, so nobody was selling mobile phones with the words ‘Don’t Panic’ in large, friendly letters on the front, but other than that it was a remarkable thing to happen—especially to a writer who had always been at pains to point out that his science fiction stories were in no way meant to be predictive.

  The only fly in the ointment was that, like most dot.com companies, it was not entirely clear where h2g2 Ltd was actually making money. It was notable that the only advertising banners on the h2g2.com site were for Starship Titanic, which was not exactly a cash-cow, so where was the revenue coming from? In December 2000, the first crack appeared when the merchandise page of the site announced: “Having survived the Christmas rush, the h2g2 Shop will now be temporarily closed while we restructure the e-commerce side of the business. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.”

  h2g2.com closed on 29th January 2001, another victim of the dot.com boom.

  Or was it? On 21st February it was announced that h2g2 would be re-opening—as part of the BBC. And indeed, on 12th March, the whole affair went back online at www.bbc.co.uk, where it has remained happily ever since, gradually increasing in size. Many observers noted the irony of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy coming home, twenty-three years later, to the BBC where it had all started at 10.30 pm on that Wednesday night.

  The launch of www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2 represents a significant step towards ‘engaging with’ rather than ‘broadcasting to’ our consumers. As a key part of our public service offering in building communities on the web we want to ensure that we will offer something of interest to the diverse tastes of the UK’s online community.

  — Ashley Highfield, Director of New Media, BBC.

  The BBC is where Hitchhiker’s first started, and I am delighted—in the words of the hot new pop combo we’ve been hearing so much about recently—to get back to where I once belonged.

  — Douglas Adams, in the same press release.

  * The obvious precedent is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick created the novel and film simultaneously, and neither makes much sense unless one has read/watched the other. Of course, for many people they still don’t make much sense after that.

  * In the game, the player boards the ship—for no very good reason—and has to upgrade him/herself in an attempt to find and defuse the bomb.

  ** In Germany (where it was very successful) and France the book was published as ‘Starship Titanic—a novel by Douglas Adams and Terry Jones’.

  30

  A SORT OF APRÈS-VIE

  “Jesus said, ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ Ford Prefect said, ‘What I need now is a strong drink and a peer group.’”

  — Blessing by the Reverend Anthony Hurst at Douglas Adams’ memorial service.

  Douglas Adams died.

  It was that sudden, that surprising, that much of a “Where did that come from?” slap in the face. One minute he was in California, working on the Hitchhiker’s screenplay, the next he was gone.

  The specific circumstances were that Douglas Adams suffered a fatal heart attack while exercising in his gym in Santa Barbara on 11th May 2001.* But that wasn’t really the point. The point was that one of the most popular, most influential, most important British humorists of the twentieth century, who actually produced books only infrequently, wasn’t going to produce any more. Obituaries and tributes from around the world demonstrated the love that people felt for Douglas and the shock of his sudden passing. Thousands of e-mailed tributes appeared on the douglasadams.com website.

  Douglas’s funeral was held in California, with music from Bach and the Beatles, and readings from Simon Jones, Terry Jones, Michael Nesmith and others. A memorial service was held in London a few months later, attended by many well-known faces from the worlds of publishing, broadcasting, comedy, science and rock music. Speakers included Professor Richard Dawkins, Simon Jones and Ed Victor. The choir sang Bach, and David Gilmour’s solo acoustic rendition of ‘Wish You Were Here’ brought a tear to every eye. But even death couldn’t stop Douglas from breaking new ground in communications technology: this was the first church service broadcast live over the web by the BBC.

  It is unfinished not just in the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man and his work, stops in mid-flow, but in the more important sense that the text up to that point is also unfinished.

  — Douglas Adams, from his introduction to Sunset at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse (Penguin, 2000).

  When Douglas had first mentioned The Salmon of Doubt many years previously, he had described it as a third adventure for Dirk Gently. In later interviews he said that the book was not working as a Dirk Gently novel, and that the Holistic Detective had been removed, leaving a book unconnected with any of his previous works. Still later, he said that he had realised that his ideas for the book actually fitted the Hitchhiker’s universe better, and it had now become a sequel to Mostly Harmless. At the memorial service it was announced that this final, unfinished novel would be published posthumously.

  When Douglas’s various hard drives were examined, several different versions of Salmon were discovered. The version eventually published—the Dirk Gently version—was pieced together
from three separate files by Peter Guzzardi, Douglas’s New York editor. Chapters 2 to 8, 10 and 11 are from one file, with Chapter 1 being an earlier draft and Chapter 9 being Douglas’s last known piece of writing.

  So what is The Salmon of Doubt actually about? Briefly, Dirk is approached by a client who wants him to find the back half of her cat (the front half is doing very well, oblivious to its ignominy or indeed the basic laws of biology and physics). At the same time, Dirk discovers that somebody is paying $5,000 into his bank account every week. Feeling that he should do something to earn this money, he follows somebody at random and finds himself in California, where he meets a rhinoceros named Desmond. The first chapter, entirely unconnected with any of the above, is an enigmatic, unexplained piece about someone called Dave, hang-gliding in California (or Daveland, as it is now called) 1.2 million years after the extinction of the human race.

  Misleadingly described by the press as an unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt is a fragment, a few chapters of working notes. It has some good bits, such as a taxi driver who has never been asked to “Follow that cab!” and has come to the conclusion that his is the cab all the other cabbies are following, and it has some bad bits, notably an unconnected description of a Los Angeles car-jacking, for which Douglas incongruously and unnecessarily lurches into first person narrative, and which would almost certainly never have made it into a finished novel. Probably the most interesting part of the story is in Chapter 9, in which the rhinoceros’s rampage through a party is described from Desmond’s point of view. Douglas had often commented that a rhino’s view of the world is primarily olfactory rather than visual or aural, and this is a bold attempt to describe an event through smell.

  The Salmon of Doubt (the fragment) is of peripheral interest to completists but it is only one of many items in The Salmon of Doubt (the book), which also contains two short stories (‘Young Zaphod Plays It Safe’ and ‘The Private Life of Genghis Khan’), thirty-three non-fiction pieces and two and a half interviews. The non-fiction includes some speculations on the millennium from The Independent on Sunday; the inlay notes to a J. S. Bach CD; and an h2g2.com piece on how to make a cup of tea. Plus some snippets, the sources or precise topics of which, frankly, nobody involved with the book could identify, but which are enjoyable anyway.

  The best piece in the book is ‘Riding the Rays’, a lengthy description of a 1992 trip to Australia to investigate whether the Sub Bug, a one-man underwater motive device, is as good as being dragged through the water by a manta ray. This is non-fiction writing of the highest calibre, on a par with Last Chance to See, combining Douglas’s love of travel, gizmos, scuba diving and nature with a supremely accurate observational eye.

  Douglas’s passing also precipitated a deluge of Hitchhiker’s-related items, starting with tribute programmes on BBC 2 (Omnibus: Douglas Adams—The Man Who Blew Up the Earth) and Radio 4 (So Long and Thanks for All the Fish: A Tribute to Douglas Adams, presented by Geoffrey Perkins). The TV series was released as a lavish two-disc DVD, including The Making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and numerous other clips and oddments. A graphical computer game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide was announced for May 2002, developed by the team behind Starship Titanic (Douglas had been involved in the early stages of the project), but although images from this ‘towel-’em-up’ adventure appeared on the web, it was put on hold in February 2002 and its eventual fate still remains unknown.

  In early 2002 a biography of Douglas Adams was announced, to be written by Hitchhiker’s Guide expert MJ Simpson and published in March 2003 on the 25th anniversary of the radio series’s first broadcast. Because life often laughs at publishers and authors there was also another biography in the works, Wish You Were Here, written by Nick Webb, Douglas’s friend and onetime publisher. The two writers came to a friendly agreement, deciding that the former book would concentrate on Douglas’s work while the latter would concern his life. Wish you Were Here was published in May, two months after Simpson’s book.

  An authorized, feature-length documentary, entitled Life, the Universe and Douglas Adams, was also produced, including interviews with many of Douglas’s friends, relatives and colleagues, and clips from some of the many speeches which he had made to business conferences (he was one of the most popular speakers on the international business circuit and frequently talked on the subjects of ecology and information technology). The documentary was narrated by some guy called Neil Gaiman and was sold directly to consumers on VHS. In 2007 it would be repackaged on DVD and included as a bonus feature alongside a boxed set of newly recorded Hitchhiker’s audio books.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself…

  With the movie version of Hitchhiker’s back in development—a new draft of the screenplay was commissioned from a leading Hollywood scriptwriter in February 2002—and the books, videos and CDs continuing to sell, it was clear that interest in the works of Douglas Adams remained as high as ever. The tragedy being that Douglas himself wasn’t there to enjoy that interest. The world was a poorer place for his passing.

  The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.—from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

  — Posted on the Digital Village website, 11 th May 2001.

  * It was observed by one fan that, with an irony Douglas would have loved, right at the very end he at least knew precisely where his towel was.

  31

  A HELL OF A THING TO CLIMB IN A RHINO COSTUME

  A small bunch of Englishmen out walking miles a day in the midday sun and taking turns at wearing a large rhino costume. Mad dogs have thrown in the towel long ago.

  — Douglas Adams, ‘The Rhino Climb’, Esquire, 1994.

  The Salmon of Doubt reprints an article Douglas wrote for Esquire magazine in 1994, detailing his participation in a sponsored walk on behalf of Save the Rhino International, a charity of which he was a founding patron. Several people took part in the walk, taking it in turns to wear a large rhino suit as they marched toward, then up Mount Kilimanjaro.

  Mount Kilimanjaro is, as Douglas helpfully points out in his article, “one hell of a thing to climb in a Rhino Costume”. It is, as most passing geographers will happily point out, Very Tall Indeed. Douglas didn’t participate in the full trek: “I only spent a week on the walk. I didn’t get to climb Kilimanjaro, though I did get to see it. I was very sorry not to get to go up it, though, having seen it, I have to say that I wasn’t very, very sorry.”

  The whole event raised around £100,000, the money going toward schools in Kenya and a preservation project for the Black Rhinoceros in Tanzania.

  Douglas’s association with Save the Rhino International was to continue after his death. From 2003 onwards, the charity has held an annual series of lectures in his name to raise money and awareness for environmental issues. Richard Dawkins, the celebrated ethologist and evolutionary biologist, was the first guest speaker, presenting a talk entitled ‘Queerer Than We Can Suppose—The Strangeness of Science’.

  Dawkins had been a close friend of Douglas’s for a number of years. He had sent Douglas a fan letter—the only time Dawkins had been moved to do so—after reading (and re-reading) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It transpired that Douglas had greatly enjoyed Dawkins’ book on evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, and the two of them hit it off immediately. In 1992, at his fortieth birthday party, Douglas introduced Dawkins to the actress Lalla Ward who had played the Doctor’s companion, Romana, during Douglas’s time as script editor on the show. Dawkins married her later that year. Nine years later still, he sat at his desk, early on the morning following Douglas’s death, debating whether he could bear to wake her to impart the terrible news.* He spoke at Douglas’s funeral, and would go on to dedicate his groundbreaking book The God Delusion to him, appending the Hitchhiker’s quote, “Isn’t it enough to see that the garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

  Dawkins’ inaugural lecture has since
been followed by a string of celebrated scientists and speakers including Robert Swan, Benedict Allen, Richard Leakey and Douglas’s fellow explorer on the Last Chance to See project, Mark Carwardine.

  The Douglas Adams Memorial Lectures are not the only annual event designed to honour his memory. Shortly after his death the following message appeared on Binary Freedom, an open source web forum:

  Towel Day: A Tribute to Douglas Adams

  Monday May 14, 2001 06:00am PDT

  Douglas Adams will be missed by his fans worldwide. So that all his fans everywhere can pay tribute to this genius, I propose that two weeks after his passing (May 25, 2001) be marked as “Towel Day”. All Douglas Adams fans are encouraged to carry a towel with them for the day.

  So long Douglas, and thanks for all the fish!

  — D. Clyde Williamson, 2001-05-14.

  Towel Day has built steadily, with people all over the world now taking part. In 2009 Douglas’s UK publishers, Pan Macmillan, got involved, co-organizing a competition with Sci-Fi Now magazine to reward the most creative towel-user who posted a photograph of themselves to online image library Flickr. A set of Hitchhiker’s books (reprinted to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first novel) was up for grabs, as well as a Sony eReader for not reading them on.

  The winner, ‘Hitkan’, took the grand prize with his image of a homemade Hitchhiker’s towel, with the judge for Sci-Fi Now commenting that, “It might not be the most stunning entry, but this is a great example of someone displaying their love for the series with all the dedication of a true fan.”

  Well played Hitcan, I say.

  * As related in a piece he wrote for The Guardian shortly after.