Dont Panic
Page 7
way of doing the shows. I can understand people saying, `They
weren't taking it seriously', but in writing it I was taking it
terribly seriously. It's just that the way you make something
work is to do it for real. . . I hate the expression `tongue-in-
cheek'; that means `It's not really funny, but we aren't going to
do it properly'."
Douglas worked on Dr Who for fifteen months. During the
course of this time, he wrote the first Hitchhiker's book, the
second radio series, the theatrical adaptation, produced Black
Cinderella II Goes East, and acted as script editor, writer and
rewrite man for the Doctor. At the end of this time he had, much
to his and no doubt everyone else's surprise, not gone mad,
become prone to fits or to throwing himself off tall buildings. By
this time, Hitchhiker's was enough of a success for Douglas to
give up the only proper job he had held for more than a few
months.
So he did.
9
H2G2
SHORTLY AFTER THE HITCHHIKER'S RADIO SERIES first went on the
air, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd were approached by New
English Library and Pan Books, both prominent English
paperback publishers, about doing a book of the series. After
lunching with both of them, a deal was agreed with Pan; chiefly
because they liked Nick Webb, the editor who approached them.(Nick Webb left Pan almost immediately, embarking on a game of musical publishers that would take him, in traditional publishing fashion, around most major British paperback publishers.)
The book was to start out on an unhappy note. Douglas had
never written a book before, and, feeling nervous about it, had
asked John Lloyd to collaborate on it.
John had agreed. As he tells it: "I'd been working in radio
very hard for five years, and had gotten bored with it - I could
see myself a crusty old radio producer at ninety - so l was very
excited about the prospect of doing this book together. Then one
night we had rather a strange conversation. Douglas said to me,
Why don t you write your own novel?' I said, `But we're writing
this Hitchhiker's book together...', and he said, `I think you
should write your own.'
"The next day I got his letter saying, `I've thought about it
very hard and I want to do the thing on my own. It's a struggle
but I want to do it my own, lonely way.' It was the most fantastic
shock - as if the bottom had dropped out of my whole life.
We'd been trying to write together for so long that when this
letter came I simply could not believe it. Even the fact that he'd
written the letter at all seemed amazing, seeing that we went
down the pub every night, and, as Douglas was at that time a
radio producer in the office next door to me, we worked six
inches away from each other.
"Looking back, I can't see why I reacted like that. It seems
the most natural thing in the world for Douglas to have done it
alone and 1 don't think Hitchhiker's would have been the success
it was if we had written it together. I genuinely feel that.
"But at the time, I was shocked. I didn't speak to Douglas for
two days, and I seriously considered getting a solicitor, and suing
him for breach of contract. Then I met him in town a few days
later. He said, `How's it going?' I said, `You'll be hearing from
my legal representative'.
"Douglas was appalled! He thought I was over-reacting; I
thought he was insensitive. These are the kinds of things that start
wars. . .
"I saw an agent, and explained to him that we had agreed to
the contract, and on the strength of that I'd drunk a lot of
champagne, spent the money, and now wanted redress. My agent
phoned Douglas's and made some fantastic demand: he said he
wanted $2000 now, and 10% of Hitchhiker's in perpetuity, so
whenever the name The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was
used I'd get 10%. When he told me about this I was shocked - I
hadn't wanted anything like that!
"At the time everyone, even Douglas's agent, thought that he
was in the wrong. Even his mum. Then I ran into Douglas, and he.
said, `What are you doing?' I said, `You told me to get an agent!'
He said, `Yes, I told you to get an agent to write your own
bloody book - not to sue me for mine!'
"Eventually we did a deal, whereby I took half of the
advance, and that was the end of it.
"But we had booked a holiday in Greece that September to
write the book together, and I had nowhere else to go. So, despite
all that had happened, I went on holiday with Douglas. He stayed
in his room and wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and
I went down to the bar and the beach and had a good time.
Douglas showed me the first version of his first chapter, and I
read it, and it was a Vonnegut novel.I told him that, and he tore
it up and started again, and after that it started to come good. I
have always thought the books were the best bits of Hitchhiker's
by miles: you could see that they are so original, and so different
that it was obvious that he had made the right decision.
(A number of other things occurred on this holiday, the most
notable of which was the creation of what was to become The
meaning of Liff. But that will be told in its place.)
As Douglas explains, "It was very silly. On the one hand I
thought, `It might be a nice idea to collaborate', and on sober
reflection I thought, `No, I can do it myself'. It was my own
project, and I had every right to say, "No, I'll do it myself'. John
had helped me out, and been very well rewarded for the work. I
rashly talked about collaborating, and changed my mind. I was
within my rights, but I should have handled it better.
"You see, on the one hand, Johnny and I are incredibly good
friends, and have been for ages. But on the other hand, we are
incredibly good at rubbing each other up the wrong way. We
have these ridiculous fights when I'm determined to have a go at
him, and he is determined to have a go at me. So... I think it was
an over-reaction on his part, but on the other hand the entire
history of our relationship has been one or the other over-
reacting to something the other has done."
So Douglas wound up receiving a $1500 advance for his first
book. (He would get over five hundred times that amount as an
advance for his fifth novel.)
When the series had started, BBC Publications were offered
the idea of doing the book, and quite sensibly turned it down.
After the contracts were signed with Pan, BBC Publications
asked to see the scripts, since it had occurred to them that they
might possibly do a book of Hitchhiker s. On being told that Pan
had already bought the book rights BBC Publications asked
bitterly why the book had not been offered to them.
**************************************************************
ARTHUR: You know, I can't quite get used to the feeling that
just because I've spent all my life on the Earth I am
therefore an ignorant country bumpkin.
/> TRILLIAN: Don't worry Arthur, it's just a question of
perspective.
ARTHUR: But if I suddenly accosted a spider I found crawling
under my bed, and tried to explain to this innocent
spider in its spider world all about the Common
Market, or New York, or the history of Indo
China....
TRILLIAN: What?
ARTHUR: It would think I'd gone mad.
TRILLIAN: Well?
ARTHUR: It's not just perspective, you see.I'm trying to make
a point about the basic assumptions of life.
TRILLIAN: Oh.
ARTHUR: You see?
TRILLIAN: I prefer mice to spiders anyway.
ARTHUR: Is there any tea on this spaceship?
- Dialogue cut from the first series
***************************************************************
As with everything Douglas had done, the book was late.
Apocryphal stories have grown up about Douglas Adams's
almost superhuman ability to miss deadlines. Upon close
inspection, they all appear to be true.
The story about the first book is this: after he had been
writing it for as long past the deadline as he could get away with,
Pan Books telephoned Douglas and said, "How many pages have
you done?"
He told them.
"How long have you got to go?"
He told them.
"Well," they said, making the best of a bad job, "Finish the
page you are on, and we'll send a motorbike round to pick it up
in half an hour."
Many people have complained that the first book ends rather
abruptly. That is the main reason why, although it is also true
that Douglas knew he was going to have to keep the radio
Episodes Five and Six (which he was still less than happy with)
back for the end of the second book. If there was a second book.
Meanwhile, Pan were going through the normal pre-
production actions of publishing: getting covers designed,
accumulating quotes from celebrities to put on the covers,
wondering how many copies they would sell.
The initial print run of 60,000 copies betrayed a healthy
optimism about sales, and showed that the publishers knew they
were not dealing with just a new science fiction book (for which
an initial print run is more like 10,000), but with something
slightly special. The earliest promoted cover design showed a
Flash Gordon-type in a bulky spacesuit with his thumb stuck
out, holding a sign that said, in crude letters `ALPHA
CENTAURI'. It was not used, although it was distributed on
fliers at the 1979 World Science Fiction Convention.
Douglas had suggested a number of people who might be
willing to give cover blurbs for Hitchhiker's to Pan. These
included the Monty Python team, Tom Baker (then Dr Who), and
science fiction writers Christopher Priest and John Brunner.
None of these blurbs were ever used, although Terry Jones
from Python turned in at least a page of possible quotes. These
included:
The funniest book I have ever read, today. Terry Jones
Every word is a gem... it's only the order they're put in that
worries me. Terry Jones
Space age comedy for everone... except for (insert the name of
the man who writes worse poetry than the Vogons and whose
name I can't remember). Terry Jones
Probably the funniest book in the universe. Terry Jones *
*dictated by D. Adams.
One of the funniest books ever to have quoted what I said
about it on the cover. Terry Jones.
In the end the only quotes used were in some press releases:
Really entenaining and fun. John Cleese
and
It changed my whole life. It's literally out of this world. Tom
Baker
The final cover design, by Hipgnosis and lan Wright, better
known for their record covers than their book covers, was ideal,
and provided a uniformity of design with the first record, which
was released at the same time as the book, during the second week
of October 1979. The front cover showed the title in `friendly' red
letters, and on the back the words `DON'T PANIC' appeared, in
a similar, colour-videoscreen-style typeface.
It is worth commenting here on the anomalies of the title.
The mould was cast by Adams, on his original three-page outline
for the series, which was titled THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE
TO THE GALAXY (with hyphen) but referred to the book as
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE (without hyphen) throughout.
The cover of the first book included the hyphen, but lost the
apostrophe, while the spine, back and insides wrote Hitch and
Hiker's as two words. The tradition continues to the present day.
British copies of So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, for
example, hyphenated Hitch-Hiker on the cover, but wrote it
Hitch Hiker inside; while the radio scripts book hyphenated all
the way through, except at the back, where advertisements appear
for the book under both titles, with hyphens and without.
In America, the problem is very sensibly avoided by
referring to it as Hitchhiker (without a hyphen, and making it
into one word). The matter will not be referred to again.
The book went straight to number one on the bestseller lists,
and stayed there. This surprised a number of people, not least
Douglas Adams: "Nobody thought that radio had that much
impact, but it does. I think a radio audience has a greater overlap
with a solid reading audience than television does. All power to
radio, it's a good medium."
Within the next three months, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy sold over a quarter of a million copies. Douglas sent a
note to booksellers when sales reached 185,000:
"I can only assume that you have all been giving away pound
notes with every copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
or possibly even sending press gangs out into the streets,
because I have just been officially notified that the sales have
now passed the point of being merely absurd and have now
moved into the realms of the ludicrous. Whatever you have
been doing to get rid of them, thank you very much."
Although later Douglas was to express dissatisfaction with the
instant success of the first book ("It was like going from foreplay
to orgasm with nothing in the middle - where do you go after
that?"), at the time he was jubilant.
The beauty of Hitchhiker's was that it came at just the right
time. The success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third
Kind had created a willingness among the public to regard science
fiction as an acceptable form of entertainment; science fiction
readers had long been in need of something that was actually
funny; and the radio audience who picked up the book
discovered very quickly that there was far more in the first book
than there had been in the radio series (in fact, it can come as
something of a surprise, relistening to the original radio series, to
discover quite how many of the more familiar aspects of
Hitchhiker's were not in it - towels, for example). The book
ga
rnered rave reviews. Douglas found himself compared to Kurt
Vonnegut, (a comparison that was to persist until the release of
Vonnegut's Galapagos in 1985, at which point some reviewers
stated comparing Vonnegut, slightly unfavourably, to Douglas
Adams), and the book found itself on many critics' `year's best'
lists for 1979.
If the radio series had been a cult success, then the book took
Hitchhiker's beyond that, to a place in the popular consciousness.
It was not long before a lot of people found their perceptions of
towels, white mice and the number Forty-Two had undergone a
major readjustment.
*************************************************************
WHY WAS HITCHHIKER'S SO SUCCESSFUL?
John Lloyd:
"It's what William Goldman, in his book Adventures in the
Screen Trade calls a non-recurrent phenomenon. Before
Hitchhiker's came along there was no reason why it should, and
once it's there it seems the perfect idiom for its time. I don't
know why, but it catches the spirit of the moment. The title says
it all for me - with hitchhiking and galaxies you have this
curious mixture of post-hippie sensibilities and being interested
in high tech, digital technology and all that stuff. But it's
impossible to say why Hitchhiker's is so successful - it's just one
of these great original products of a diseased mind. It makes no
concessions to popularity, it just gets on and does it. Not once
has Douglas toned the thing down so it would sell more copies.
Douglas really was as surprised by its success as anyone - he had
no idea whether it was any good or not. He used to sit around
going, `Is this good? Is this funny? What do you think of this
script?' He really didn't know. But you can't explain it. And
because you can't, you can't write another book like it. And
that's what makes it a work of genius."
Jacqueline Graham (Press officer, Pan Books):
"Because it was such a wholly original idea, and you don't get too
many of those. And because it was funny, but intelligently funny.
And because it started as a sort of cult thing. Mostly because it's