ZAN-TEQUILA OCEANS.
ALL ORDERS PAYABLE IN ADVANCE."
ZAPHOD: Ah, fetid photons, you wake me from my own
perfectly good dream to show me somebody else's?
TRILLIAN: We didn't wake you earlier. The last planet was
knee deep in fish.
ZAPHOD: Fish ?
FORD: Fish.
ZAPHOD: Well, tell them to turn it off. Get us out of here!
HE YELLS UP AT THE SKY.
ZAPHOD: Get us out of here!
IN THE SKY THE WRITlNG CHANGES. IT
NOW SAYS:
"MAGRATHEAN PLANET CATALOGUE BK
THREE:
DESIGN 35/C/7. `LEATHERLAND'.
LANDFORMATION: FINEST ARCTURAN
MEGA-OX HIDE.
OPTIONAL EX?'RAS: STEEL MOUNTAIN
STUDS. "
WE SEE THAT THEY ARE NOW STANDING
ON A PLAIN OF SHINING BLACK
LEATHER WHICH UNDULATES AWAY
INTO THE DISTANCE. GIANT STRAPS AND
BUCKLES ARE ALSO VISIBLE.
ZAPHOD: Get us out of here!
THE SKY WRlTlNG CHANGES AGAIN. (I'M
GIVING THE DETAILS IN FULL, THOUGH
IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO DWELL ON
THEM LONG ENOUGH TO READ THEM
ALL).
"MAGRATHEAN PLANET CATALOGUE BK
THREE.
DESIGN 35/C/e.'WORLD OF PLAYBEING'.
LANDFORMATION: EPIDERMlTEX.
OP1'IONAL EXTRAS: ASK FOR SPECIAL
CATALOGUE."
WE SEE THAT THE NEW LANDSCAPE THAT
HAS MATERIALISED AROUND THEM IS
SOFT AND PINK AND CURIOUSLY
UNDULATING. THERE ARE HILLS
AROUND THEM WHICH ARE GENTLY
ROUNDED WITH RED PEAKS.
ZAPHOD: Get us...hey, I think I could learn to like it here.
What do you think FORD?
FORD: I think it's a mistake to mix geography with
pleasure.
ZAPHOD: What's that meant to mean?
FORD: Nothing. It's just a form of mouth exercise. Ask
Trillian.
ZAPHOD: Ask her what?
FORD: Anything you like. (HE WANDERS OFF
ENIGMATICALLY.)
ZAPHOD (TO
TRILLIAN): Is he trying to drive me mad?
TRILLIAN: Yes.
ZAPHOD: Why ?
TRILLIAN: To stop all this driving us insane.
MEANWHILE A SLOGAN HAS RISEN
ABOVE THE HORIZON. IT SAYS IN LARGE
LETTERS: "WHATEVER YOUR TASTES
MAGRATHEA CAN CATER FOR THEM. WE
ARE NOT PROUD."
- Unused scene from early draft of TV series, Episode
*********************************************************
Four.
Having written one Hitchhiker's book he had been unsatisfied
with, Life, the Universe, and Everything, and having sworn
"never again" on the Hitchhiker's saga, why did Douglas Adams
sign a contract to write the fourth book in the trilogy?
Firstly, he was under a great deal of pressure to write it, both
from his agent and his publishers. On his return from the US, he
explained, "I felt so disoriented being in Los Angeles, and so keen
to be home and just sort of grab hold of things I knew again, it
became very easy to give in to the temptation of sort of re-
establishing what I knew I could do, by doing another Hitchhiker's
book.
Secondly, he did have God's Final Message to His Creation;
and since he was never going to tell people what The Ultimate
Question was, he felt that that was something he should reveal.
Thirdly, the advance he was offered topped six hundred
thousand pounds.
He signed the contract.
I asked him about the book in November 1983: "I can tell
you more about the working title than what it's actually going to
be about. The working title is So Long, and Thanks for All the
Fish. It's about something left hanging at the end of the third
book, which is Arthur's quest to find God's final message to His
creation.
"My agent thinks So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish isn't
the right title for the book, since the first three all have `Galaxy' or
`Universe' in the title, so he wants me to call it God's Final Message
to His Creation. I don't know, but I don't think that has the
ironical ring to it, in the way that that most modest of titles Life,
the Universe, and Everything does. Or doesn't. However that
sentence started. Also I do want it to be a quotation from the first
book, as the titles of the other two books were."
While Ed Victor, Douglas's agent, was not too keen on So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish as a title, everyone else was-
especially Douglas's American publisher (and five-sixths of the
advance money had come from America). At this point Douglas
had a title and a contract. And an idea, but not much of one.
******************************************************
DEEP THOUGHT: It occurs to me that running a programme like
this is bound to create considerable interest in
the whole area of popular philosophy, yes?
MAJIKTHISE: Keep talking. . .
DEEP THOUGHT: Everyone's going to have their own theories
about what answer I'm eventually going to come
up with, and who better to capitalise on that
media market than you yourselves?
BY THIS TIME WE ARE QUITE CLOSE IN
ON ONE OF DEEP THOUGHT'S I'V
SCREENS. A NEW SCENE COMES UP ON
IT: A TV PROGRAMME CALLED "DEEP
THOUGHT SPECIAL". AT THE BOTTOM
OF THE SCREEN FLASHES THE WORD
"SIMULATION" WHICH ALTERNATES
WITH THE WORDS "MERELY A
SUGGESTION". 'THOUGH NO SOUND
COMES WITH THE PROGRAMME WE
SEE THAT IT FEATURES BOTH
VROOMFONDEL AND MAJIKTHISE AS
IMPORTANT-LOOKING PUNDITS ON A
DISCUSSION PROGRAMME. THEY
APPEAR TO BE ARGUING ON EITHER
SIDE OF A SWINGOMETER WHICH IS
LABELLED "ANSWER PREDICTOR". AS
THEY ARGUE THE SWINGOMETER
NEEDLE MOVES BACKWARDS AND
FORWARDS BETWEEN TWO EXTREMES
MARKED "LIFE AFFIRMATlON" AND
"HOPELESSNESS AND FUTILITY". THESE
DETAILS ARE NOT PARTICULARLY
IMPORTANT IN THEMSELVES IF WE
CAN'T MAKE THEM OUT. THE
IMPORTANT THING TO ESTABLISH IS
THAT IT LOOKS IMPORTANT. THE
REAL VROOMFONDEL AND
MAJIKTHISE ARE CLEARLY
FASCINATED BY THIS PICTURE.
DEEP THOUGHT: So long as you can keep violently disagreeing
with each other and slagging each other off in
the popular press, and so long as you have clever
agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy
train for life.
- From early draft of TV series, Episode Four.
***********************************************************
Life, the Universe, and Everything had given Douglas the problem
of trying to force jokes onto a carefully worked-out plot. This time
he would just follow the story wherever it led him. For the first
time, the book was to be released in the UK in a hardback edition
first (rather than a later library and book-club hardback). The
presses were booked. The deadlines were agreed. The final-final
deadlines were agreed. The extensions-be
yond-which-one-could-
not-extend were agreed.
Douglas was late.
Although he had made a number of notes on the book, had
toyed with various ideas, including pulling in some of the weirder
stuff from the second radio series, and getting a computer
spreadsheet programme to organise his ideas for him, he had not
written it in his Islington home (incidentally, Life, the Universe,
and Everything is the only Hitchhiker's book Douglas has ever
written at home, as opposed to somewhere else. It has been
suggested that this was because he had only just moved in there,
and it seemed like somewhere else).
He had gone down to the West Country, where earlier books
had been written, but did not write it there.
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 straight forward 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 Sonn 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 gstronomic 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 strange sort of walrus creature. And it's a
rather dull life as a walrus, but on the other hand he's perpetually
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