The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time dg-3

by Douglas Adams

  “The perennial movie, which has been about to be made for about twenty years and is even more about to be made now,” Adams said. “But we shall see. I wish I had never thought of doing it as a movie. I’d have about ten years of my life back.

  For the first time in over a decade, Adams is working on a book.

  “There was a point where I just got massively fed up with it. My books tend to use up ideas at a ferocious rate,” he said. “I never intended to be a novelist to begin with. So I decided to go and do a whole bunch of other things... . The consequence of that is I have a huge backlog of story ideas, and now the sort of panic is, ‘Can I do them all in the rest of my career, given the speed at which they’re arriving at the moment?’ The other panic, of course, is the perennial writer’s problem of application. I think I have more fear of writing than most writers.”

  The new book is not a Hitchhiker’s book—there are already five of those—or a Dirk Gently book, but “it will be recognizable in style to anyone who knows those books.

  “Since then, I’ve now got lots and lots of different story lines waiting for me to turn them into books. One of them I shall apply the title Salmon of Doubt to, but I don’t know which one yet.”

  In 1990, Adams, with zoologist Mark Carwardine, wrote Last Chance to See. It’s one of his hardest books to find, and his favorite. When Adams—who has lived in Santa Barbara for the last two years—speaks today at UCSB, it’s the book he’ll talk about.

  “I do talks around most of the rest of the country,” Adams said. “So I was very keen to do one here, just to sort of say, ‘Hi, here I am.’”

  Adams gives a lot of speeches, usually about high technology to large companies.

  “I actually much prefer doing this particular one, which I only ever usually get to do at colleges because it’s funny, but big corporations don’t particularly like to hear about protecting endangered wildlife,” he said. “You lose a lot of money to endangered wildlife.”

  Last Chance to See started as a magazine article for the World Wildlife Fund. The group sent Adams to Madagascar, where he met Carwardine. Adams wrote about the aye-aye, an endangered species of nocturnal lemur that looks like a cross between a bat, a monkey, and a very surprised infant.

  “At the time, it was thought that there were only about fifteen. They’ve found a few more so it’s not quite so endangered, just very, very, very endangered,” Adams said. “The whole thing was completely magical.”

  So magical that Adams and Carwardine spent the next year traveling the world and seeing endangered animals, like flightless kakapo parrots in New Zealand and baiji river dolphins in China. The last twenty dolphins will become extinct when the Chinese government completes the Three Gorges Dam and destroys the dolphins’ habitat.

  “It’s a desperate thing, not only because another species is lost and the tragedy of that, but because I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something... . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.”

  In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, intergalactic bulldozers destroyed the Earth and humanity. A very different sort of bulldozer destroyed the most successful species the planet had ever known. Sixty-five million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the Yucatán peninsula, created a one-hundred-mile crater, and sent a cloud of searing vapor and dust into the air. That was pretty much it for the dinosaurs.

  “I’m rather obsessed with the idea of that comet coming down and it being the single event to which we owe our very existence,” Adams said. “It is arguably the single most dramatic thing to have ever occurred in the world and certainly the one that was the most dramatic event in our lives, in that it paved the way for our existence, and no one was there to see it.”

  Dinosaur-killing rocks are classic physics. The newer physics is a little too outlandish for Adams, a man who wrote that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. A computer came up with that answer, and Adams said computers will change everything.

  “Now that we’ve built computers, first we made them room-size, then desk-size and in briefcases and in pockets, soon they’ll be as plentiful as dust—you can sprinkle computers all over the place. Gradually, the whole environment will become something far more responsive and smart, and we’ll be living in a way that’s very hard for people living on the planet just now to understand,” Adams said. “I guess my six-year-old daughter will get a much better handle on it.”

  Adams has done a bit of everything, from radio to television to designing computer games. Not all of them worked out.

  “These are life’s little learning experiences,” he said. “You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’

  “At the end of all this being-determined-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades, I think I’m better off just sitting down and putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order.”

  Adams writes “slowly and painfully.”

  “People assume you sit in a room, looking pensive and writing great thoughts,” he said. “But you mostly sit in a room looking panic-stricken and hoping they haven’t put a guard on the door yet.”

  Adams will probably be writing for the next few years, before his daughter grows up.

  “I think what I’ll do, because there has been talk about me doing a big TV documentary series, is that I’ll wait until her hormones kick in, and then I shall go off like a shot,” he said. “I think when she’s about thirteen I’ll go off and do a big documentary series and come back when she’s become civilized.”

  The interview ended when Adams’s cell phone rang from inside his pocket. In the other pocket there was a little bit of padded cotton, red trimmed with a giraffe on it. It looked like it belonged to his daughter. His wife and daughter were supposed to have flown to London that night, but his daughter came down with an ear infection. “A serious one, actually.”

  It was time for Adams to climb into his black Mercedes to go home and see her.

  And so he did.

  Interview conducted by Brendan Buhler,

  Artsweek

  Epilogue

  A lament for Douglas Adams, best known as author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who died on Saturday, aged forty-nine, from a heart attack.

  This is not an obituary; there’ll be time enough for them. It is not a tribute, not a considered assessment of a brilliant life, not a eulogy. It is a keening lament, written too soon to be balanced, too soon to be carefully thought through. Douglas, you cannot be dead.

  A sunny Friday morning in May, ten past seven, shuffle out of bed, log in to e-mail as usual. The usual blue bold headings drop into place, mostly junk, some expected, and my gaze absently follows them down the page. The name Douglas Adams catches my eye and I smile. That one, at least, will be good for a laugh. Then I do the classic double-take, back up the screen.

  What did that heading actually say? Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few hours ago. Then that other cliché, the words swelling before my eyes.

  It must be part of the joke. It must be some other Douglas Adams. This is too ridiculous to be true. I must still be asleep. I open the message, from a well-known German software designer. It is no joke, I am fully awake. And it is the right—or rather the wrong—Douglas Adams. A sudden heart attack, in the gym in Santa Barbara. “Man, man, man, man oh man,” the message concludes. Man indeed, what a man. A giant of a man, surely nearer seven foot than
six, broad-shouldered, and he did not stoop like some very tall men who feel uncomfortable with their height. But nor did he swagger with the macho assertiveness that can be intimidating in a big man. He neither apologised for his height, nor flaunted it. It was part of the joke against himself.

  One of the great wits of our age, his sophisticated humour was founded in a deep, amalgamated knowledge of literature and science, two of my great loves. And he introduced me to my wife—at his fortieth birthday party.

  He was exactly her age, they had worked together on Dr. Who. Should I tell her now, or let her sleep a bit longer before shattering her day? He initiated our togetherness and was a recurrently important part of it. I must tell her now.

  Douglas and I met because I sent him an unsolicited fan letter—I think it is the only time I have ever written one. I had adored The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then I read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

  As soon as I finished it, I turned back to page one and read it straight through again—the only time I have ever done that, and I wrote to tell him so. He replied that he was a fan of my books, and he invited me to his house in London. I have seldom met a more congenial spirit. Obviously I knew he would be funny. What I didn’t know was how deeply read he was in science. I should have guessed, for you can’t understand many of the jokes in Hitchhiker if you don’t know a lot of advanced science. And in modern electronic technology he was a real expert. We talked science a lot, in private, and even in public at literary festivals and on the wireless or television. And he became my guru on all technical problems. Rather than struggle with some ill-written and incomprehensible manual in Pacific Rim English, I would fire off an e-mail to Douglas. He would reply, often within minutes, whether in London or Santa Barbara, or some hotel room anywhere in the world. Unlike most staff of professional helplines, Douglas understood exactly my problem, knew exactly why it was troubling me, and always had the solution ready, lucidly and amusingly explained. Our frequent e-mail exchanges brimmed with literary and scientific jokes and affectionately sardonic little asides. His technophilia shone through, but so did his rich sense of the absurd. The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch, and the follies of humanity were as comic in the world’s silicon valleys as anywhere else.

  He laughed at himself with equal good humour. At, for example, his epic bouts of writer’s block (“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by”) when, according to legend, his publisher and book agent would lock him in a hotel room, with no telephone and nothing to do but write, releasing him only for supervised walks. If his enthusiasm ran away with him and he advanced a biological theory too eccentric for my professional scepticism to let pass, his mien at my dismissal of it would always be more humorously self-mocking than genuinely crestfallen. And he would have another go.

  He laughed at his own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not to, but he did it with such charm that the jokes became even funnier. He was gently able to poke fun without wounding, and it would be aimed not at individuals but at their absurd ideas. To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow preordained for us, because we are so well suited to live in it, he mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle. Or there’s this parable, which he told with huge enjoyment, whose moral leaps out with no further explanation. A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained about high-frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, transmitters and receivers, amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”

  Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender (he once climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit to raise money to fight the cretinous trade in rhino horn), Apple Computers has lost its most eloquent apologist. And I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met. The day Douglas died, I officially received a happy piece of news, which would have delighted him. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone during the weeks I have secretly known about it, and now that I am allowed to, it is too late.

  The sun is shining, life must go on, seize the day and all those clichés.

  We shall plant a tree this very day: a Douglas fir, tall, upright, evergreen. It is the wrong time of year, but we’ll give it our best shot.

  Off to the arboretum.

  Richard Dawkins, in The Guardian,

  MAY 14, 2001

  (Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.)

  Douglas Noel Adams 1952-2001

  The Order of Service for His Memorial

  Schubler Chorales—J. S. Bach

  Shepherd’s Farewell, from The Childhood of Christ—Hector Berlioz

  Welcome to the Church by Reverend Antony Hurst, on behalf of St. Martin-in-the-Fields

  Introduction and opening prayer by Stephen Coles

  JONNY BROCK

  Three Kings from Persian Lands—Peter Cornelius

  ED VICTOR

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord—Traditional American melody & words by Julia Ward Howe

  MARK CARWARDINE

  Gone Dancing—Robbie Mclntosh

  Te Fovemus—The Chameleon Arts Chorus (by P. Wickens)

  JAMES THRIFT, SUE ADAMS, JANE GARNIER

  Rockstar—Margo Buchanan

  Prayers of Thanksgiving by Stephen Coles

  Holding On—Gary Brooker

  Wish You Were Here—David Gilmour

  RICHARD DAWKINS

  For the beauty of the earth—Music by Conrad Kocher & words by Folliott S. Pierpoint

  ROBBIE STAMP

  Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust from Cantata No 170—J. S. Bach

  Aria

  Contented rest, beloved heart’s desire,

  You are not found in the sins of hell,

  But only in heavenly concord;

  You alone fortify the feeble heart.

  Contented rest, beloved heart’s desire,

  Therefore none but the gifts of virtue

  Shall have their abode in my heart.

  SIMON JONES

  For all the Saints who from their labours rest—Music by R. Vaughan Williams & words by William W. How

  BLESSING BY REVEREND ANTONY HURST

  Organ Music by J. S. Bach:

  Fantasia in G

  Prelude and Fugue in C

  Italian Concerto

  Editor’s Acknowledgments

  To Douglas, without whom all of us would not be sharing the bounteous pleasures of these pages; I miss you;

  To Jane Belson, Douglas’s beloved wife; her belief in and support for this book provide the foundation on which it rests;

  To Ed Victor, Douglas’s long-time agent and trusted friend, whose commitment to this undertaking cleared away every obstacle;

  To Sophie Astin, Douglas’s invaluable assistant, whose intelligence, devotion, and first-hand contribution to these pages proved essential;

  To Chris Ogle, Douglas’s close friend, whose computer skills and knowledge of Douglas’s thought processes, passwords, and what could very kindly be called Douglas’s filing system, enabled Chris to assemble a master disk of all Douglas’s work, without which this book would not exist;

  To Robbie Stamp, Douglas’s good friend and business colleague, who reminded me that Douglas had already created the structure for this book;

  To Shaye Areheart and Linda Loewenthal of Harmony Books, who fi
rst brought me into this project, and to Bruce Harris, Chip Gibson, Andrew Martin, Hilary Bass, and Tina Constable, who published and loved Douglas; to Peter Straus and Nicky Hursell in the UK, for their valuable editorial suggestions;

  To Mike J. Simpson, former president of ZZ9, Douglas Adams’s official fan club, whose generosity and encyclopedic knowledge of Douglas’s life and work was an invaluable resource;

  To Patrick Hunnicutt, who assisted my efforts in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and to Lizzy Kremer, Maggie Philips, and Linda Van in Ed Victor’s office;

  To the various publications, writers, and friends of Douglas who so generously gave access and permission to use their work as it related to his;

  To Isabel, my partner in life;

  To my sons, Sam and William, who, as new generations tend to do, devoured Douglas’s books;

  To all of Douglas’s readers: as you know, the love went (and still goes) both ways.

  For more information on Douglas Adams and his creations, please visit www.douglasadams.com, the official website.

  You may wish to join ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Appreciation Society, founded in 1980. For details of this fan-run club, visit www.zz9.org.