by Nick Webb
Of course, not even Douglas could come up with new lectures on every occasion though he could speculate interestingly if given a specific topic (for instance, in September 2000 he was invited to San Jose to talk about the Future of Systems). His lectures were akin to his anecdotes, and Sophie Astin, his assistant at TDV, was a little shocked to discover how cleverly he could appear to be thinking on his feet, umming and ahhing with the effort of original thought right under the audience’s nose—while in fact repeating himself perfectly. Douglas always was a bit of a thespian.
Douglas could slip into lecture mode easily, and just occasionally his mates would crave the small change of human transactions rather than an intellectually demanding brain dump. “Enough already,” one would gasp, even though it was good stuff that would command a fee when done professionally.* 210 Douglas’s didacticism was, however, deployed brilliantly on the circuit. Although he had many variations and could wander into new topics during Q & A sessions, his basic repertoire comprised four lectures with interesting sub-routines depending on the audience. He had grasped the first rule of public speaking—one that comes even before “look up, don’t gabble, try not to read wads of text” and so on. Know who your audience is. Three of his lectures circled around the theme of the future of technology, though one of these—specifically for the college crowd—was a humorous examination of the technology in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The fourth, probably the one least in demand, says Don, was an inspired talk based on Last Chance to See. It was both wise and funny.* 211
Do you remember the kakapo whose fate is described in that book? It’s the large parrot from New Zealand that has forgotten how to fly. New Zealand is in some ways a huge evolutionary experiment, for it never formed part of a larger land mass, but consisted of what Douglas called gunk emerging from the sea. As a result creatures that could fly there enjoyed an early advantage. The ecology is spectacular. New Zealand was bird heaven. There were no predators.
Flying is expensive (here Douglas was wont to make a joke about whatever aviation cartels had brought him to that location)—expensive, that is, in terms of energy. A bird needs a lot of food to sustain flight, and the more food ingested, the heavier the bird becomes, and the more difficult it is to fly. Flight, of course, is also a survival mechanism, but it is one not needed when there is nothing to escape from. Eventually the kakapo evolved to flightlessness. Sometimes, Douglas reminded us, it forgets and topples from a tree with the grace of a six or seven pound bag of flour. But there is a problem with being in such a protected environment: you could breed beyond the ability of the environment to sustain your population, which would then crash catastrophically. For a truly harmonious existence in such a paradise, a really slow rate of reproduction is advantageous.
The kakapo has one of the slowest and oddest. The male attracts the female by hollowing out a concavity, a resonance chamber, on a promontory over a valley and then making a bass sound so low that it is almost felt rather than heard. Bass sound travels for miles, but it is non-directional, which is why some stereo systems have a separate woofer that can be hidden anywhere in the room. The female kakapo can therefore hear the male at an enormous distance, but, even assuming she’s in a receptive mood, she has no idea where he is. We’ve all had relationships like that, Douglas asserted. If, by happy chance, they find each other, the female may lay one large egg every two years.
This reproductive strategy worked well for the kakapo until, with the aid of their twig technology, the monkeys arrived by boat, bringing with them animals that had evolved in altogether more competitive circumstances. Cats, stoats, possums, and, worst of the lot, the ship’s ineradicable stowaway, rattus rattus. These alien species tore through the kakapos in a welter of blood. The birds simply didn’t know the form when confronted with a predator, not that they could have done much even if they did. By the time the monkeys woke up to the problem, kakapo numbers had fallen from possibly as many as millions to forty-five. Rather like the aye-aye, they barely hang on to life on a small island off an island.
The more stressed the kakapo became, the more it relied on the old strategy that had worked so well in the past—i.e. it bred even more slowly—and the more endangered it became. Now, said Douglas, look at us monkeys. We evolved in circumstances when our most successful strategy for dealing with the environment was to regard it as ours for the taking. There were so few of us that for all practical purposes we could treat the planet as infinite.
Consider the kakapo and how its evolutionary strategy now serves it in changed circumstances. Do you think, he would ask ingenuously, that this stupid bird may have something to teach mankind?
It was an intellectual coup—Douglas at his very best.
••••••
In the New Scientist magazine, 9 November 2002, there’s a letter from an Alain Williams on the rather esoteric subject of Grigori Volovik’s attempt to infer the structure of the early universe from the distribution of helium isotopes. Mr. Williams says that this scientist found out what readers of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy already knew, viz that you could learn a lot about the universe from small bits of it—though in Douglas’s case he suggested fairy cake rather than helium.
It’s a tiny example of how Douglas’s ideas have permeated the world. Richard Dawkins posits the idea of “memes”—ideas, notions, cultural artefacts, fashionable connections, turns of phrase even, that have one thing in common: they replicate like viruses. Considered from this viewpoint, Douglas has left a huge and benign footprint on the world.
Recent references to Douglas and his ideas—spotted on a quite unsystematic basis—include a website, “the homepage of God,” where God’s son is not Jesus but Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sunday Times, 14 July 2002). Or Astronomy Now magazine quoting his words about being at the unfashionable end of the galaxy (February 2002). Life, the universe and everything, for instance—those words in that order, have become ubiquitous as a jokey way of positing some all-embracing answer. Examples are too numerous to quote, but one recent sighting was an editorial in The Times about anti-matter. Indeed the words are now so deeply embedded in our consciousness that variations of them can be uttered, and printed, in the confidence that the allusion to the original will be recognized with a smile. “Earth, the Universe and Everything” was a recent headline to the Review section of the Guardian’s G2 supplement (23 November 2002). Even the Sun, one of Britain’s more frivolous tabloids, ran a recent story about models and their rapacious divorce settlements under the headline “Strife, the Universe and Everything.” Another Sun headline along the same lines was “Wife, the Universe and Everything.”
A clever piece of translation software is named Babel, not as an Old Testament reference to the tower and the fragmentation of language, but in hon-our of Douglas’s Babel fish. Neal Stephenson, in his brilliant SF novel Snow Crash, alludes to the Babel fish argument in Hitchhiker’s when he talks about how, if the Bible were provably true, there would be no room for faith. Stephen Fry’s book Making History and Rob Grant’s Colony also show signs of the Adams influence. The computer that finally beat humanity’s strongest chess player, the awesome Kasparov, ran a program called—guess what?—Deep Thought, a reference to the computer in Hitchhiker’s that took seven million years to ponder the question. Douglas even has an asteroid named after him.
Listing all the manifold ways Douglas left his mark on the world would take several volumes. If you want to try an experiment, put “Douglas Adams” into the Google search engine. In February 2003 this produces 941,000 references.
Over the years Douglas’s books have sold over 17 million copies. He has given us lots of excellent jokes, many expressions that entered the general currency of the language, and a great deal of pleasure—not all of it innocent. He was serious and funny—seriously funny. If Dawkins’s memes really are viral, then the most infectious and enduring of Douglas’s legacies is his sideways view of the place we ape descendants occupy in the world and the absurdl
y trivial place that our world has in the cosmos. It’s what has become known as a paradigm shift, a pattern-altering template-busting change in the shape not just of a philosophical argument, but of a whole way of seeing. The pity of it is that we will never know what more he may have achieved. Very sneakily, while we were laughing at the jokes, he gave us back a sense of wonder.
It’s why Douglas Adams was so important. There he was, apparently living in Islington or California, but often inhabiting another planet, and looking back at ours with a mixture of amazement, grief, not infrequent anger and overwhelming humour. “It’s just so improbable,” you can imagine him saying. “How did the human condition ever get to be so bloody silly?”
••••••
Douglas Adams, one of the most creative thinkers of his time, the man who put his imagination through the Total Perspective Vortex on our behalf, was born on 11 March 1952.
APPENDIX ONE
Twenty-Five Years On
Douglas dubbed the original radio series the Primary and Secondary phases. To the delight of legions of enthusiasts the balance of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy has now been translated to radio. The Tertiary, Quadrenary and Quintessential phases will be based on Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless.
The programmes (ten half-hours) have been adapted and directed by the award-winning Dirk Maggs, who was Douglas’s own choice for the task. The new series features many of the actors who were so wonderful in the original. Simon Jones, sounding exactly the same but possibly even more indignantly bewildered, returns triumphantly as Arthur Dent. Geoffrey McGivern plays Ford Prefect, Susan Sheridan is Trillian, Mark Wing-Davey is Zaphod and the much-loved Marvin is once again Stephen Moore. Richard Griffiths appears for the first time as Slartibartfast, and Joanna Lumley and cricket commentators Fred Truman and Henry Blofield make guest appearances. William Franklyn, inimitably urbane, performs the Book. With the help of technology he would have adored, Douglas himself makes his debut in episode three as Agrajac. Paul Wickens, “Wix,” and Philip Pope provide the music.
The recordings, an Above the Title production for BBC Radio 4, took place at the Soundhouse studios in Hammersmith in West London late in 2003. Dirk Magg’s style of direction is warm and immediate; he likes to be in the studio with the actors, praising, enthusing and thinking aloud. In the control room Paul Deeley, the sound engineer, knitted the bits together. Paul listens with an attentiveness that can pick up the stridulation of a fly’s thighs or the minute rustling of a script when ordinary ears hear nothing. Contrary to the clichés about thespian chitchat, the atmosphere on the set was collegial and jolly. The whole crew worked its socks off.
Initially a contractual problem between the BBC and the Disney Corporation delayed transmission. The issue was rather technical (concerning how much of the broadcasts will be available for streaming on the BBC website) and would not have existed as an issue even ten years ago. Both organizations cited entrenched policy positions. Sorting out the wrangle was a gift from the new technology to lawyers. However, after a frustratingly long delay (for when do you hear the expression “as swift as a lawyer”?), the new series was eventually broadcast in the UK for six weeks from the end of September 2004 on its natural home, BBC Radio Four.
Films are as much a byword for uncertainty as Heisenberg. You can never be sure until the public is cemented by its bottom in the multiplex around the corner. Yet the film of Hitchhiker is now (October 2004) in post-production. Robbie Stamp, the Executive Producer, has been steering it around the hazards with the finesse of a diplomat and the doggedness of a marathon runner. H2G2, a Disney/Spyglass Entertainment project, was greenlit for filming early in 2004, and principal photography started on 19 April 2004 in London’s Elstree and Shepperton Studios. Nick Goldsmith is the producer and Garth Jennings the director. These two have had a long commitment to the project, and says Robbie, “they have fantastic visual imaginations and care passionately about getting it right.” Rather that trying to film the story with all the episodic rambling of the original, they have re-imagined it with a much more filmic structure. Douglas will have a posthumous credit as a producer. The screenplay is by Karey Kirkpatrick and Douglas Adams. By all accounts it is sparkling—playful, irreverent and contemporary, while being true to the spirit of the original.
The casting has generated some fierce Internet traffic. The fans have their own images of the characters, and they are passionate if they feel some actor is inappropriate. Douglas was on record as saying that Arthur Dent had to be English, but that the rest could comfortably be American. Ford Prefect is, after all, appallingly street- and cosmos-wise, and there are references in the books to his time in New York. The deeply cool Mos Def for Ford therefore looks a good choice. Martin Freeman, whose innocent English phizzog seems perfect for the job, plays Arthur Dent. Other cast members include Zooey Deschanel as Tricia McMillan, Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast and Sam Rockwell as the unspeakably hip Zaphod Beeblebrox. Surely only an American could credibly play the President of the Galaxy these days? Warwick Davis is the actor enduring the sweaty hell of performing inside Marvin. It is this appointment that has generated the most internet heat. Marvin’s relentless melancholy strikes a chord in us all. People are hugely fond of him and of Stephen Moore’s infinitely tired but expressive voice. The design of the robot (by the Jim Henson Workshop) has also excited much comment. It has a body of cartoony excess, like a rubberoid children’s toy, surplanted by a spherical head enormous enough to accommodate that famously large brain. Personally I find it witty, but since there are as many different visions of Marvin as readers, not everybody will approve. The Vogons have been brilliantly realised without CGI; instead they have been rendered with disgusting relish as huge animatronic creatures capable of an extraordinary range of subtle, but horrible, movements.
Completists and collectors might also like to know that there is a rare recording of Simon Jones reading The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (S&S Audio, 1989) that was withdrawn when Douglas decided he’d like to read his work himself (and why not? as Simon Jones graciously observes).
Finally, in 2003, even after a quarter of a century, a fine tribute was paid to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when it was selected by the British public as one of its all-time top one hundred reads in BBC TV’s The Big Read; indeed it was in the top ten. Sanjeer Baskar (with a cameo from Stephen Hawking) pleaded its case for the number one spot on the grounds that the novel talks so directly to people who feel they do not fit comfortably into the world and that its unique and funny world view still gives young imaginations a wallop. Douglas’s book is as fresh today as when he wrote it so painfully all those years ago.
APPENDIX TWO
Chronology of the Major Works
1978 First radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy starts 8 March. Christmas special in December.
1979 First stage production in May by The Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy published by Pan in October. Double LP or double cassette recording available from November by mail order.
1980 Second radio series broadcast from 21 January.
Records and cassettes sold through shops from May.
Theatr Clywd production in January/February (much liked). Rainbow Theatre Production in July (massacred). Hundreds of amateur and professional productions follow.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe published by Pan in October.
1981 The television series broadcast on the BBC from 5 January.
Theme music single released from Original Records.
Two Marvin singles from Polydor.
Abridged Talking Books Hitchhiker’s from Listen For Pleasure read brilliantly by Stephen Moore.
1982 Life, the Universe and Everything published by Pan, and by Arthur Baker in hardcover, in August.
1983 The Meaning of Liff, with John Lloyd, published by Pan in association with Faber & Faber.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish published by Pan in November; Pan’s first hardcover.
1986 “Young Zaphod Plays it Safe” for The Utterly, Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book.
1987 Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency published by Heinemann in June.
Bureaucracy computer game from Infocom in August.
1988 The Long, Dark Tea-time of the Soul, the second Dirk Gently adventure, published by Heinemann in October. Coincides with the Pan paperback of the first Gently novel.
1989 Pan edition of The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul.
1990 Last Chance to See published by Heinemann.
The Deeper Meaning of Liff, with John Lloyd, published in hardcover by Faber & Faber.
1991 Pan edition of Last Chance to See.
1992 Mostly Harmless published by Heinemann.
Pan edition of The Deeper Meaning of Liff.
1993 Pan edition of Mostly Harmless.
1994 Unabridged (6-hour) Talking Books version of all the Hitchhiker’s novels issued by Isis. Douglas reads them himself with great panache.
1997 Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic by Terry Jones based on the TDV computer game published by Pan in December.
1998 Starship Titanic CD-ROM game released in April in the US.
2002 Posthumous publication of The Salmon of Doubt by Macmillan in March.
2003 Pan edition of The Salmon of Doubt in January.
APPENDIX THREE
Full Credits for the Radio Series
CAST:
The Book Peter Jones
Arthur Dent Simon Jones
Ford Prefect Geoffrey McGivern
Frogstar Prison Relation Officer David Tate
Gargra Varr Valentine Dyall
The Ventilation System Geoffrey McGivern
The Nutrimat Machine Leueen Willoughby