Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide Author. Comedic Sci-Fi Pioneer

Douglas Noel Adams was born on March 11, 1952, in Cambridge. His father, Christopher Douglas Adams, was a probation officer and his mother, Janet Adams, a nurse. They divorced when Adams was five, and he and his younger sister, Susan, lived with their mother and her parents in a gloomy house in Brentwood, Essex. Of his childhood Adams has said, “I don’t think it was a good time.”

Adams attended Brentwood School, where he developed a love of theater despite his limited range as an actor (like all the men in his family, he was quite large, growing to nearly six-and-a-half feet as an adult, limiting the roles he could play). He then read English at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he wrote comedy sketches for student revues; eventually he became one of the chief writers for the storied theatrical club Footlights.

After graduating in 1974, Adams lived in Islington, a fashionable district of London, trying to work as a sketch writer, selling occasional pieces for radio shows while he worked a number of odd jobs, including chicken shed cleaner and hotel bodyguard. Some of his Footlights work, when televised in 1974, caught the eye of Graham Chapman, one of the comedians behind Monty Python’s Flying Circus and himself a Footlights alumnus. Impressed with the writing, Chapman struck up a friendship with Adams that led to Adams’s writing a sketch for Monty Python. However, at the end of 1974, Adams’s career appeared to be going nowhere, and he succumbed to a deep depression.

In February 1977 Adams got the break he had been hoping for. He was commissioned to write a comic science fiction series for BBC radio. Soon after accepting the commission, he was also asked to write a four-part serial for the science fiction series Doctor Who. Suddenly overburdened with work, Adams struggled to finish the radio series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. His work habits were erratic, and he was prone to listlessness and depression. He also failed to meet deadlines, a quirk that would plague him throughout his career.

When the series premiered on March 8, 1978, however, it was an instant success. Humorously riffing on many of the conventions of science fiction, Adams related the story of Arthur Dent, a perfectly boring, middle-class Englishman who is whisked off into interstellar adventures by his friend Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien. The title of the series refers to a popular electronic guidebook for which Ford researches and writes articles. Dent meets fantastic characters such as Zaphod Beeblebrox, a two-headed hipster and felon, and Marvin the Paranoid Android, a robot so intelligent that, serving aboard Zaphod’s stolen starship, it sees how pitiful its condition is and becomes permanently depressed.

The success of the show earned Adams a position as producer in BBC radio’s light entertainment department. A second series was commissioned, and a stage version of the series was first performed the following May. The novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published in October 1979 and became an overnight best seller. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a sequel to Hitchhiker’s, was published in 1980, and Adams adapted Hitchhiker’s for television (broadcast in 1981).

Adams’s life changed dramatically in the 1980s. He became an outspoken technophile, lecturing on the virtues of information technology and the possibilities of the personal computer. He moved in with his lover, Jane Elizabeth Belson, a barrister, in 1981, and began hosting renowned parties in Islington. A third installment in the Hitchhiker’s series, Life, the Universe, and Everything, appeared in 1982, while a fourth, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, came out in 1984. By this time, Adams had an international cult following.

Adams wrote several other books during this time that were unrelated to Hitchhiker’s. A new, less successful series was launched with Dirk Gen- tly’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and its sequel, The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul (1988). Its title character, Dirk Gently, is a private detective who solves mysteries by examining the “interconnectedness of all things.”

Adams was most proud of a very different book. Traveling to Indonesia, Zaire, New Zealand, China, and Mauritius with zoologist Mark Carwardine, he wrote of the endangered animals they tracked down and studied in Last Chance to See (1990), an impassioned, humorous, and humanistic work.

Belson and Adams married in 1991 and had a daughter, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, in 1994. Adams found it increasingly difficult to write during the 1990s (He is widely quoted as saying, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”) and spent much of his time on the lecture circuit. He completed what would be the final Hitchhiker novel, Mostly Harmless, in 1992 and devoted the rest of his time to trying to secure funding for a film version of Hitchhiker’s. In 1999 he and his family moved to Santa Barbara, California.

Adams was hard at work on a screenplay for Hitchhiker’s when he died of a heart attack at his local gym in Montecito, California, on May 11, 2001. His screenplay was eventually completed, and the long-awaited film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was released in 2005.

Adams’s Hitchhiker books have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, inspiring at least two generations of fans. Many prominent writers, musicians, and scientists have declared their admiration for Adams and his work. Adams was a rare writer, one who successfully fused satire, comedy, science fiction, and philosophy in his works and crossed genre lines to win a broad and devoted fan base. Every May 25, an informal holiday known as Towel Day is held to commemorate him. During the day, fans carry around a towel all day, alluding to the importance of towels in the Hitchhiker series.

Critical Analysis. With The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Douglas Adams effectively invented a subgenre of literature: comedic science fiction. Although Adams was not the first to write humorous science fiction, his original vision of the universe fused memorable wit and superb satire of the cliches of science fiction with philosophical insight and a deep understanding of advanced scientific concepts in a way that has been widely imitated but never repeated.

Part of the series’ appeal lies in its insertion of an utterly normal protagonist, Arthur Dent, into fantastically absurd and humiliating situations. At the start of the first book, his house is about to be destroyed to make way for a bypass when he is whisked onboard an alien spaceship by his friend Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien. The hitchhiking duo narrowly escape the destruction of the Earth by the very aliens whose ship they have invaded, the Vogons. A dour race obsessed with bureaucratic procedure, the Vogons torture Dent and Prefect with a reading of the captain’s poetry before ejecting them into space.

Improbably enough, just before they are about to expire, they are picked up by a passing spaceship stolen by a friend of Prefect’s, Zaphod Beeblebrox. The spaceship, Heart of Gold, is powered by an experimental engine, the Infinite Improbability Drive. Dent, Prefect, Beeblebrox, along with the human Trillian and the immeasurably intelligent (and depressed) Marvin the android, proceed throughout the galaxy on a series of misadventures that involve hyperintelligent mice, a computer designed to provide an answer to the “question of life, the universe, and everything” (the answer is “42”), and the Krikkiters, a genocidal alien race whose planet has been locked away in an envelope of slow time, only to be opened by the reassembly of an artifact called the Wikkit Gate.

One of the other most beloved aspects of the series is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself, an electronic guidebook collaboratively written and edited by its users, whose philosophical and humorous passages pepper the five novels in the series. The Guide is an example of Adams’s technological prescience, prefiguring both PDAs and wikis. Together, the Guide passages and the journeys of Dent and his companions depict an elaborately imagined universe.

Adams’s work has been rightly compared to that of Lewis Carroll, Kurt Vonnegut, and P. G. Wodehouse. His wordplay, economical wit, and thought-experiments with bizarre technologies and scientific notions are balanced with a deep sense of mixed melancholy and wonder at existence itself. The series has attained the status of a modern classic.

Other Works by Douglas Adams:
The Salmon of Doubt. New York: Harmony Books, 2002.

Works about Douglas Adams:
Philips, Deborah. “Douglas Adams.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 261, British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Since 1960, edited by Darren Harris-Fain, 3-7. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2002.

Simpson, M. J. Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams. Boston: Justin, Charles & Co., 2003.
Webb, Nick. “Adams, Douglas Noel (1952-2001).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, January 2005. Available online. URL: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/75853. Accessed January 15, 2008. Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.

Yeffeth, Glenn. The Anthology at the End of the Universe: Leading Science Fiction Authors on Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2005.

Fleur Adcock: Award-Winning NZ-British Poet & Literary Translator

Fleur Adcock was born in Papakura, New Zealand, but spent several years (1939-47) in England. Her mother, Irene Adcock, is also a writer, as is her sister, Marilyn Duckworth. After her return to New Zealand, in 1954 Adcock received a classics degree at Victoria University at Wellington. For several years she was married to the poet Alistair Campbell, with whom she had two sons. She has worked as a librarian and university lecturer in both New Zealand and Britain. For the last 20 years she published poetry and translated and edited poetry collections. She also talks about poetry for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).

Adcock has been referred to as the “expatriate poet” because she lives and writes in England and New Zealand, and both countries claim her. She is considered one of the best women poets writing in Great Britain now. Her first book of poetry, The Eye of the Hurricane (1964), is filled with poems about her life in New Zealand and gives evidence of her training in the classics. She has commented: “The content of my poems derives largely from those parts of my life which are directly experienced, relationships with people or places; images and insights which have presented themselves sharply from whatever source, conscious or subconscious; ideas triggered off by language itself.”

In a poem called “For a Five-Year-Old,” she tries to explain the strangeness of adult behavior toward animals, admitting that she has trapped mice and shot wild birds: “But that is how things are: I am your mother, And we are kind to snails.” In “Richey,” a poem published in The Scenic Route (1974), Adcock examines her Irish ancestry: “My great-grandfather Richey Brooks began in mud: at Moneymore; ‘a place of mud and nothing else’ he called it. . . .” The poems in this collection are shorter and filled with more images than her usual style. The collection The Inner Harbour (1979) deals with love and loss and the ways in which Adcock was able to accept changes in her life.

In addition to her many volumes of poetry, Adcock has translated other poets, such as Grete Tartler’s Orient Express: Poems from Romanian. Adcock was also the editor of The Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry (1987) and of The OxFord Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982). Her many awards include the New Zealand National Book Award in 1984, and she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1996.

A Work about Fleur Adcock:
Bleiman, Barbara, ed. Five Modern Poets: Fleur Adcock, U. A. Fanthorpe, Tony Harrison, Anne Stevenson, Derek Walcott. New York: Longman, 1993.