Don't Panic

by Neil Gaiman

  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 I 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 I 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 demands: he said he wanted £2,000 now, and ten per cent of Hitchhiker’s in perpetuity, so whenever the name The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was used I’d get ten per cent. 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 explained, “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 overreaction 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 £1,500 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?

  — Cut from first radio 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 sixty thousand 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 ten thousand), 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 Doctor 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 wo
rries me —Terry Jones

  Space age comedy for everyone… 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 entertaining 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 Ian 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’s on the cover, but wrote it Hitch Hiker’s 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’s (with an apostrophe, without a hyphen, and making it into one word). Which is also, incidentally, the form used in this book (except when quoting a source which used one of the various spellings mentioned above). 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, re-listening 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 garnered 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 started 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 42 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 so original, and secondly because it makes you laugh.”

  Geoffrey Perkins:

  “I know at the time we made the radio series I felt that it was the logical successor to Monty Python, really. There’s no doubt that Hitchhiker’s appeals to the same kind of audience and has the same sort of comedy. That was an initial reason for the success. The title plays an important part. Somebody once described it in an article as ‘a programme somewhat clumsily entitled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, which is a very erroneous judgement. I knew it hit a nerve from the start, when the letters started pouring in. The timing was obviously good. It was Star Wars time, there was a lot of interest in space. Also, when people think of space they tend to think of something very comic-strip and here was something very erudite and witty. That surprised people. But it appealed to everyone. The intellectuals compared it to Swift, and the fourteen-year-olds enjoyed hearing depressed robots clanking around.”

  * 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.

  10

  ALL THE GALAXY’S A STAGE

  There have been three major productions of Hitchhiker’s in the theatrical world. Two of these have been successful. The other was a disaster of epic proportions. It is somewhat unfortunate, in this case, that the disaster is the one that got noticed. The first production was put on at the ICA [Institute for Contemporary Arts] in London on lst-9th May 1979, presented by Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool. ‘Staged’ might be the wrong word for this production. The actors performed on little ledges and platforms, while the audience, seated on a scaffolded auditorium that floated around the ICA on air skates, filled with compressed air, was pushed around the hall at the height of 1/2,000th of an inch by hardworking stage hands.

  The ninety-minute-long show was a great success.

  Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters were on sale in the bar, and, for the eighty people who fitted into Mike Hust’s airborne seating system, it was a great evening. Unfortunately, every hour brought 150 phone calls for tickets, all doomed to failure as the 640 tickets for the show’s run had been sold out long before it opened. (Apparently an organisation with the
same initials as the ICA, the International Communications Association, got so fed up with misrouted calls for tickets that they wound up closing their switchboard for a week, and stopped Communicating.)

  The reviews were unanimous in their praise. A typical review from The Guardian, having praised the costumes and hovercraft, stated, “Chris Langham is an utterly ordinary Arthur… and is thus a beautiful counterpart to the cunning Ford (Richard Hope), the two-headed schizophrenic Beeblebrox (Mitch Davies and Stephen Williams, as a space-age version of a pantomime horse with two heads, two legs, and three hands) and the pyrotechnics of Campbell’s production.” At the time it was announced that they were hoping to revive the show “as soon as they could find a hall large enough to accommodate a 500 seater hovercraft”.

  This was, it should be borne in mind, before the publication of the book or the release of the first record, when nobody knew how much of a cult success Hitchhiker’s was or was going to be.

  The next performance began life some 300 miles due west in the Theatr Clwyd, a Welsh theatre company. Director Jonathan Petherbridge had taken the scripts of the first radio series and transformed them into a play, performed around Wales from 15th January until 23rd February 1980.

  Announced as the “First Staged Production of Douglas Adams’s Original Radio Scripts” the company would either perform two episodes an evening, or, on certain long evenings, the entire three hours of script in ‘blockbuster’ performances, during which “essential space rations” were handed out to the audience at half-hourly intervals. (Not only did the bar sell Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, but the Coffee Lounge sold Algolian Zylbatburgers.) The Theatr Clwyd performance was so successful that they were offered the opportunity to take their production to London’s prestigious Old Vic Theatre. Unfortunately, by this time Douglas had offered the stage rights to Ken Campbell, who had decided to stage another production at the Rainbow Theatre in London, a rock venue that seated three thousand people, in August.