Dont Panic
Page 1
Scanned and corrected by Dirk Gently- as usual. If you have some interesting books to be scanned (Finnish and Estonian preferred!), and they'd interest me as well, you can contact me. Don't forget the three letters: i-R-C! Sorry, no Email addy is possible. I had lots of probs scanning/editing this text, so it'd be great (if you are a DNA fan) if you sent me some greets in demoz/diskmags of yours, if you appreciate my effort to make this book available for you.
I recommend you keeping the file's Word format coz I've edited the text with Bold and Italic characters as well.
There were some TIFFs as well in the archive. COVER.TIF was the TrueColor TIFF of the cover. The other TIFFs were:
6.tif: the name (and the text) speaks for itself :) (600 dpi, BW 256, 20%)
APP1_1... APP1_4.tif: Appendix 1's 4 pages (900 dpi, BW 256, 20%)
Anyway, to make life easier, I've also typed in the contents of the
mentioned TIFs so you won't need to get the TIFFs.
*************************COVER***********************
'IT'S ALL
ABSOLUTELY
DEVASTATINGLY
TRUE -
EXCEPT THE BITS
THAT ARE LIES'
This is the story of an ape-descended human called
Douglas adams who, in a field in Innsbruck, in 1971,
had an idea.
It us also the story of a book called, at a very high level
of improbality, The Hith Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy;
of the radio series that started it all; the five book
trilogy it comprises; and the computer game, towel
and television series that it, in its turn, has spawned.
'DESERVES AS MUCH CULT
SUCCESS AS THE HITCH HIKER'S
BOOKS THEMSELVES'
Time Out
REVISED & UPDATED
************************************************
********************************************************************
`Hilarious fun... a source of much delightful trivia'
- Publisbers Weekly
`Fanciful and irreverent... adds much extra information'
- Forecast
`Droll and informative... indispensable'
- American Library Association
`Indispensable... a treasure trove of quotes and anecdotes'
- Locus
Full of fun... and much more information than most books
of this type'
- Science Fiction Chronicle
`An excellent insight into the creative process'
- Vector
BOOKS BY DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe, and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts
The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief
Christmas Book (Editor)
The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd)
Thc Decper Mcaning of Liff (with John Lloyd)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Thc Long Dark Tca-Timc of thc Soul
Last Chance to See (with Mark Carwardine)
OTHER BOOKS BY NEIL GAIMAN
Black Orchid
Thc Books of Magic
Ghastly Beyond Belief
Sandman: Thc Doll's House
Sandman: Dream Country
Sandman: A Game of You
Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes
Sandman: Season of Mists
Violent Cases
DON'T PANIC - DOUGLAS ADAMS & THE
HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
ISBN 185286 411 7
Published by
Titan Books Ltd
19 Valentine Place
London SE1 8QH
First edition published as `Don't Panic: The Official
Hitehhiker's Guide to tbe Galaxy Companion' January 1988
Second revised edition July 1993
1098765432
Copyright (C) Neil Gaiman 1987,1993
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all extracts from
the works of Douglas Adams are copyright Douglas
Adams 1987-1993 and used by permission of William
Heinemann Ltd
Cover illustration `Swarm Fish' (C) 1993 Britstock-IFA Ltd
used with permission.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue
record for this book is available from thc British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by
way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox and Wyman Ltd,
Reading, Berhshire
Because she's threatened me with consequences too dreadful
to consider if I don't dedicate a book to her...
And because she's taken to starting every transatlantic
conversation with "Have you dedicated a book to me yet?"...
I would like to dedicate this book to intelligent life forms
everywhere.
And to my sister, Claire.
CONTENTS
Foreword ix
0 The Hitchhiker's Gvide to Europe 1
1 DNA 3
2 Cambridge and Other Recurrent Phenonema 9
3 The Wilderness Years 14
4 Gherkin Swallowing, Walking
Backwards and All That 19
5 When Yov Hitch Upon a Star 23
6 Radio, Radio 31
1 A Slightly Unreliable Producer 43
8 Have Tardis, Will Travel 47
9 H2 G2 53
10 All the Galaxy's a Stage 62
11 "Childish, Pointless, Codswalloping Drivel..." 68
12 level 42 72
13 Of Mice, ond Men, ond Tired TV Producers 76
14 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 101
15 Invasion USA 105
16 Life, the Universe, ond Everything 111
11 Making Movies 119
18 Liff, and Other Places 125
19 SLATFAT fish 131
20 Do You Know Where Your Towel Is? 146
21 Games with Computers 148
22 Letters to Douglas Adams 157
23 Dirk Gently and Time for Tea 167
24 Saving the World at No Extra Charge 174
25 Douglas and Other Animals 179
26 Anything That Happens, Happens 185
Appendix I: Hitchhiker's - the Original Sypnosis 191
Appendix II: The Variant Texts of Hitchhiker's-
What Happens Where and Why 195
Appendix III: Who's Who in the Galaxy-
Some Comments by Douglas Adams 201
Appendix IV: The Definitive How to Leave the Planet 210
Appendix V: Dr Who and the Krikkitmen-
an Excerpt from the film Treatment by Douglas Adams 214
Foreword
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY is the most
remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out
of the great publishing companies of Ursa Minor. It is about the
size of a paperback book, but looks more like a large pocket
calculator, having upon its face over a hundred flat press-buttons
> and a screen about four inches square, upon which any one of
over six million pages can be summoned almost instantly. It
comes in a durable plastic cover, upon which the words
DON'T PANIC!
are printed in large, friendly letters.
There are no known copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy on this planet at this time.
This is not its story.
It is, however, the story of a book also called, at a very high
level of improbability, The HitchHiker's Guide to tbe Galaxy; of
the radio series that started it all; the five-book trilogy it
comprises; the computer game, towel, and television series that it,
in its turn, has spawned.
To tell the story of the book - and the radio series, and the
towel - it is best to tell the story of some of the minds behind it.
Foremost among these is an ape-descended human from the
planet Earth, although at the time our story starts he no more
knows his destiny (which will include international travel,
computers, an almost infinite number of lunches, and becoming
mindbogglingly rich) than an olive knows how to mix a Pan
Galactic Gargle Blaster.
His name is Douglas Adams, he is six foot five inches tall,
and he is about to have an idea.
0
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe
THE IDEA IN QUESTION bubbled into Douglas Adams's mind
quite spontaneously, in a field in Innsbruck. He no longer has
any personal memory of it having happened. But it's the story he
tells, and, if there can be such a thing, it's the beginning. If you
have to take a flag reading THE STORY STARTS HERE and
stick it into the story, then there is no other place to put it.
It was 1971, and the eighteen-year-old Douglas Adams was
hitchhiking his way across Europe with a copy of The
Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe that he had stolen (he hadn't
bothered `borrowing' a copy of Europe on $5 a Day; he didn't
have that kind of money).
He was drunk. He was poverty-stricken. He was too poor to
afford a room at a youth hostel (the entire story is told at length
in his introduction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A
Trilogy in Four Parts in England, and The Hitchhiker's Trilogy in
the US) and he wound up, at the end of a harrowing day, flat on
his back in a field in Innsbruck, staring up at the stars.
"Somebody," he thought, "somebody really ought to write a
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
He forgot about the idea shortly thereafter.
Five years later, while he was struggling to think of a
legitimate reason for an alien to visit Earth, the phrase returned to him. The rest is history, and will be told in this book.
The field in Innsbruck has since been transformed into an
unremarkable section of autobahn.
***************************************************************
"When you're a student or whatever, and you can't afford a car,
or a plane fare, or even a train fare, all you can do is hope that
someone will stop and pick you up.
"At the moment we can't afford to go to other planets. We
don't have the ships to take us there. There may be other people
out there (I don't have any opinions about Life Out There,I just
don't know) but it's nice to think that one could, even here and
now, be whisked away just by hitchhiking."
- Douglas Adams,1984.
***************************************************************
1
DNA
DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID, commonly known as DNA, is the
fundamental genetic building block for all living creatures. The
structure of DNA was discovered and unravelled, along with its
significance, in Cambridge, England, in 1952, and announced to
the world in March 1953.
This was not the first DNA to appear in Cambridge,
however. A year earlier, on the 11 th March 1952, Douglas Noel
Adams was born in a former Victorian workhouse in Cambridge.
His mother was a nurse, his father a postgraduate theology
student who was training for holy orders, but gave it up when his
friends managed to persuade him it was a terrible idea.
His parents moved from Cambridge when he was six months
old, and divorced when he was five. At that time, Douglas was
considered a little strange, possibly even retarded. He had only
just learned to talk and, "I was the only kid who anybody I knew
has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide
open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on
inside, because there sure as hell didn't seem to be anything going
on on the outside!"
Douglas was a solitary child; he had few close friends, and
one sister, Susan, three years younger than he was.
In September 1959 he started at Brentwood School in Essex,
where he stayed until 1970. He says of the school, "We tended to
produce a lot of media trendies. Me, Griff Rhys Jones, Noel
Edmunds, Simon Bell (who wrote the novelisation for Griff and
Mel Smith's famous non-award winning movie, Morons from
Outer Space; he's not a megastar yet, but he gives great parties). A
lot of the people who designed the Amstrad Computer were at
Brentwood, as well. But we had a very major lack of archbishops,
prime ministers and generals."
He was not particularly happy at school, most of his
memories having to do with "basically trying to get off games".
Although he was quite good at cricket and swimming he was
terrible at football and "diabolically bad at rugby - the first time
I ever played it, I broke my own nose on my knee. It's quite a
trick, especially standing up.
"They could never work out at school whether I was terribly
clever or terribly stupid. I always had to understand everything
fully before I was prepared to say anything."
He was a tall and gawky child, self-conscious of his height:
"My last year at prep school we had to wear short trousers, and I
was so absurdly lanky, and looked so ridiculous, that my mother
applied for special permission for me to wear long trousers. And
they said no, pointing out I was just about to go into the main
school. I went to the main school and was allowed to wear long
trousers, at which point we discovered they didn't have any long
enough for me. So for the first term I still had to go to school in
short trousers."
His ambitions at that time had more to do with the sciences
than the arts: "At the age when most kids wanted to be firemen, I
wanted to be a nuclear physicist. I never made it because my
arithmetic was too bad - I was good at maths conceptually, but
lousy at arithmetic, so I didn't specialise in the sciences. If I had known what they were, I would have liked to be a software
engineer... but they didn't have them then."
His hobbies revolved around making model aeroplanes ("I had
a big display on top of a chest of drawers at home. There was a large
old mirror that stood behind them, and one day the mirror fell
forward and crushed the lot of them. I never made a model plane
after that,
I was upset, distraught for days. It was this mindless blow
that fate had dealt me..."), playing the guitar, and reading.
"I didn't read as much as, looking back, I wish I had done.
And not the right things, either. (When I have children I'll do as
much to encourage them to read as possible. You know, like hit
them if they don't.) I read Biggles, and Captain W. E. Johns's
famous science fiction series -I particularly remember a book
called Quest for the Perfect Planet, a major influence, that was.
There was an author called Eric Leyland, who nobody else ever
seems to have heard of: he had a hero called David Flame, who
was the James Bond of the ten-year-olds. But when I should have
been packing in the old Dickens, I was reading Eric Leyland
instead. But there you go - you can' tell kids, can you?"
Douglas was also an avid reader of Eagle, at that time
Britain's top children's comic, and home of Dan Dare. `Dan
Dare', drawn by artist Frank Hampson, was a science fiction strip
detailing the banle between jut-jawed space pilot Dare, his comic
sidekick Digby, and the evil green Mekon. It was in Eagle that
Douglas first saw print. He had two letters published there at the
age of eleven, and was paid the (then) enormous sum of ten
shillings each for them. The short story shows a certain
precocious talent (see page 6).
Of Alice in Wonderland, often cited as an influence, he says I
read - or rather, had read to me - Alice in Wonderland as a child
and I hated it. It really frightened me. Some months ago, I tried to
go back to it and read a few pages, and I thought, `This is jolly
good stuff, but still...' If it wasn't for that slightly nightmarish
quality that I remember as a kid I'd've enjoyed it, but I couldn't
shake that feeling. So although people like to suggest that Carroll
was a big influence - using the number 42 and all that - he really