Dont Panic
Page 17
grateful for the fact that he wasn't in this incredibly embarrassing
position, and had ended up a walrus.
"The reason I made it a walrus, was... well, first of all I
didn't know what the alternative life would be, and then when
Gary Day Ellison, who designed the cover, showed me that
lenticular picture I thought, `I might as well make him a walrus'.
It's because Gary always designs a cover that can clearly not have
any function in relation to the book, and if I still had a chance I'd
always try and work it in somehow. Not that it ever actually
happened that way."
In November the book was released in England and
America. The English cover was all black, with a lenticular
picture of a dinosaur that changed into a walrus (and vice versa)
stuck on the front. (There are no dinosaurs or walruses in So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.) The American cover,
marginally more logically, showed some leaping dolphins. (There
are no dolphins in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, but there
are more dolphins than there are walruses or dinosaurs.)
It was in October that the world's most expensive
Hitchhiker's book was sold. At a dinner-party at Douglas's
British inventorial entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair spotted a pre-
publication copy of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and
asked if he could have it. Douglas refused, pointing out it was the
only copy he had, whereupon Sir Clive whipped out his cheque
book, and offered Douglas $1,000 for the charity of his choice,
providing he could have the book.
Douglas had him make the cheque out to Greenpeace.
However, Douglas's hesitation to give the book away may
have less to do with the fact it was his only copy, and more to do
with the fact that it was not a book with which he was altogether
happy.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is very different from
the other Hitchhiker's books, and the critical reaction to it was
mixed. For many of the fans it was a disappointment: they
wanted more Zaphod, more Marvin, more space; they wanted
Arthur to make it with Trillian; they wanted to find out how the
Agrajag problem resolved: why Arthur Dent was the most
important being in the universe (and even funnier than the frogs),
they wanted towel jokes and extracts from The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. What they got was a love story. So Long, and Thanksfor All
the Fish is no longer science fiction, and, for much of the book, it
is no longer humour (although it is often funny, and has certain
science fiction elements in it). It was not the book the fans were
expecting, and many of them were disappointed.
Many of the mainstream critics, however, preferred it, finding
the gentler pace and the relatively down-to-earth tone easier to
cope with, and coming up with such quotes as "Fish is the best
evidence yet that Adams is not simply a funny sci-fi writer but a
bomb-heaving satirist" (Time); others commented that it read as if
it had been written in a hotel room in two weeks, with such
comments as "a work in which bits and pieces of different
sketches orbit around a non-existent plot" (The Times). So Long,
and Thanks for All the Fish went on to sell as well as any of the
other books, and won the City Limits `best book' award for 1985
(voted on by the readership of the London listings magazine).
Talking to Adams about the book, one finds a mix of
emotions: relief and slight embarrassment that it sold as well as it
did, added to the feeling that he had `used up a life' with the book.
Why weren't the expected characters in the book? "Panly
because they didn't fit, and partly because I didn't want to do
them. It was like a chore - people were saying, `Let's have a
Zaphod bit', and I didn't feel like doing a Zaphod bit!"
This attitude of `I am not going to buckle down to the wishes
of the fans' comes across in the book, to its detriment, most
obviously in Chapter 25, where, having asked, somewhat
rhetorically, whether or not Arthur Dent ever indulges the
pleasures of the senses other than flying and drinking tea,
Douglas comments, `Those who wish to know should read on.
Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit
and has Marvin in it.' It is patronising and unfair. And
undoubtedly would have been cut from a later draft of the
manuscript had there been one. (Occasionally Douglas threatens that at some future date he will rewrite all four
Hitchhiker's books into one massive, self-consistent tome.)
Douglas continued, "You see, I didn't even want to do
Marvin, but then what happened was that I finally had an idea of
something I wanted to do that would have to involve Marvin,
which is the way it should be. I didn't have that with Zaphod, or
I couldn't. But when I needed the extra element for that scene it
looked like a job for Marvin.
"It's very strange, that walking across the desert scene, when
they find the message. I felt very haunted by that when I wrote it
- it's not panicularly funny or anything, but curiously enough I
was very proud of it. I actually felt very sorry for, and sympathetic
with Marvin in that I felt close to the character in a way that
sometimes I hadn't because I was just doing it out of duty.
"But yes, the book is lighter weight than the others. In a
sense I came close to owning up to that on the last page."
It was hard not to see parallels between Arthur Dent's return
from space (which involves telling everybody he's just returned
from California) and Douglas Adams's return from a not
altogether happy year in Los Angeles to the safer environs of
Islington; and while he maintains that Fenchurch is no relation to
Jane, his fiance (Fenchurch being based more on his memories of
adolescent love), he admits there is an element of this in the book.
"It wouldn't be fanciful to say that there is an echo of my
return from LA in there. But I do think that one problem with
the book, and there are many, is that up to that point I had been
writing pure fantasy, which I'd had to do as I'd destroyed the
Earth in the first reel, so to speak. So my job was to make the
fantastical and dreamlike appear to be as real and solid as
possible, that was always the crux of Hitchhiker's.
"Whereas in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish a curious
kind of thing happened.I got back to the everyday and somehow
for the first time it seemed to be unreal and dreamlike. It was
rather in reverse. I think it's largely because I thought I'd get rid
of this problem of not having the Earth there to relate to by just
bringing it back, and I suppose a part of me knew, a part of me
said that you can't really do that. So therefore it wasn't the real
Earth, and therefore it was bound to become unreal and
dreamlike, and that was really a problem with the book.
"Also, you see, the character of Arthur Dent has undergone a
fundamental change by then, because up to that point he has been
our representative in a fa
ntastical world, he has been Everyman,
the person we can relate to, and through whose eyes we have seen
the strange things that have happened. Now suddenly it's been
turned around, and we have a real everyday Earth, and this
character who, far from being our representative, has just spent
the last eight years of his life alternately living in a cave on
prehistoric Earth or being flung around the galaxy.
"So he is no longer someone through whose eyes we can see
things. The whole thing has turned upside down, and I don't
think I had got to grips with that until I was too far committed.
"That's why I am staning afresh now, because I feel all the
lines have gotten rather too tangled."
Whatever happened to the `jumping off a cliff' plot? "It was a
structural idea I came up with which I still think is neat as a
structure, but doesn't work as a book. The book would start with
him leaping off a cliff, with the idea that just before you die your
life flashes before you. There was something he wanted to
remember, and he'd deal with what happened when he got to the
bottom when he got there. So the entire book would be a
flashback which would come from what he thought and he
remembered as he fell down the cliff. I decided after hacking
away at that for a while that it's a short story structure, but not a
novel structure. Some people might argue (and with, I think, a
certain amount of justice) that I didn't achieve a novel structure in
the end, so what was I making a fuss about?
"But I suppose one reason why a lot of that stuff went, why
it never materialised, was I had the feeling during that period of
the whole world looking over my shoulder while I was writing.
Every time someone would write to me and say, `What are you
going to do with this character?' or, `Why don't you do this to
resolve this situation?', then you instantly shy away from it and
think it's no longer yours to control.
"It seemed to me like there was too much to tie up and mop
up in Hitchhiker's, so that trying to write it like that would just
be a continual task of knotting up the loose ends, when in fact it
might be better just to think of something completely different to
do.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was to be the last word
on Hitchhiker's. At least in novel form; there were still to be the
computer games, the film, the towel, possibly more television and
more radio - even this book. But in novel form the story had
gone as far as it was going to go.
At least for then.
Douglas said so.
20
Do You Know Where Your Towel Is?
A TOWEL, AS EXPLAINED AT LENGTH in the Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, is a jolly useful thing.
A towel is also a fairly obvious piece of merchandising.
While the merchandising properties of a number of anifacts
mentioned in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy have obvious
commercial potential - Joo Janta sunglasses, for example, which
turn black when danger threatens, or Disaster Area records, or even
the Guide itself - technology has not yet reached the point where
these things could be manufactured in bulk, nor, indeed, at all.
Not so with towels.
At one point Marks and Spencer (A British chain store whose underwear can be found on two out of three British people.) considered marketing the
towel of the book; however, nothing came of this.
In 1984 Douglas had lunch with Eugene Beer, of Birmingham
publicists Beer-Davies. (Eugene was handling the publicity for the
Hitchhiker's computer game.) During the course of this lunch
Douglas mentioned the abonive Marks and Spencer towel project.
Eugene immediately saw the potential in real, authorised, money-
making towels, with the relevant page of Hitchhiker's emblazoned
on it. He began marketing them, taking out an advert in Private
Eye, and sending complimentary towels all over the place.
The complimentary towels were intended to cause the writers
who received them to recommend them in print, something which
happened almost without exception.
The towels were originally available in a son of purple and a
son of blue. They were large, strong, good value, and did all the
things that hitchhikery towels are well known for doing, in
addition to which they gave you something to- read on long
journeys, something that even Douglas Adams, in his initial
treatise on towels, failed to think of. The second edition of towels
were available in `Squornshellous Silver' and `Beeblebrox Brown',
and were 60" by 40" (A wide variety of merchandise, such as T-shirts, pens, badges, stickers, etc, is available from ZZ9 Plural 2 Alpha (37 Keen's Road, Croydon, Surrey, CRO 1AH). But no towels.).
21
Games with Computers
DOUGLAS ADAMS HAS ALWAYS been fascinated by gadgets of every
kind. His home, and indeed his life, is awash with all those little
devices designed to reduce the complications of the workaday
world. Televisions and amplifiers, computers and cameras, tape
players of all descriptions, electronic objects of every colour and
size. "The tendency for me to take the piss out of technology is
me taking the piss out of myself. Digital watches and a kitchen full
of juice extractors - I'm a sucker for it!"
While the initial success of Hitchhiker's allowed him to
indulge his passion for tape players, Walkmans and the like, he
remained for a long time on a battered manual typewriter, neither
liking nor trusting computers.
****************************************************
DEEP THOUGHT DESIGN:-
THE COMPUTER IS BASICALLY A TALL
WHITE TOWER WHICH TAPERS AS IT GOES
UP. AS IT GOES DOWN IT WIDENS OUT SO
THAT IT ACTUALLY BECOMES THE
FLOOR: YOU QUITE LITERALLY WALK UP
TO IT. TO EITHER SIDE OF IT AND SET
SLIGHTLY FORWARD OF IT ARE TWO
SIMILAR BUT SMALLER TOWERS. SET INTO
THE FRONT OF EACH TOWER IS A TV
SCREEN. THE SCREEN ON THE MAIN
TOWER HAS A PICTURE OF A MOUTH.
WHEN DEEP THOUGHT TALKS, THE
MOUTH MOVES IN SYNCH. ONE OF THE
OTHER SCREENS SHOWS A SINGLE EYE,
AND THE THIRD SCREEN SHOWS A SIDE
VIEW OF A SINGLE EAR. EACH EYE AND
EAR AND MOUTH SHOULD BE AS
ANONYMOUS AS POSSIBLE, BUT IT
SHOULD BE APPARENT THAT THEY ARE
NOT FROM THE SAME PERSON.
- Suggested design (first version) for Deep
Thought, from TV script, Episode Four.
***********************************************************
In a 1982 interview he revealed that he considered computers to
be, if not intrinsically malevolent, then useless - either
HACTARs or EDDlEs. He had just moved into the Islington
flat, and had found it impossible to convince the various utilities
companies' computers that he had in fact moved. "Dealing with
the American Express computer," he told the reporter, "has been
beyond Kafka's worst nightmares."
In retaliation he had created a scenario for Life, the Uni
verse,
and Everything in which a world much like our own is poised on
the brink of nuclear Armageddon, and tipped over the brink not
by a flock of geese or a madman's finger on a red button, but by a
change-of-address card fouling up a computer. The scene never
made it into the final draft.
He had tried to like computers, indeed had gone to a
computer show earlier that year, but had been overcome by
jargon and was forced to leave. His enthusiasm (bordering on
messianic fervour) for computers did not really begin until 1983,
when he spent seven months in Los Angeles, supposedly writing
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film screenplay.
While it is true that he did write one and a half drafts of a
screenplay over this time, it would be equally fair to say that he
spent much of the time playing with his word processor and
getting involved with interminable computer games.
Douglas had received many requests to turn Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy into a computer game, and had so far refused
all of them. However, the time spent playing computer games had
given him definite ideas: he knew he wanted the Hitchhiker's
ga