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Dont Panic

Page 17

by Dont Panic [lit]


  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

 

 

 


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