Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy (1979)
What put the 42 in CompLit 342?
Douglas Adams, 1952-2001
• British writer, broadcaster, and environmentalist
• Wrote episodes of Doctor Who before HG2G;
also portions of the last episode of Monty
Python’s Flying Circus
• Also wrote non-fiction on science, technology,
and endangered species
• Published 7 complete SF novels, three short
stories, one collaborative work, and one
incomplete one
The “Trilogy of Five”
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
(1980)
• Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982)
• So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (1984)
• Mostly Harmless (1992)
• Plus the short story Young Zaphod Plays it Safe
(1986)
Adams on Writing Science Fiction
• “I didn’t mean to [write SF]. I just exaggerate a
lot.”
• “I never set out to parody SF, but to use the
trappings of SF to look at other things.”
• “I’m not a parodist - parody is one of the easier
forms of writing, and it’s one that’s too easy to
slip into when you aren’t trying hard enough.”
• “No matter how good the ideas are, a lot of [SF]
is terribly badly written.”
Adams’ Use of Humour and Satire
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Genre conventions
Themes - especially paradoxes
Narrative techniques
Anecdotal writing style
Self-referential humour (including references to his
earlier work in both comedy and ‘serious’ SF)
• How ‘traditional’ is it? How ‘New Wave’? Is it both or
neither?
• Ironic post-apocalyptic narrative
• Satire as reflection on the ‘state of the genre’
Multimedia Interpretations
• The original radio plays (became the first two books)
• The 1981 BBC miniseries (based mostly on the radio play but
incorporates material from the first two books)
• The 2005 movie (based on the first book but incorporates material
from the other four)
• The second series of radio plays (based on the last three books)
• The 1984 computer game (based mostly on the first book)
• Graphic novels and photoillustrated editions
• Stage productions
• Recordings and audiobooks
• Adams’ Online Encyclopedia, H2G2
• Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing (2009)
From the introduction to the
anthology of all 5 books:
• “The history of HG2G is…so complicated that
every time I tell it I contradict myself, and
whenever I do get it right I’m misquoted.”
• “The Guide has appeared in so many forms books, radio, a television series, records, and…a
major motion picture - each time with a different
storyline that even its most acute followers have
become baffled at times.”
• Adams considered the radio play to be his
favourite version, but was interested in varying
the story to fit each medium it was in
Adams on Multimedia
• “When radio came out, everyone said books will disappear. When
television came out, everyone said that radio will disappear. It was
the same when movies came out. People find new ways of enjoying
themselves. There's something about the experience of a book
which nothing else will ever replace….but it doesn't mean anything
else has got to be thrown out.”
• “Moving something from one medium to another is very
interesting…like carrying a picture or a piece of clothing from one bit
of lighting to another. Suddenly it looks very different. What interests
me…is the way in which…different media interrelate – you can hand
things off from one to another, you can exploit each other’s
strengths and weaknesses.”
The Guide
• Expository narrative device
• Self-referential commentary
• HG2G vs. Encyclopedia
Galactica (reference to Isaac
Asimov’s Foundation)
• Master narrative / ‘sacred’ text,
yet originally created for
mundane purposes (inspired
by a real travelogue of Europe)
• Inaccuracies / discrepancies /
need for constant updating
• Seeming irrelevancy of entries
– but are they really?
• “In case of major discrepancy
it’s always reality that’s got it
wrong”
42
• Is there an answer to
everything?
• If we found the answer, or
the question, would we
know we did?
• Can one book give us all
the answers?
• What’s more important:
the question or the
answer?
The Babelfish
• Parody of “universal
translator” convention
(also now the name of a
universal translation
website)
• Removal of barriers to
communication - more of
a problem than it solves?
• Babelfish and the
existence (or not) of
God?
Adams and God
• “Isn’t it enough to see that a
garden is beautiful without
having to believe that there are
fairies at the bottom of it?”
• Adams’ “evangelical atheism”
vs. his fascination with
religions
• e.g. philosophers’ objection to
Deep Thought; Babelfish
debate; planet factory and
creationism; Viltvodel VI
subplot in the film
• Is Adams satirizing God, or
organized religion?
Adams and Animals
• Adams’ environmentalist work
• Relative intelligence of humans and
animals, esp. dolphins and mice
• Who’s really the more intelligent species,
and why?
• Paradoxical role of Earth and humans:
“mostly harmless”, yet a key part of the
search for the meaning of life
Adams and Technology
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Early advocate of hypertext; one
of the first people in UK to own a
Mac; H2G2 website as
precursor/alternative to Wikipedia
Space travel
AI and androids
Technology often causes as many
problems as it solves
“Given the destruction caused by
the randomness in the universe,
why do we also have to deal with
the phone company?”
Significance of seemingly
mundane items (towels, digital
watches)
Improbable Fictional Worlds
• Improbability Drive as parody of both physics
and possible-worlds theory
• Adams called the sum total of all possible worlds
“The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash”
• Different versions of the story as counterpart
worlds; use of counterpart worlds in the story
itself
• “We talk about one universe but the universe I
live in…is revealed to my own senses…and the
universe you live in is absolutely subjective to
you.”
Adams’ Use of Social Satire
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References to the socioeconomic
and political conditions of Britain in
the 1970s; possible relation to the
British “alternative comedy”
movement
British establishment’s obsession
with paperwork and bureaucracy
Representations of
corporate/consumer culture: e.g.
Magrathean planet factory; Sirius
Cybernetics Corp.; Answer to
Everything as profit motive
Mr. Prosser and Vogons as parallel
characters (also suggested by
Prosser’s ancestry?)
Depiction of Vogon society in later
adaptations
Role of art: planetary formations;
poetry as weapon of mass
destruction
• Zaphod as Adams’
satirical representation of
politicians
• Extra head and limb
relating to his character?
• Changing nature of his
motives in different
versions: Money? Fame?
Power? Just because?
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Explanations of Ford’s name:
mistaking the dominant lifeform;
footnote on his “real” name
“Mostly harmless” - commentary
on editors? Deliberate
understatement?
Arthur’s search for the perfect cup
of tea vs. Ford’s search for the
perfect party
Arthur and Ford as ironic
observers and guides to each
other as well as to the reader
Possible origin of Arthur’s name:
The Plain Man’s Pathway to
Heaven (1601) - HG2G as ironic
spiritual biography?
• Arthur as “everyman”
character vs. Trillian as
misunderstood genius
(relating to Ford’s opinion
of astrophysicists?)
• Trillian as challenge to
gender stereotypes in
“traditional” SF while still
fitting into them
Adams on the Nature of Life, the Universe, and
Everything
From a 1998 Lecture at Cambridge
http://www.douglasadams.se/stuff/sand.html
• On life: “a collection that includes a fruit fly and Richard Dawkins
and the Great Barrier Reef is an awkward set of objects to try and
compare. When we try and figure out what the rules are that we are
looking for, trying to find a rule that’s self-evidently true, that turns
out to be very, very hard.”
• “in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is,
because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in
your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.”
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On God: “Man the maker looks at his world and says ‘So who made this
then?’ Who made this? — you can see why it’s a treacherous question.
Early man thinks, ‘Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about
who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger,
much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I
tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male’. And so
we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it
with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself, ‘If
he made it, what did he make it for?’ Now the real trap springs, because
early man is thinking, ‘This world fits me very well. Here are all these things
that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me
nicely’ and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it,
made it for him.”
The “puddle” analogy: we perceive the world as being made for us, but were
we made for it instead?
• “as we become more and more scientifically literate, it’s worth
remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated
our world may have some function that it’s worth trying to
understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than
throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we
may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first
place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them,
or something like them, to be there.”
• e.g. the monetary system, which nowadays is based on mutual
agreement more than on physical objects
• Purpose of fictional worlds (worldviews, etc.) is to help us explain
things in the actual world we don’t yet understand
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On the universe: “if you imagine that our Universe is simply one layer and
that there is an infinite multiplicity of universes spreading out on either side,
not only does it solve the problem, but the problem simply goes away. This
is exactly how you expect light to behave under those circumstances.
Quantum mechanics has claims to be predicated on the notion that the
Universe behaves as if there was a multiplicity of universes, but it rather
strains our credulity to think that there actually would be.”
“One way or another, this is a deeply misleading Universe. Wherever we
look it’s beginning to be extremely alarming and extremely upsetting to our
sense of who we are—great, strapping, physical people living in a Universe
that exists almost entirely for us—that it just isn’t the case.”
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Why Deep Thought? “The
computer...enables us to see how life
works. Now that is an extraordinarily
important point because it becomes
self-evident that life, that all forms of
complexity, do not flow downwards,
they flow upwards and there’s a whole
grammar that anybody who is used to
using computers is now familiar with,
which means that evolution is no
longer a particular thing, because
anybody who’s ever looked at the way
a computer program works, knows that
very, very simple iterative pieces of
code, each line of which is
tremendously straightforward, give rise
to enormously complex phenomena in
a computer.”
Adams and Other Writers
• Influenced more by New Wave (incl. Lem and Dick) than
by “traditional” SF, when influenced by SF at all
• Themes shared by Adams and Lem: consequences of
extraterrestrial contact; role of academic/expository
discourse; observation and description of otherworldly
phenomena; extensive uses of wordplay
• Themes shared by Adams and Dick: role of AI and
animals, esp. in relation to humans; roles of
corporate/consumer culture; post-apocalyptic narratives;
playful responses to SF and to the actual world