Hardcore fans of Douglas Adams can make the worst of ambassadors for his work. They go too often for the lowest-hanging fruit — like towels, “Don’t Panic!”, or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a “trilogy” of five novels (a “joke” so thuddingly unfunny that I choose to believe it originated with some harried paperback copywriter rather than Adams himself). Or, God help us, “42.” All of these tropes had already had every last drop of novelty wrung from them thirty years ago. I can’t help but think about those awful teenagers — I should know; I used to be one — who march around repeating every line from their favorite Monty Python sketches verbatim in awful teenage faux-British accents in the belief that repetition is the soul of wit.
For me the real pleasures of Douglas Adams are subtler. He was a genuinely good crafter of sentences who cared about the way he put words onto the page, which is a quality rarer than it ought to be amongst popular writers. Even more unusually, he had a style all his own, crafting strange juxtapositions of words that shouldn’t work but somehow do. Some of the sentences in his books could have come from no one else’s pen. (Who else could have written, “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”?) His wordplay has drawn occasional comparison with Lewis Carroll:
“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water.”
Hitchhiker’s as a whole is much more than a collection of intermittently amusing gags and goofy aliens. It’s no more really about outer space than Gulliver’s Travels is about Lilliput and Brobdingnag. At the same time, however, Adams wasn’t sending up or satirizing science fiction itself in the manner of something like, say, Spaceballs. No, he was using his far-out settings and characters to comment on the real world around him: “I am writing about precisely here and now and putting it on an extreme epic cosmic scale to make fun of it.” Most of the best bits in Hitchhiker’s have recognizable analogues in human culture. It’s our sense of recognition, even if it’s subconscious, that makes them so funny. The Vogon captain is a stand-in for Adolf Eichmann and every other officiously bureaucratic little butcher in history. Through the band Disaster Area, “the loudest noise of any kind at all in the galaxy,” Adams mocked the pomposity of arena rock four years before This is Spinal Tap. Or take the resolutely non-sporting Adams’s description of Brockian Ultra Cricket as “a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away,” a description that could be applied to most of the team sports we humans play.
Like Jonathan Swift, Adams isn’t interested in peddling what he regards to be false comforts. There’s an unsettlingly nihilistic core to at least the first three and the fifth Hitchhiker’s books. Adams’s universe may be charmingly wacky, but it’s also meaningless and utterly uncaring, even if Adams still professed himself to be an agnostic rather than an atheist through the writing of most of the series. (That changed only in the lengthy gap between the fourth and fifth books, when he met and became hugely enamored of Richard Dawkins. He spent the remainder of his life as an outspoken atheist and anti-theist to rival Dawkins himself.) This is after all a series that begins with the destruction of the Earth and all its billions of inhabitants because a bunch of aliens randomly decide to build a “hyperspace bypass” through its orbit. He is cruel enough to offer a Nietzschean solution of finding meaning in self-actualization through the mouth of the old planet designer Slartibartfast, only to jerk it away as just as deluded as any other route to inner peace.
“Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.
“Where’s the sense in that? None that I’ve been able to make out. I’ve been doing fjords all my life. For a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award.
“In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and I’m old-fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough. Equatorial!” He gave a hollow laugh. “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
“And are you?”
“No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.”
It can all become a bit exhausting eventually, especially if you’re silly enough to try to devour the whole series in one gulp. Small wonder that Adams himself was prone to bouts of existential angst and depression throughout his life, during which times he admitted he could become embarrassingly like his terminally depressed robotic creation Marvin the Paranoid Android.
The emptiness at the heart of the other Hitchhiker’s books might explain why I like the fourth book, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, so much more than so many people, including on occasion Adams himself, tell me I ought to. The first time Adams tried to write a novel in the conventional way, from scratch (the first three books were all adapted from script treatments), it brings Adams’s hapless human victim-of-circumstances Arthur Dent back home to a resurrected Earth. (Don’t ask how; I’m not sure I even remember. No one reads Hitchhiker’s for the plot anyway.) There Adams lets him fall in love. More shockingly, it’s a disarmingly sweet little love story that, while funny, is funny in a completely different way from what we’ve come to expect. It shows the other side of Adams — the romantic — in passages that demand a noisily joyous soundtrack like, say, a little Raspberries. Or at least anything but Arthur’s album of bagpipe music.
That night, at home, as he was prancing round the house pretending to be tripping through cornfields in slow motion and continually exploding with sudden laughter, Arthur thought he could even bear to listen to the album of bagpipe music he had won. It was eight o’clock and he decided he would make himself, force himself, to listen to the whole record before he phoned her. Maybe he should even leave it till tomorrow. That would be the cool thing to do. Or next week sometime.
No. No games. He wanted her and didn’t care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, adored her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.
He actually caught himself saying things like “Yippee,” as he pranced ridiculously round the house. Her eyes, her hair, her voice, everything …
He stopped.
He would put on the record of bagpipe music. Then he would call her.
Would he, perhaps, call her first?
No. What he would do was this. He would put on the record of bagpipe music. He would listen to it, every last banshee wail of it. Then he would call her. That was the correct order. That was what he would do.
In moving his satirical eye to our own planet, So Long demonstrates how perceptive Adams really is about the world around him. The arguable highlight of the entire book is the biscuit story that Arthur shares with his new love Fenchurch. Unfortunately, it’s just too long to quote here. Instead I’ll share the alleged real-life origin of the story, which Adams later recounted in a speech collected posthumously in The Salmon of Doubt. (He helpfully translates “biscuit” into “cookie” here for the benefit of his American audience.)
This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.
Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?In the end I thought nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.
We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.
A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.
Whether in this or the more extended (and, truth be told, funnier) version in So Long, it’s a story that communicates worlds about Britishness. There’s been some doubt cast as to whether the story really happened at all; similar stories have apparently been passed around as urban legends since long before 1976. But then the story’s veracity or lack thereof isn’t actually the point, is it?
The series’s new tone didn’t last very long. When Adams returned to Hitchhiker’s under pressure from his publisher after a long hiatus, it was to write Mostly Harmless, a misanthropic little book that delights in blowing up the Earth and tormenting poor Arthur yet again and doesn’t even have the virtue of being all that funny. Big softie that I am, I prefer to pretend that it all ended with the perfectly tidy conclusion of So Long, with the Earth still intact, Arthur happily hitchhiking the galaxy again with Fenchurch, and Marvin dying — happy(!).
Amongst other things, Mostly Harmless was written as a sort of “Up Yours!” to Adams’s traditional fans, who hadn’t responded all that well to either the shift the Hitchhiker’s series had made in So Long or his Dirk Gently books, a pair of similarly earthbound philosophical detective novels he wrote between the fourth and fifth Hitchhiker’s books. (Some will tell you, and not without justification, that the Dirk Gently books were actually the best things Adams ever wrote.) It was a problem that frustrated Adams throughout his career: he wasn’t quite coming from the same place as most of the people who read what he wrote. While his fan base was rooted in science fiction, Adams never thought of himself as a science-fiction writer, in spite of some accidentally prescient things that sneaked into Hitchhiker’s — the most notable of which was the eponymous electronic guidebook itself, which is essentially Wikipedia running on a tablet, right down to the somewhat questionable veracity of much of what it offers and its editors’ somewhat, shall we say, idiosyncratic priorities.
Here’s what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.
The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterward. The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself…
Cue up the recipes, etc., etc. Earth, meanwhile, is dismissed in another of those jokes we never need to hear again as “mostly harmless.” Similarly, and as described in a recent MIT Technology Review article, Wikipedia lavishes more care on its “List of Pornographic Performers by Decade” than on some entire countries.
Still, Adams himself noted that “saying I write science fiction is like saying the Pythons make historical movies.” He always thought of himself as a comedy writer who happened to play in a science-fictional setting rather than a science-fiction writer whose work happened to be funny. Being a voracious reader in general, he had read his share of science fiction before creating Hitchhiker’s, but he wasn’t particularly obsessed with the stuff. Certainly his opinions of some of the icons of the field were hardly glowing. He said he “wouldn’t employ Isaac Asimov to write junk mail.” Arthur C. Clarke fared only a little better: he was “a little dull perhaps.” The only two science-fiction authors he spoke of in consistently glowing terms were Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Sheckley. These are also two of the relatively small stable of science-fiction writers who are genuinely, consistently funny, which perhaps shows where Adams’s priorities really lay. When Adams’s agent started booking him for science-fiction conventions in the first blush of Hitchhiker’s success, he was discomfited by the places, and soon asked to stick with traditional bookstore signings. His favorite writer was someone that most of the people who attended those conventions had probably never heard of: the great British wit, satirist, and societal deconstructor par excellence P.G. Wodehouse.
When others — and there have been tons of them, including heaps and heaps writing not books but games — try to write in the “comedy science fiction” genre Adams virtually invented, they tend to get the surface trappings but miss the Wodehousian wit and wisdom that underlie them. Thus you end up with, well, a collection of intermittently amusing gags and goofy aliens. You end up, in other words, with Space Quest. Infocom, however, had the luxury of working with Adams himself on their adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which led to something rather more interesting than most of the ludic works in this genre. Having bored and possibly inflamed you with my opinions, next time I’ll come down more on the side of facts as we look at how that most storied of Infocom collaborations came to be.
(Of the three extant Douglas Adams biographies, Neil Gaiman’s Don’t Panic is the most readable and M.J. Simpson’s Hitchhiker the most factually rigorous. The official biography can’t really be recommended on either count.
In addition to the biographies, I drew information for this article and those that follow from the April 1985 Compute!’s Gazette, the April/May 1985 Commodore Power Play, the April 1985 Electronic Games, and, most valuable of all, an interview a pre-Infocom Adams gave to the October 1982 issue of Your Computer. The image that begins this article was taken from the April 1985 Electronic Games.)
David Boddie
November 11, 2013 at 8:54 pm
It looks like someone has helpfully uploaded his Hyperland documentary to YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOsPKjbMvxY&list=PL4D736D136E07009A
Ian Schmidt
November 12, 2013 at 4:59 am
As one of probably many people who hated the Python movies because I’d heard every remotely good line about 5 billion times before I had a chance to see them, I’m just glad I read most of Adams’ books as they came out, before they fell into the same sort of black hole.
And yeah, strong arguments can be made for Dirk Gently being his best, or at least most coherent, work.
Felix
November 12, 2013 at 6:58 am
I think you’re being too harsh about what fans took from Douglas Adams’ work. “42” for example is an important concept, basically the modern version of Zen’s “mu” — “the question is wrong”. In fact, Douglas Adams himself was too dismissive of fans finding hidden meaning in his work. His famous line, “I may be a sad person, but I don’t make jokes in base 13”, is telling. We all find hidden meaning in books all the time that the author didn’t intend — that’s because we attach meaning to the Universe in general; it doesn’t have any by itself. (That, incidentally, is why authors shouldn’t try to intentionally put hidden meaning in their books; it doesn’t work that way and it’s pointless in the first place since readers will miss it and find their own instead.)
Remember, tropes are not cliches, and not a bad thing in and of themselves. ;)
Jimmy Maher
November 12, 2013 at 7:29 am
Oh, I don’t disagree at all that the whole story of Deep Thought and the Ultimate Question is possibly one of the smartest, wisest bits in all of Hitchhiker’s.
The problem I have is that 99% of the people who deploy “42” aren’t engaging with any of that at all. They’re just plastering “42” everywhere as some marker of nerdy inclusion. That’s not witty or droll and certainly not original in the least. It’s just kind of tedious. If you have something to SAY about the Ultimate Question or its Answer, by all means go ahead. But otherwise… just stop. Please.
Adams was always uncomfortable with his most rabid fans, partly because, as related in the article, he was kind of coming from a different place than most of them. But also because having someone worship the ground you walk on is just kind of weird in general. (I’ve had one or two come along like that since I started this blog, and I never quite know how to tell them that, hey, I’m just this guy, you know? I can only imagine how it must have been for Adams.) Also, so many of these fans just wanted more Hitchhiker’s and more 42 jokes when he really wanted to try something else. I think it’s to his credit that he was unfailingly polite to them in his public appearances, if not always bubbling over with warmth.
Captain N
March 22, 2018 at 7:49 pm
I get what the author is trying to say. Adams wasn’t really a “geek” in the sense that most geeky geeks are. I would say that he wasn’t really a geek at all, anymore than Vonnegut was.
I’m at the point in my life where I’m kind of sick of fanboy wanking, either in myself or others.
Good example, I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve read a journalistic article about space where the author just feels that he needs to remind you that “Space is big…really big…if fact you won’t believe…ect,ect!” If I see that again in one more article about space, I will…
Helm
November 13, 2013 at 2:13 am
What is a trope but a cliche once it’s identified as a trope and surfaced in an ‘archive of tropes’?
No other disagreements with your post, just this question that doesn’t need an answer.
@redpola
November 12, 2013 at 12:27 pm
“He was a genuinely good crafter of sentences” made me laugh out loud. Very clever. I hope it was an intentionally-terrible sentence! :)
Jimmy Maher
November 12, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Unintentionally terrible I’m afraid… and now that you’ve publicly called me out for it I can’t even fix it. :( This whole article is pretty bad, actually. Maybe I should have followed my first instinct and just thrown it in the bin.
Michael Davis
January 19, 2015 at 4:56 am
It feels awfully silly commenting on this over a year later, but for whatever it’s worth, I genuinely can’t tell what is terrible about the sentence. When taken literally, I can’t personally think of a way to say it better.
Greg Cox
August 11, 2017 at 12:22 am
For what it’s worth, I’m glad you didn’t. I’d rather have your writing imperfect than non-existant.
Duncan Stevens
November 12, 2013 at 1:49 pm
My first thought about Adams’s take on other SF authors was to wonder what he thought of Terry Pratchett, whose style is similar in a lot of ways, but as of 2000, at least, he hadn’t read anything by Pratchett.
http://slashdot.org/story/00/06/21/1217242/douglas-adams-answers-finally
Jimmy Maher
November 12, 2013 at 2:38 pm
From what I know of Pratchett, which is much less than I probably should, I’d say his books aren’t so much about his fantasy world of Discworld, in the way that, say, George R.R. Martin writes about whatever his world’s called, as they are about us. In other words, maybe he’s another humorist and social commentator who just happens to use the trappings of fantasy and science fiction.
matt w
November 12, 2013 at 5:20 pm
I sort of think Douglas Adams:Terry Pratchett::Raymond Chandler:Ross Macdonald. Both pairs are up to a lot of the same stuff, but where Adams and Chandler are more iconic Pratchett and Macdonald were more productive and, if more workmanlike, developed their worlds more. Discworld is a much more built-up world than Adams’s universe, and I think the same thing is true of Macdonald’s milieu as compared to Chandler’s (but I might not be able to defend that).
Anyway I’d definitely say that from the Pratchett I’ve read you’re right that he’s writing about our world. There’s a Discworld novel parodying Australia, another about the postal service, and the first part of the very first Discworld book is about the destructive force of introducing insurance policies and economics to a fantasy world, not to mention tourism.
Keith Palmer
November 12, 2013 at 9:43 pm
So far as comparisons to Adams’s work go, I’ve long held in my mind a comment made by Graham Nelson in the Inform Designer’s Manual, “the radio series and novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the Three Men in a Boat of the 1970s”. In the context of the quote, though, I’d be just as willing to agree it’s comparing “cultural impact.”
Jimmy Maher
November 12, 2013 at 10:52 pm
Clever, but not sure I can entirely agree if we are indeed not talking “cultural impact.” Three Men is just silly fun. Hitchhiker’s is silly, but does have some pretty profound things to say — or at least some wise/cogent observations to make. At risk of getting too grandiose, I’d actually be tempted to plump for Gulliver’s Travels myself.
Duncan Stevens
November 13, 2013 at 3:34 pm
There’s definitely plenty of social commentary in Pratchett’s novels, though Pratchett also spends a fair amount of time parodying fantasy itself; I wouldn’t call Adams a parodist. (Maybe a satirist? It’s pretty scattershot satire.)
Martin’s books aren’t parody, nor are they social commentary except in a very indirect sense, I believe he’s said that one thing he intended to do with his novels–which are very loosely based on the Wars of the Roses–was to show how horrible medieval warfare was for pretty much everyone involved, and for women in particular. You could take them as a critique of medieval-ish fantasy stories that tend to gloss over the seamier aspects of medieval life; man, does Martin dwell on the seamy.
Nick
November 14, 2013 at 1:15 am
Way to suck the life out of some comedic works. Thankfully, regardless of Adam’s message(s), he was and still is far more amusing and pertinent than this pontification.
Jimmy Maher
November 14, 2013 at 9:25 am
It’s not a very good article, is it?
Although on rereading it I must say that it is kind of impressive of me to manage to shoehorn every one of my worst traits as a writer into a single article…
Anthony
November 16, 2013 at 7:44 pm
You’re too hard on yourself. I suspect it was difficult to summon the verve to write enthusiastic preliminary remarks about something that’s been flogged to death like Hitchhiker’s has — even though it’s something seminal and something you love. Tricky.
Peter Smith
August 21, 2014 at 6:26 pm
I actually think this article is quite sharply written and perceptive, for what it’s worth.
Peter Piers
October 14, 2015 at 6:17 pm
Same here. Don’t knock yourself too hard. I quite enjoyed the article.
Mike Taylor
March 13, 2018 at 11:55 pm
Agree.
ZUrlocker
November 14, 2013 at 7:20 am
I read HHGG and the follow-ons when I was in college just a few years after they were first issued in paperback. Adams’ had a comic style that was powerfully funny but also unique in its social commentary.
“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
However, as once was said, dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog –few people are interested in it and the frog dies. Still you can’t blame Adams for his rabid fans or the myriad of derivative works.
DJ Hastings
November 19, 2013 at 8:42 pm
When I started read your comments on Adams’ unique style, I immediately thought of the “much the same way that bricks don’t” line. That one really stood out to me when I first read the books. (Sadly, being a teenager at the time, I then went around repeating the line to everyone who would listen.)
Martin
June 26, 2016 at 3:15 am
Yay! Finally found one!
There Adams lets him fall him love.
Maybe some strange loving is going down but probably a typo.
Jimmy Maher
June 26, 2016 at 8:26 am
Thanks!
Mike Taylor
September 28, 2017 at 10:24 am
Glad to find someone who shares my love for the chronically under-rated 4th book. I think it suffered only because people were expecting More Of The Same and got something so radically different. Perhaps SLATFATF didn’t really belong in the Hitch-Hiker series, but it was a fine book in its own right.
I do very much enjoy the Ford Prefect sections of Mostly Harmless, though: all that jumping out of windows and stealing identity cards. Very funny, and very Adams.
Nathanael
March 6, 2021 at 7:37 am
Oh, there’s a lot of us out here whose favorite is So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish.
I suppose we’re romantics at heart.
I first read it on original publication as an elementary-schooler. It was *unexpected*, given the first three books, but it’s so *sweet*.
Ben Bilgri
March 19, 2018 at 5:24 am
“Lewis Carroll” > “Lewis Carrol”
“Spaceballs” > “Space Balls”
And even though I’m more than four years late to the party, I’m glad this article is here. Not least because I used to be one of those insufferable teenagers. At least some of us got better.
Jimmy Maher
March 19, 2018 at 10:11 am
Thanks!
Wolfeye M.
September 2, 2019 at 9:46 pm
Ok, I won’t mention “towels” or “42”.
Well, I just did, but I won’t discuss them further. I will, however, mention my favorite bit in all of the Hitchhiker books.
I can’t remember which book, or the exact wording, but it’s the part where Arthur figures out how to fly.
You just fall… and miss the ground.
Ben
June 20, 2021 at 12:49 pm
Nietzschian -> Nietzschean
also two are of -> also two of
Jimmy Maher
June 21, 2021 at 6:52 am
Thanks!
Duncan Snowden
July 21, 2021 at 7:00 am
(Okay, since Ben corrected a spelling error a month ago, I think I feel safe jumping in almost eight years late with this. In my defence, I’m working my way through the ebooks in order. Fascinating read. :) )
It’s interesting that you describe P.G. Wodehouse as a, “satirist, and societal deconstructor”, since, in almost exactly the way Adams denied being a science fiction writer, he always rejected such labels: he considered himself a humorist who just happened to write about English high society. He considered satire a mean-spirited trade, while all he wanted to do was “write a sort of musical-comedy without the music” about “the younger sons of Dukes falling over door-mats”. He certainly said on several occasions that he found those younger sons a strange phenomenon, being essentially without purpose in life as the heirs to nothing meaningful, but wealthy enough not to have to work (the “drones” after whom Bertie Wooster’s club was named), but I honestly don’t believe that it ever occurred to him that this was any kind of Indictment of Society; he just thought it was funny.
It also occurs to me that Mostly Harmless is the closest to hard SF that Adams ever got, with its exploration of multiple universes. It’s almost as if he was saying to his fans, “Okay… I’ll write you some science fiction, then. But you’re not going to like it.”
Jeff Nyman
September 6, 2021 at 8:25 pm
” … as a “trilogy” of five novels (a ‘joke’ so thuddingly unfunny that I choose to believe it originated with some harried paperback copywriter rather than Adams himself).”
I don’t think it was so much meant as a “joke” as it was a bit of cognitive dissonance. The whole series turned things on their head, fairly often, and the “trilogy of five” is an absurdist notion. And that notion of absurdity is something I think this article entirely fails to understand or capture. So much so that silly things like this creep in:
“… description of Brockian Ultra Cricket as ‘a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away,’ a description that could be applied to most of the team sports we humans play.”
*Most* of the team sports? Really? Like what? American Football, to an extent, and Rugby, sure. (Hockey, yes, but it’s not supposed to be that way and is only so when they get into their routine fights.) But Baseball, Bowling, Curling, Rowing, Soccer, Track and Field, Swimming, Basketball, Volleyball, Gymnastics, and many more — none of those are about hitting people and running away and they are team sports.
I bring this up because this article seems intent to reinforce a negative view. Case in point:
“There’s an unsettlingly nihilistic core to at least the first three and the fifth Hitchhiker’s books.”
It’s long been acknowledged as more absurdist than nihilist, certainly when you compare the structure of these works with that of Terry Pratchett (on one side of the spectrum) and perhaps Kurt Vonnegut (on the other side).
The Hitchhiker’s series clearly emphasizes satirical themes via abstract dialogue based in what is clearly ridiculous and untenable logic. Clearly Marvin the Robot is a warning *against* nihilism when you look at how the character is situated with others. I know as a young person reading these books, it was pretty obvious that Adams was not suggesting there was a higher meaning to life — but he was also clearly against the idea of nihilistically interpreting a purported lack of meaning as a reason to lose all hope.
Marvin does that routinely and the series makes it very clear that this is a self-defeating view, which is why it comes up so routinely; to reinforce the view. The series also makes it clear that one of the the best ways to deal with this is to find your own personal source of meaning.
Nihilism has always posited that since there is no meaning to existence, any attempt to construct any such meaning is pointless and, worse than that, irrational. Absurdism suggests that “yes, life may have no inherent meaning, but that doesn’t stop you from searching for your own meaning.”
Is doing such a thing improbable? Well, that’s perhaps why we have an improbability drive. The whole notion of a device that “passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe simultaneously” is a way of saying that somewhere out there, you can find what you want. It just might depend how improbable you think it is. This is what made “Mostly Harmless” so interesting in that the goal to being truly nihilist was to imagine destroying all possibilities, all the possible Earths on the probability axis.
Short of that, however … there was *always* a way to find meaning. You just couldn’t expect others to share your meaning. That’s not nihilism; not by a long shot.
Will Moczarski
November 7, 2022 at 11:57 am
“which is essentially Wikipedia running on a tablet, right down to the somewhat questionable veracity of much of what it offers and its editors’ somewhat, shall we say, idiosyncratic priorities.”
I never associated it with Wikipedia but rather the much more similar writing style (and prioritising, for that matter) of actual guidebooks for hitchhikers and individual travelers, e.g. the Cambridge-based “Let’s Go” and even moreso “Lonely Planet.”