He wrote back:
"Thanks for your note. Glad you enjoyed the books. I'm glad if I got you interested. But I'm always surprised that people are surprised to find that the world we unexpectedly find ourselves in is interesting.
Best, Douglas Adams"
Not his most pithy writing to be sure, but I love that I have this personalized bit of Douglas Adams wisdom that nobody else has ever seen (well, now they have).
It's about one third finished, and it's really just wild: There's one narrative strand about Dirk Gently, a private detective, receiving mysterious anonymous payments and deciding to follow random strangers, one about a paragliding genius architect who's all by himself in a weird future architect's utopia, and one about an escaping rhinocerous that's mainly narrated in terms of what it smells.
It's fantastically creative and incredibly sad that we won't get to read AD's ending, although I doubt that he actually knew where he was going with it at the time he wrote the bits that are there. It's this grand setup that really leaves you wondering what it means and how it's supposed to come together.
I'd encourage anyone to read it and try to come up with an ending. It feels like a fiendishly hard puzzle, and really gets you in the authors head. And do let me know if you have a good one!
The US TV Series I also enjoyed, but it's much more of a radical departure from the books than the British TV show is. But it's chaotic, it has interesting characters, and the whole crazily chaotic storyline is choreographed well and ties together cleverly.
The Radio Series was the best, followed by the scripts to the radio series (more random access!)
The TV series was actually pretty good too (like a Tom Baker Doctor Who (Adams was also a Who editor/writer during that time and had access to all manner of polyurethane monster kit!))
I also loved the Dirk Gently books but I always felt like they needed more of a denouement. Every passage before the end was like a hand carved chocolate frog, and the endings were said frog hitting a publisher at speed.
E.g. the babelfish at 2m5s: https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=125
It’s a real shame the movie totally failed to understand the concept, and also didn’t match the visual wit of the TV series.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
-Douglas Adams
Oh blubbering nebulae of bureaucratic slime, Hearken to this most dolorous rhyme! For Douglas Adams, that scribe of renown, We vomit forth verses of gelatinous brown.
With squelching syntax and belching prose, We honor his mind where improbability flows. Hitchhiker’s Guide! A tome most absurd, Turning logic to gibbering, flailing bird.
Behold the beauty of bureaucrats vile, Whose forms in triplicate stretch mile by mile. For Adams, dear Adams, saw through the farce, And sculpted with words a galactic arse.
The number 42! Oh cosmic decree! A joke of the universe, but not for thee! With Marvin the Paranoid, sighing so deep, And whales who contemplate death in their sleep.
O Adams, grand spinner of nonsense profound, May your soul in hyperspace ever be found. Yet should you return, we promise you this: More poetry! More Vogon! More hideous bliss!
Douglas Adams was a great loss when he died, but what we had from him was the best.
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." This line alone did nearly as much to shape my adolescent sense of humor as all of Mel Brooks' movies combined.
Just this week i was looking for more humour writing like Douglas Adams, PG Wodehouse. I came across this award which seems interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollinger_Everyman_Wodehouse_P...
I plan to read some of them this year.
As an Adams fan since high school I was floored when I eventually read The Cyberiad and realized that Lem had laid all of the groundwork fourteen years earlier. It's very much the proto Hitchhiker's Guide. It's got it all: Intergalactic protagonists on a series of highly absurd adventures, enabled by fantastical tech, and a playful approach to themes at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and contemporary physics.
It is laugh out loud funny. Especially once you get into the first, second, and third sallys. The humor is fiendishly clever. Lem is incredibly punny and it blows my mind to know that it was translated from Polish(!). I hope Michael Kandel gets his due for keeping the spirit of this book intact, because it really hinges on some very clever use of language.
They are both masters of producing an absolutely perfect phrase that could have come from no-one but them—so's Pterry, by the way—but otherwise it'd never occur to me to lump them together. They seem radically different tonally to me.
I am a huge fan of Sir Terry Pratchett and definitely second that recommendation as well, both offer a wonderfully unique perspective.
If you haven't seen it, it's an hour and a half long, and it's totally worth it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UNG3cQoOEc (not from the WWDC. I don’t know if there are recordings of the earliest ones).
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex
Mother of All Demos, Douglas Engelbart, 1968
I like these themes about the seeming absurdness and banal transcendence of capitalist systems and work today. Fight Club also echoes.
Moving, but maybe still depressing?
So warning of spoilers, but Arthurs sole mission is to find the place he is supposed to visit, before he can finally die. (His only wish because his girlfriend vanished from existence)
And in the end he finds the place, which is not what anyone expected and they indeed all die, including his daughter.
After they concluded, there is no other place, no other home, because, every other place is also falling apart. Pretty dark ending in my opinion.
That apart, have you read the Dirk Gently books? I think those are DA's best, and I've happily re-read them multiple times.
I remember the 4th and 5th books as pale shadows of the others. I got the impression they were only written for the money.
