Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

254 Pages·2009·5.27 MB·English

by  Neil Gaiman

Don’t Panic
Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy
Neil Gaiman
Additional material by David K. Dickson, MJ Simpson, and Guy
Adams
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
0 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe
1 DNA
2 Cambridge and Other Recurrent Phenomena
3 The Wilderness Years
4 Gherkin-Swallowing, Walking Backwards and All That
5 When You Hitch Upon a Star
6 Radio, Radio
7 A Slightly Unreliable Producer
8 Have TARDIS, Will Travel
9 H2G2
10 All the Galaxy’s a Stage
11 “Childish, Pointless, Codswalloping Drivel …”
12 Level 42
13 Of Mice, and Men, and Tired TV Producers
14 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
15 Invasion USA
16 Life, the Universe and Everything
17 Making Movies
18 Liff, and Other Places
19 SLATFAT Fish
20 Do You Know Where Your Towel Is?
21 Games with Computers
22 Letters to Douglas Adams
23 Dirk Gently and Time for Tea
24 Saving the World at No Extra Charge
25 Douglas and Other Animals
26 Anything That Happens, Happens
27 Guides to the Guide
28 The Movies That Don’t Move
29 The Dot.com That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong
30 A Sort of Après-Vie
31 A Hell of a Thing to Climb in a Rhino Costume
32 Shada Redux
33 So, That Would Seem to Have Been That as Far as the Radio Was
Concerned
34 Postcards from Daveland
35 Starman
36 The Interconnectedness of All Things
37 Hitchhiking Towards the Future
Appendix I: Hitchhiker’s—the Original Synopsis
Appendix II: The Variant Texts of Hitchhiker’s: What Happens Where
and Why
Appendix III: Who’s Who in the Galaxy: Some Comments by Douglas
Adams
Appendix IV: The Definitive ‘How to Leave the Planet’
Appendix V: Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen: An Excerpt from the Film
Treatment by Douglas Adams
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Because she’s threatened me with consequences too dreadful to consider if I
don’t dedicate a book to her …
And because she’s taken to starting every transatlantic conversation with “Have
you dedicated a book to me yet?” …
I would like to dedicate this book to intelligent life forms everywhere.
And to my sister, Claire.
FOREWORD
Seventeen years ago a young writer was asked to write a Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy companion. Douglas Adams had agreed some years before that Titan
could publish such a book, but the original writer, Richard Hollis, hadn’t written
it for reasons I’m still not clear on to this day, and someone at Titan had asked
Kim Newman if he wanted to write it. He didn’t—but, he pointed out, he knew
someone who had already interviewed Douglas several times.
So Nick Landau, of Titan Books, called me, and asked if I was interested. I
wanted to write this book more than anything. I said yes.
Douglas Adams opened his address book to me. I talked to his colleagues, and
went through his filing cabinets. I read dozens of scripts and photocopied all of
Douglas’s press clippings. I played the Hitchhiker’s computer game to the end,
and battled with primitive word processing programs trying to find one that
would let me do footnotes. My favourite bits were interviewing Douglas, though,
and the way he’d manage to be funny, and serious, and faintly baffled, all at the
same time.
You will find many of the great Hitchhiker’s anecdotes in this book (although
several of them, such as the tale of the thousands of people blocking the streets
for the first Forbidden Planet book signing, had not yet evolved in early 1987
when the greater part of the book was written).
Don’t Panic has been updated and expanded twice.* David K. Dickson wrote
chapters 24-26 in 1993, and in 2002 MJ Simpson wrote chapters 27-30, and
overhauled the entire text.
When Douglas died I found myself being interviewed, in newspapers and on
the radio, Douglas’s favourite medium, being asked to explain who he was and
what he did, and why his absence was a tragedy. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, at
the end of the day, one of the most magical things about Douglas’s writing, as
with that of his literary hero P. G. Wodehouse, was that you knew the person
writing was on your side, that he was not laughing at you, but that you were in
on the joke.
Back in 1987 Douglas was bemused by the existence of this book, and doubly
bemused by its success. What he would make of a world in which we have not
only this but MJ Simpson’s not-actually-authorised-but-by-no-means-
unauthorised Douglas Adams biography, Hitchhiker, and Nick Webb’s
forthcoming actually-officially-authorised biography Wish You Were Here, I
hesitate to think.
I wish he were still around. I’d send him an e-mail and ask him. And he’d
write back something serious and funny and faintly baffled, all at the same time.
Neil Gaiman
July 8, 2003
Late
* Now, in fact, for a third time, with Guy Adams slightly revising chapter 30, writing chapters 31-37 and
updating appendix ii.
INTRODUCTION
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the most remarkable, certainly the most
successful book ever to come out of the great publishing companies of Ursa
Minor. It is about the size of a paperback book, but looks more like a large
pocket calculator, having upon its face over a hundred flat press-buttons and a
screen about four inches square, upon which any one of over six million pages
can be summoned almost instantly. It comes in a durable plastic cover, upon
which the words
DON’T PANIC
are printed in large, friendly letters.
There are no known copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on this
planet at this time.
This is not its story.
It is, however, the story of a book also called, at a very high level of
improbability, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; of the radio series that
started it all; the six-book trilogy it comprises; the computer games, towel, and
television series that it, in its turn, has spawned.
To tell the story of the book—and the radio series, and the towel—it is best to
tell the story of some of the minds behind it. Foremost among these is an ape-
descended human from the planet Earth, although at the time our story starts he
no more knows his destiny (which will include international travel, computers,
an almost infinite number of lunches, and becoming mindbogglingly rich) than
an olive knows how to mix a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
His name is Douglas Adams, he is six foot five inches tall, and he is about to