Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker

1
Douglas Adams,The Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy (1979)
2
What put the 42 in CompLit 342?
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Douglas Adams, 1952-2001

• British writer, broadcaster, and environmentalist
• Wrote episodes of Doctor Who before HG2G also
  portions of the last episode of Monty Pythons
  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

4
The Trilogy of Five

• The Hitchhikers 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)

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Adams on Writing Science Fiction

• I didnt 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.
• Im not a parodist - parody is one of the easier
  forms of writing, and its one thats too easy to
  slip into when you arent trying hard enough.
• No matter how good the ideas are, a lot of SF
  is terribly badly written.

6
Adams Use of Humour and Satire

• 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

7
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 Colfers And Another Thing (2009)

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From the introduction to the anthology of all 5
books

• The history of HG2G isso complicated that every
  time I tell it I contradict myself, and whenever
  I do get it right Im misquoted.
• The Guide has appeared in so many forms - books,
  radio, a television series, records, anda 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

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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 interestinglike carrying a picture or a
  piece of clothing from one bit of lighting to
  another. Suddenly it looks very different. What
  interests meis the way in whichdifferent media
  interrelate you can hand things off from one to
  another, you can exploit each others strengths
  and weaknesses.

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The Guide

• Expository narrative device
• Self-referential commentary
• HG2G vs. Encyclopedia Galactica (reference to
  Isaac Asimovs 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 its always reality
  thats got it wrong

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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?
• Whats more important the question or the answer?

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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?

13
Adams and God

• Isnt 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?

14
Adams and Animals

• Adams environmentalist work
• Relative intelligence of humans and animals, esp.
  dolphins and mice
• Whos 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

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Adams and Technology

• 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)

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(No Transcript)
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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 inis revealed to my own sensesand the
  universe you live in is absolutely subjective to
  you.

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Adams Use of Social Satire

• References to the socioeconomic and political
  conditions of Britain in the 1970s possible
  relation to the British alternative comedy
  movement
• British establishments 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 Prossers ancestry?)
• Depiction of Vogon society in later adaptations
• Role of art planetary formations poetry as
  weapon of mass destruction

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• 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?

20

• Explanations of Fords name mistaking the
  dominant lifeform footnote on his real name
• Mostly harmless - commentary on editors?
  Deliberate understatement?
• Arthurs search for the perfect cup of tea vs.
  Fords 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 Arthurs name The Plain Mans
  Pathway to Heaven (1601) - HG2G as ironic
  spiritual biography?

21

• Arthur as everyman character vs. Trillian as
  misunderstood genius (relating to Fords opinion
  of astrophysicists?)
• Trillian as challenge to gender stereotypes in
  traditional SF while still fitting into them

22
Adams on the Nature of Life, the Universe, and
EverythingFrom a 1998 Lecture at
Cambridgehttp//www.douglasadams.se/stuff/sand.ht
ml

• 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
  thats 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.

23

• On God Man the maker looks at his world and
  says So who made this then? Who made this?
  you can see why its a treacherous question.
  Early man thinks, Well, because theres 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, hes 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?

24

• as we become more and more scientifically
  literate, its worth remembering that the
  fictions with which we previously populated our
  world may have some function that its 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
  dont yet understand

25

• 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 its beginning to be
  extremely alarming and extremely upsetting to our
  sense of who we aregreat, strapping, physical
  people living in a Universe that exists almost
  entirely for usthat it just isnt 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 theres 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 whos 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.

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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