Oh, belgium, man!
Sometimes the death of a stranger can be surprisingly affecting. It was shocking to learn of the death of Douglas Adams; that fecund mind gone, and so young. What a bummer. Belgium, man.
I remember one Wednesday night tuning in at 10:30 to Radio 4 for the start of a new science fiction series — that was just about all I knew of what was coming; at the end of something completely forgettable the previous week it had been announced that Peter Jones would star in a new science fiction series.
Not really a lot of preparation for what was to follow, was it? It was science fiction — and it was comedy, the best use of radio for the genre since The Goon Show.
Like Gilbert he used characters from putatively far away lands — or planets, in this case — to lampoon some of the irritating features of life in Britain. Petty bureacrats, union officials, all the everyday irritants of the late 70s appeared transmogrified in the Guide.
Like Carroll he played with words, suddenly turning things on their head:
“… And you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace, it’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“Well, what’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water…”
Like no one else, he took the fittings and clichés of SF and played with them. This wasn’t slapstick, it wasn’t the heavy-handed, near-juvenile humour of some earlier attempts at levity in the genre: this was intelligent, witty, sophisticated humour good enough to make you laugh out loud.
Many people have conjured up robots, computers and AIs of vast intelligence. Only Adams gave us lifts sulking in the basement, afraid of the future; a paranoid, depressive robot; and a staggeringly intelligent computer that could give you the answer to life, the universe, and everything but wasn’t powerful enough to tell you what the question was.
And it changed the possibilities. On the one hand, can you imagine, say, Red Dwarf without HHGTTG? The Guide showed that SF could be funny, that there was a market for this sort of thing. On the other hand, some things couldn’t be done any more: when the Borg threatened the Enterprise, we knew they said “Resistance is futile” because no one can get away with “Resistance is useless” since the Guide.
It wasn’t just the radio series, of course. There were the records. And the books, all five parts of the trilogy (a very pointed joke to those who know SF). And the TV series — not a bad effort all things considered. Mustn’t forget the towel, of course — every hoopy frood should know where his towel is. But the radio series was the definitive version, the first exposure to the magic.
Away from the Guide, Adams was involved with Dr. Who during one of that programme’s peaks of excellence — pretty much the last, actually. Little touches here and there made his presence felt: the Doctor reading Origins of the Universe by Oolon Caluphid (“Why didn’t he ask someone who saw it happen?”), dialogue such as, “I say, what a wonderful butler! He’s so violent!” — and, of course, that quoted at the end of another article.
His final involvement with Dr. Who was the never-completed “Shada” — not to worry, though, since elements of that story cropped up in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Apart from the fiction, Adams (with Mark Carwardine) produced the very serious — yet typically funny — Last Chance to See, about the endangered species on this planet. No, no, it wasn’t po-faced, worthy stuff. I told you, serious but funny. Here’s a passage picked at random:
Until the nineteenth century this enormous tract of Africa was simply a large black hole in the centre of any European map of the dark continent but it was only after Livingstone’s penetration of the interior that the black hole began to exercise any gravitational effect on the outside world.
The first people to pour in were the missionaries: Catholics who arrived to teach the native population that the Protestants were wrong and Protestants who came to teach that the Catholics were wrong. The only thing the Protestants and Catholics agreed about was that the natives had been wrong for two thousand years.
These were closely followed by traders in search of slaves, ivory, copper and suitable land on which plantations could be established. With the help of Stanley, who was on a five-year contract to open up the interior of Africa, King Leopold of the Belgians successfully laid claim to this vast region in 1885 and promptly subjected its inhabitants to an exceptionally brutal and ruthless form of colonisation, thus giving them a practical and convincing demonstration of what ‘wrong’ actually meant.
Adams was scientifically literate and fascinated by technology. It was in an article by Adams in a magazine — no idea which one — that I first heard of the Macintosh. It was clearly a much superior machine to the — I almost wrote “Wintel”, but this was a different world: IBM-compatibles is what I should say. I was in the market for a computer, and Adams’ article was the first indication that there was more to computing than DOS.
I couldn’t afford a Mac then, but Adams’ article prompted me to look for something else which was superior to the IBM compatibles (and there were a few such machines then). Now, as it happens, I’m sitting typing this into a Mac.
Adams had, apparently, completed the script for a HHGTTG film just before he died. I hope his particular vision survives the transition to the cinema screen. But if it doesn’t we still have the radio series and the TV series and the books — as Stephen Fry said in his piece in the Guardian, “So long, and thanks for all the books” — and, of course, the towels.
Which brings me to towel day, a proposal that Friday, 25th May, be used to commemorate Douglas Adams — the idea is you take your towel with you everywhere that day. It’s an appealing notion — now all we need is the perfect pan-galactic gargleblaster to toast his memory.
Slàinte! (and thanks for all the fun).
© DC 2001. All rights reserved.