Don't panic: Douglas Adams & The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy by Neil Gaiman

Author:Neil Gaiman
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Novels, Adams, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Biography: general, Douglas, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -, Literary, Literary Criticism, English, Biography & Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9781852864118
Publisher: Titan
Published: 1993-08-13T20:00:00+00:00

Life, the Universe, and Everything

************************************************

ZAPHOD: There's nothing wrong with my sense of reality. I

have it thoroughly serviced every fortnight.

- Cut from radio script, Episode Three.

************************************************

The first two Hitchhiker's books were based on material developed

for the radio series. When Douglas Adams agreed to write the third

book he had sworn he would never write, he took the plot from a

storyline he had had "knocking around for ages".

He had once suggested it as a Dr Who story, but Graham

Williams thought it was just "too silly". Later, when there was

talk of a Dr Who film to star Tom Baker, he had written the story

as a film outline, Dr Who and the Krikkitmen (see Appendix V).

The film never materialised, but later, when talk began of the

second Hitchhiker's television series, Douglas began to look at

the Krikkitmen script as a Hitchhiker's vehicle.

As things turned out, for reasons explained at length

elsewhere, there was not going to be a second television series.

However, the process of turning Dr Who and the Krikkitmen

into Life, the Universe, and Everything, had begun.

As far as plots go, the storylines are essentially the same.

Douglas divided the Dr Who role between Slartibartfast,

Trillian and (for the final sequence) Arthur Dent, although what

would have been the last half of the Dr Who format became the

final thirty pages of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

(In the Dr Who version, after having failed to prevent the

Krikkitmen from taking the components of the Wicket Gate, the

Doctor arrives with Sarah Jane on Krikkit and spends most of the

rest of the story, in classic Dr Who style, running around, getting

captured, escaping, learning vital bits of plot, running around,

getting captured, escaping, rescuing Sarah Jane, and so on.)

Life, the Universe, and Everything was different in kind

from the other Hitchhiker's books, in that it was not written

serially. Douglas knew what was going to happen next, but this

gave him a new problem, that of fitting the Hitchhiker's

characters into the Dr Who plot. Hitchhiker's characters are

essentially feckless, and instead of, say, saving the universe they

would tend instead towards going to a party (Ford), staying cool

(Zaphod), looking bewildered (Arthur) or moaning (Marvin); this

really left only Trillian, whose personality had never been fully

explored (indeed, barely glanced at), as a substitute worldsaver.

More so, perhaps, than any other part of Douglas's oeuvre,

the creation of Life, the Universe, and Everything was fraught

with difficulties:

"As with everything, I put it off longer than I should have,

and then I had a huge domestic crisis which knocked me for six; I

couldn't think of anything funny to save my life; I wanted to

jump off cliffs and things like that. It was an emotional episode

which I'm not going to go into in any detail..."

(Although Adams will no longer discuss it, his then girlfriend

had left him - as he said in an interview given about that time,

"She went off with this bloke on, to me, the spurious grounds

that he was her husband.")

As a result of this, Adams wrote a "very bleak" first draft of

Life, the Universe, and Everything: "I had the first draft of it

three-quarters finished and then I had to go and do a major book

promotion tour in the US for a month.

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