The Rough Guide to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Marcus O'Dair

Author:Marcus O'Dair
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848367135
Publisher: Rough Guides
Published: 2010-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Life Beyond Hitchhiker’s

Despite his new nest, Adams was spending a lot of time in California, attempting – not for the last time – to get a film version of Hitchhiker’s off the ground. It was on one of these American trips that he and John Lloyd, having overcome the animosity surrounding the Hitchhiker’s novel, wrote The Meaning of Liff, a spoof dictionary of concepts familiar to all yet previously neglected by the lexicon. Though it may sound a fatuous concept, it’s truly a minor masterpiece and was a deserving bestseller when published in 1983. A sequel, The Deeper Meaning of Liff, appeared in 1990. In a sense, however, the main significance of The Meaning of Liff in terms of Adams’s career trajectory is that it represented a first move away from the Hitchhiker’s universe with which he’d become synonymous. True, there would be a fourth Hitchhiker’s novel, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, in 1984. Yet it was written under duress, even by Adams’s standards, and imbued with a palpable sense that its author had fallen out of love with his subject.

That book out of the way, Adams embarked on a new project, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, for which he received over $2 million for the US rights alone (and remember, this was 1985). Not surprisingly given that sort of advance, Adams made all the right noises about getting started straight away. Legend has it, however, that when the deadline appeared, he had written precisely one sentence. Adams’s dilatory approach to deadlines had only worsened by the time of the follow-up, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Still Adams continued to spread his wings. One country that gets a brief mention in Dirk Gently is Madagascar, Adams having just visited the island with WWF zoologist Mark Carwardine for an article in the Observer magazine. The trip, which had been in search of an extremely rare species of lemur, was such a success that he and Carwardine decided to extend the concept to include near-extinct species around the world. Their expeditions of 1988 and 1989 would be collected in Last Chance to See, both a BBC Radio 4 series and, once Adams had undergone the by now obligatory coercion, a book. It is arguably his best piece of writing, and certainly gave a major boost to Adams’s interest in ecology and evolution. Twenty years later, Last Chance to See was revived, with a new series featuring Adams’s friend Stephen Fry as well as Carwardine.

Last Chance to See also represented a significant stage in the evolution of Adams himself. Having already distanced himself from Hitchhiker’s, this was a further step, away from novels and script-writing altogether. Instead, he was taking on a broader role, one for which terms like “philosopher” or “intellectual” are perhaps too pompous, yet – along with “media personality” – are not entirely inappropriate. He was particularly obsessed by information technology, which was making the futuristic fantasies of Hitchhiker’s come true before his eyes. Adams was

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