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Galactic
Gag Man
Douglas Adams travels
the universe almost as
much as the characters
in his “Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy”
books. Take, for example,
his schedule for just two weeks last month.
He leaves Los Angeles after working for a
week on a film treatment of "Hitchhiker.”
For two days he’s in Maryland, giving read
ings at Montgomery College in Rockville
and the University of Maryland. On to New
York for two days of brainstorming with
Henson Associates (the Muppet people) for
a hush-hush TV project. Then Oberlin
College in Ohio for a reading. Two days
later, it’s a press conference in New York
for the new “Hitchhiker” home-computer
game, followed by game promotion the
next day in Las Vegas and in San Francisco
two days after that. Finally, back to his
native England for three weeks of promot
ing his new book, “So Long, and Thanks
for All the Fish.” No wonder he can only
squeeze in an interview while he’s having
breakfast at 8 a m. When does he sleep?
"That’s the problem,” says a barely awake
Adams. “I don’t have time to sleep.”
Adams’s talent for warp-speed outer
space wit has spawned an enormously prof
itable "Hitchhiker” industry. First done
as a BBC radio series in 1978, “Hitchhiker”
has become a recording, a TV series, a
number of theatrical productions and a
movie to be directed by Ivan (“Ghostbust
ers”) Reitman. The "Hitchhiker” game,
just out, is a text-based adventure in which
the object of the game, says Adams, 32, “is
to find out the object of the game." The
first three "Hitchhiker” books—“The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” “The
Restaurant at the End of the Universe” and
“Life, the Universe and Everything"—
haveall been best sellers, with a total of over
7 million copies in print. "So Long, and
Thanks for All the Fish," which comes out
next month, seems certain to do as well. In
a typical bit of Adams tongue-in-cheek, the
dust jacket for “Fish” describes it as
the “fourth book in the ‘Hitchhiker’s
Trilogy’."
From the beginning, the “Hitchhiker”
books have delivered headlong action on a
cosmic scale. In the first, the Earth gets
R RtSSMtYtR—STARIM
Adams: Hack to earth after conquering the universe with warp-speed science fiction
blown up after less than 35 pages, and Ar
thur Dent, a real schlemiel of a hero, es
capes the destruction and begins to carom
about the universe from one tight scrape to
another.
Adams’s relentless sense of humor
often springs from setting earthly
foibles in an extraterrestrial context. In
"Restaurant,” he describes the hangover
Dent gets after traveling via a matter
transference beam: “Any form of transport
which involved tearing you apart atom by
atom, flinging those atoms through the sub
ether, and then jamming them back to
gether again just when they were getting
their first taste of freedom for years had to
be bad news.”
In the new book, Arthur Dent returns
to an Earth that looks remarkably the same
way it did before it was blown up, except
for the mysterious absence of dolphins.
(The title is a goodbye message from the
long departed aquatic mammals.) Dent
works diligently to find out what hap
pened to his native planet, with the help of a
like-minded Earthwoman. Only at the
novel’s end do they blast off together in
search of “God’s Final Message to His
Creation.’’ Like the previous three books,
Adams saturates the story with bizarre
characters and absurd situations. Rob Mc
Kenna, for example, is a lorry driver who
becomes famous as the "Rain God" because
it has rained every place he has been for the
past 15 years. Unlike the previous “Hitch