Douglas Adams

For other people named Douglas Adams, see Douglas Adams (disambiguation).

Douglas Noël Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, humourist, and screenwriter. He was best known as the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a 1978 radio comedy series which he adapted into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 14 million copies in his lifetime. He also adapted it into a 1981 television series, a 1984 video game and a 2005 feature film.

Adams wrote the novels Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990) and Last Chance to See (1990). He wrote three serials for the television series Doctor Who including the unaired serial Shada and City of Death (1979) which he co-wrote with producer Graham Williams, and served as script editor for its 17th season. He co-wrote the sketch "Patient Abuse" for the final episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. A posthumous collection of his selected works, including chapters of his final unfinished novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.

Known for his sharp wit and procrastination, Adams called himself a "radical atheist" and was an advocate for environmentalism and conservation. He was a lover of music, fast cars, technological innovation, and the Apple Macintosh.

Early life and education

Family

Douglas Noël Adams was born in Cambridge on 11 March 1952 to Christopher Douglas Adams, a management consultant and computer salesman who formerly worked as a probation officer, and nurse Janet Dora Sydney Adams (née Donovan). He had English, Scottish, Irish and German ancestry. His paternal grandfather, born in Glasgow, came from a long line of distinguished doctors.

Shortly after his birth, the family moved to the East End of London. His sister Susan was born in March 1955. By the time he was five his parents had divorced; Douglas, Susan and their mother subsequently moved to an RSPCA animal shelter in Brentwood run by his maternal grandparents. Each parent remarried, giving Adams several half-siblings.

Education

Adams attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood. He entered the prep school for Brentwood School in September 1959. Adams felt isolated at school because of his large stature; he was 6 feet (1.8 m) tall by the age of 12, and stopped growing at 6 feet 5 inches (1.96 m). His form master Frank Halford had a profound influence on him. Adams was the only student to be awarded 10/10 by Halford for creative writing – something Adams remembered for the rest of his life, particularly when facing writer's block.

Some of his earliest writing was published at Brentwood School. His first published work was a brief report on the prep school's photography society in The Brentwoodian in September 1962. His poem "Tramp's Eye View", written when he was twelve years old, is held by the University of Cambridge. In early 1965, he had a surreal short story titled Suspense published in the children's comic Eagle. A poem written by Adams in January 1970 was discovered in a school cupboard in early 2014. He became a boarder at the school in September 1964, and eventually left in December 1970.

On the strength of a religious poetry essay that discussed the Beatles and William Blake, Adams was awarded an exhibition to study English at St John's College, Cambridge, where his father had studied. He entered the university in 1971, hoping to follow in the footsteps of comedy writer-performers like Monty Python. Adams desperately wanted to join Footlights, the invitation-only student comedy club, and was elected to the club in February 1972. However he was disappointed by its aloof culture. He began writing comedy sketches with fellow student Keith Jeffery (with whom he shared a room), but this partnership ended in November 1972. He subsequently wrote and performed in revues with students Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith; their troupe was called "Adams-Smith-Adams". Although Adams-Smith-Adams' written material featured prominently in Footlights' 1974 May Week Revue (titled Chox), Douglas was gutted when he was not cast on the basis that his performing abilities were not strong enough. He graduated in 1974 with a 2:2 in English literature. Many of Adams's Cambridge peers played important roles in his career, such as Jon Canter, John Lloyd, Mary Allen and Simon Jones. Adams took a series of odd jobs during his time at Cambridge, which included working as a hospital porter and a chicken-shed cleaner.

Career

Adams moved back to London after leaving university, determined to break into TV and radio as a writer. The Adams-Smith-Adams trio continued working together until late 1975. The BBC occasionally accepted sketches from Adams, but his writing style was unsuited to the current style of radio and TV comedy. To make ends meet he took a job as a bodyguard for a wealthy Arab family, which involved long night shifts guarding their hotel rooms. In 1976 he directed Footlights' May Week Revue, A Kick in the Stalls. In August 1976, his career had a brief improvement when he co-wrote and performed Unpleasantness at Brodie's Close at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with John Lloyd, David Renwick and Andrew Marshall. By the end of the year, Adams's career again stalled and he moved in with his family in Stalbridge, Dorset.

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Adams often worked with writer John Lloyd (pictured in 2013); they co-wrote The Meaning of Liff books and two episodes of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series.

Adams and Lloyd unsuccessfully developed various comedy projects, such as The Swasivious Zebu, Knight and Day and a Guinness Books of Records film. The latter project, which involved aliens competing with humans in an intergalactic sporting event, was cancelled due to there being "no market for science fiction films". Adams and Lloyd also pitched Sno 7 and the White Dwarfs, a radio sitcom about two astrophysicists trapped in a Mt Everest observatory, but were told by the BBC that science fiction was "too 1950s". Adams's first professional solo work was a sketch for the radio comedy series The Burkiss Way, broadcast in early 1977. Around the same time he wrote for The News Huddlines.

Shortly before being commissioned to write the pilot episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adams was considering leaving the industry out of frustration and moving to Hong Kong. He got a job as a BBC radio producer in May 1978 "for the money", and worked on satirical programme Week Ending, documentary Here's More Egg on Your Face and panel show The News Quiz. He produced only one original project, a pantomime version of Cinderella titled Black Cinderella Two Goes East. He left the position in October 1978 to become script editor for Doctor Who season 17. Adams and Lloyd wrote two 1979 episodes of the animated children's show Doctor Snuggles, "The Remarkable Fidgety River" and "The Great Disappearing Mystery". The pair also co-wrote the mock dictionary books The Meaning of Liff (1983) and The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990). On his death in 2001, Adams was on a long break from writing books.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

—Douglas Adams, in a widely quoted citation of unknown origin

Adams struggled with writing and usually did not find pleasure from it. He often suffered from low confidence and writer's block, and was infamous for his procrastination. Weeks before his manuscript for So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) was due, he had only written 25 pages. He was locked in a hotel suite with Sonny Mehta (editorial director of Pan Books) who kept an eye on him until the manuscript was completed. The 1997 tie-in novel to Adams's video game Starship Titanic was ultimately written by Terry Jones because Adams kept putting it off. On Quote... Unquote, Adams suggested his own epitaph: "He finally met his deadline."

Monty Python and Graham Chapman

Once he had established himself in Footlights, Adams quickly sought out his idol John Cleese of Monty Python, interviewing him for the student newspaper Varsity in November 1972. Adams was inspired by Cleese's work on The Frost Report (1966–67) and similarly tall stature, later admitting "I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was taken". Cleese quit Monty Python's Flying Circus in early 1974, leaving his writing partner Graham Chapman to search for a new collaborator. Chapman met Adams in July 1974 at the West End opening night party of Chox. The two formed a writing partnership, earning Adams a writing credit in Monty Python's fourth series for a sketch called "Patient Abuse". Adams also contributed to the "Marilyn Monroe" sketch that appeared on The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Adams later stated that his contributions were "hardly worth mentioning" and that he had written "about half a dozen lines that appeared here and there in Python". Nevertheless, he is one of only two non-Python members to receive a writing credit on the television series (the other is Neil Innes).

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Adams in his first Monty Python appearance, in surgeon's garb

Adams had two brief appearances in Monty Python's fourth series. In "The Light Entertainment War", Adams is in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to on-screen captions) pulling on gloves. In "Mr. Neutron", Adams is dressed in a pepper-pot outfit and loads a missile onto a cart driven by Terry Jones, who is calling for scrap metal ("Any old iron..."). Jones was the Python member with whom Adams formed the closest friendship.

Adams and Chapman co-wrote a 1974 comedy science fiction script as a vehicle for Ringo Starr, which was rejected by all major American TV networks. Adams, Chapman and Bernard McKenna co-wrote a 1976 television pilot titled Out of the Trees. The pilot did not go to series. Adams was disappointed by the production, stating it "actually had some very good material in it, but just didn't hang together properly". Adams and Chapman also wrote the episode "For Your Own Good" for the sitcom Doctor on the Go. By the time the episode aired in February 1977, Adams had ended their partnership as Chapman's heavy drinking made him difficult to work with. The two men also "virtually came to blows" over Adams's assistance in writing Chapman's autobiography. Adams expected his Monty Python work to be his big break, but was disappointed that he had "nothing to show for it except a large overdraft and not much achieved". He subsequently "went through a total crisis of confidence".

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Main article: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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Cast and crew of the first Hitchhiker's Guide radio series. From left: Adams, producer Geoffrey Perkins, actors David Tate, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing-Davey, Simon Jones and Alan Ford.

Adams became obsessed with combining the comedy and science fiction genres in a single project. In 1977, he got that chance when producer Simon Brett encouraged him to pitch a comedy science fiction radio show to BBC Radio 4. Adams's initial idea was The Ends of the Earth, an anthology series where the Earth was destroyed in a different way each episode. He started developing the pilot episode—in which Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace express route—and realised he needed an alien character to provide context. He decided this character should be a journalist who had come to Earth researching for a guide book for space travellers. Adams first conceived of the title in 1971 while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck gazing at the stars. He was carrying a copy of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe, and it occurred to him that somebody should write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He abandoned the anthology approach in favour of a single narrative following the travels of ordinary Englishman Arthur Dent and his alien friend Ford Prefect.

Adams submitted the pilot script on 4 April, and the episode was recorded on 28 June (starring Adams's Footlights' peers Simon Jones and Geoffrey McGivern as Dent and Prefect respectively). The remaining five episodes of the series were officially commissioned on 1 September. Adams developed the series episode-by-episode, without an overarching storyline. Facing time constraints, he turned to John Lloyd to co-write the final two episodes; Lloyd contributed concepts from his unfinished novel GiGax. The radio series, directed by Geoffrey Perkins (with the exception of the pilot, directed by Brett), was innovative in its use of sound effects and music. It was the first radio comedy programme to be produced in stereo. Adams wanted the series to sound "like a rock album". Unusually for a writer, he was heavily involved in its post-production. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's first series, broadcast weekly from 8 March 1978, quickly became a hit with audiences and spread via positive word of mouth. By its fourth episode, the Post Office was receiving letters addressed to Megadodo (the fictional publisher of the guide book). In August, Adams was commissioned to write a Christmas special (broadcast on Christmas Eve) and a second series (broadcast in five parts in January 1980). Both series were condensed and re-recorded for an LP release.

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Towel Day 2005 in Innsbruck, Austria; In the Hitchhiker's Guide novels, a towel is the most useful thing a space traveller can have. The first annual Towel Day was celebrated on 25 May 2001, two weeks after Adams's death.

In August 1978, Pan Books bought the rights to a novel based on the series. Adams was thrilled that the opportunity had come to him so easily. He arranged to co-write the novel with John Lloyd, but had a change of heart and told Lloyd he would write it alone—a decision which damaged their friendship, especially as Lloyd was in debt at the time. Lloyd swiftly got an entertainment agent, who advised him to take "10 per cent of anything with the name Hitchhiker on it". Lloyd was "appalled" and settled for splitting the £3000 advance. Adams later stated that his decision to write the novel solo "was perfectly within my rights. On the other hand, I should have handled it a bit better". Adams only adapted the series' first four episodes for the novel as he did not want to use any co-written material. The novel (titled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), published in October 1979, was an instant bestseller. It sold one million copies faster than any title in Pan's history and the US rights for the novel and its sequel sold for $2.3 million. The sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), also a bestseller, reworked elements from both radio series and the Christmas special.

The novels became the core of the Hitchhiker's franchise. Adams wrote three more novels in the series: Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992). Upon the publication of the fourth book, he began to jokingly describe the series as a "trilogy". Adams only intended to write two books in the series and felt trapped by the franchise's success. He had plans for a sixth book to conclude the series, noting that Mostly Harmless was "a bleak book. I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number." After his death, his estate selected Eoin Colfer to write a sixth and final book in the series, And Another Thing... (2009). 14 million copies of Hitchhiker's Guide books had been sold worldwide by the time of Adams's death.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been adapted into various mediums. Ken Campbell produced a stage version in May 1979. Theatre Clwyd also toured a stage version in Wales. A financially-disappointing July 1980 stage adaptation at the Rainbow Theatre was called "a fiasco" by Adams; he criticised the large venue and overdone stage effects. Adams adapted the first radio series into a 1981 BBC television miniseries, in which various members of the radio cast reprised their roles. Adams was disappointed with the television adaptation, finding it clunky, and clashed with producer Alan J. W. Bell. A three-part comic book adaptation was published in 1993.

Adams and radio producer Dirk Maggs planned, as early as 1993, to create further radio series based on the third, fourth and fifth Hitchhiker's novels. This was realised only after Adams's death. The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases of the radio series were broadcast from September 2004 to June 2005, with most of the original cast reprising their roles. With the aid of a recording of Adams reading Life, the Universe and Everything, he posthumously voices the character Agrajag. The final episode of the fifth series was dedicated to Adams. A sixth radio series, broadcast in 2018, was based on both And Another Thing... and Adams's unpublished material.

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Flyer for Ken Campbell's 1979 stage version of The Hitchhiker's Guide

For almost two decades, Adams attempted to adapt The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into a feature film. He was approached by a film producer as early as 1979. Ivan Reitman was involved as a producer in 1982; he left the project over creative differences with Adams. The film's development was affected by Adams's desire for both creative control and a large budget, though he had no problem with Americanising certain elements. A film deal with Disney was agreed on 1997. Adams and his family moved to Montecito, California, in 1999 when the film was close to being made, but it remained in development hell. In 2000, he likened the Hollywood process to "trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it". The long-awaited feature film adaptation, directed by Garth Jennings, was finally released in April 2005. The screenplay is credited to Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick.

Doctor Who

Adams was a fan of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, and at prep school he wrote a spoof about Daleks being powered by Rice Krispies. He submitted at least two story outlines to the Doctor Who production office, in 1974 and 1976, which were rejected. His first concept, about a spaceship full of useless passengers fleeing a catastrophe, was rejected for being too similar to The Ark in Space (1975). This idea was reused in The Hitchhiker's Guide for the Golgafrincham fleet. The second story concept, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, was rejected by producer Graham Williams for being "too silly".

Whilst awaiting a commission for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 1977, BBC producer Richard Imison sent Adams's pilot script to the Doctor Who production office. Script editor Anthony Read was impressed and commissioned Adams to write the Doctor Who serial The Pirate Planet (1978). Despite years of inactivity, Adams ironically found himself writing The Pirate Planet and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's first series simultaneously. Adams and actor Tom Baker tried unsuccessfully to pitch a film treatment of Krikkitmen from April 1978 to at least 1980; Adams recycled the storyline in Life, the Universe and Everything.

Adams replaced Read as script editor in October 1978 for Doctor Who's 17th season (1979-80). He heavily rewrote Terry Nation's script for Destiny of the Daleks (1979) "almost from the ground up" to bring it within budget, but was uncredited. He co-wrote City of Death (1979) with Graham Williams, from an original storyline by David Fisher; it was credited to the pseudonym "David Agnew". In 2008, The Daily Telegraph named City of Death one of the ten greatest Doctor Who stories. Adams wrote the unaired serial Shada, which was only partly filmed due to industrial action at the BBC. He also pitched a story for season 17 where the Doctor becomes a bitter recluse and is eventually called back into action. This storyline inspired Steven Moffat to write the 2012 Doctor Who Christmas special "The Snowmen". Adams left Doctor Who in late 1979. Scenes from Shada were used to cover Tom Baker's absence from "The Five Doctors" (1983). As Shada's production was abandoned, Adams reused its story elements in his 1987 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. He was unhappy with his script for Shada, calling it a "patchwork", and was extremely displeased when the existing footage was released on home media in 1992 (it has been stated that he signed over permission for the project's release by accident). Per his request, he was not credited on the release and his fee was donated to Comic Relief.

He declined lucrative offers to novelise his Doctor Who scripts and did not allow others to do so in his lifetime. Shada was novelised by Gareth Roberts in 2012, and City of Death and The Pirate Planet by James Goss in 2015 and 2017 respectively. Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen was novelised by Goss in 2018. In 2003, Shada was adapted into a webcast and audio drama starring Paul McGann. A partially animated reconstruction of Shada voiced by the original cast was released in 2017.

Dirk Gently

Chafing at the pressure from publishers to write more Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, Adams broke away with a new novel series. He satirised detective fiction with Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987), a humorous whodunit novel about a "holistic" private detective named Dirk Gently. A sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, was published in 1988. Before his death he was writing a third Dirk Gently novel, which he apparently considered adapting into a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide novel. The unfinished novel was posthumously published in The Salmon of Doubt (2002). After Adams's death, the Dirk Gently series was adapted into a BBC Radio 4 series (2007–2008) starring Harry Enfield, a BBC television series (2010–2012) starring Stephen Mangan and a BBC America television series (2016–2017) starring Samuel Barnett.

Video games and digital projects

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Adams at software convention ApacheCon in 2000

Adams and Steve Meretzky created a 1984 interactive fiction video game based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for Infocom. The game ultimately sold 400,000 copies and was one of the best-selling titles of its time. Computer Gaming World included the game on their 1996 list of the 150 best games of all-time.

Adams participated in a week-long brainstorming session with the Lucasfilm Games team for the game Labyrinth (1986), based on the fantasy film of the same name. He conceived of the game's transition from a text-based format to a graphical one, as a reference to The Wizard of Oz's black-and-white to colour transition. Subsequently Adams wrote the game Bureaucracy (1987), but after its disappointing reception (it sold only 40,000 copies), he stepped away from the video game industry for a time.

In 1995, Adams and his friend Robbie Stamp founded The Digital Village, a digital media and technology company to produce video game adaptations of Adams's work. Adams took the title of "Chief Fantasist". At the company he created Starship Titanic (1998), a Codie award-winning and BAFTA-nominated adventure game. In April 1999, Adams initiated h2g2, a public wiki which served as an online encyclopedia—an experimental attempt at making The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a reality. The Digital Village changed its name to h2g2 in 1999. With the dotcom crash, the company was sold to the BBC in January 2001, who continued to run and maintain the project until 2011.

Adams wrote and presented the "fantasy documentary" Hyperland (1990) which featured Tom Baker as the personification of a software programme. It discussed Vannevar Bush's Memex and Douglas Engelbart's The Mother of All Demos, and included an interview with Ted Nelson on Project Xanadu. Adams also hosted the radio documentaries The Internet: The Last 20th Century Battleground (1999) and The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Future (2000).

Personal beliefs and activism

Views on religion

"...imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'"

—Adams in September 1998, expressing disbelief in the fine-tuned universe argument for God

Adams's parents belonged to a Christian community, and he described his childhood self as "extremely religious" and an "active Christian". In 1984, Adams stated he was "very firmly agnostic" and that atheism seemed irrational as "there's no evidence either way". In 1998 he described himself as a "radical atheist". He added "radical" for emphasis so he would not be mistaken for an agnostic. He remained fascinated by religion because of its effect on human affairs, stating "I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing." He enjoyed chapel choir and Christmas carols into adulthood.

Adams was a friend of the evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins invited Adams to participate in his 1991 Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, where Adams read a passage from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe about a talking cow which had been bred to desire being eaten. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins jokingly called Adams his "possibly only convert" to atheism.

Environmental activism

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Adams climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in 1994, while wearing a rhino costume, for the charity Save the Rhino.

Adams was an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of endangered species. In 1985, the World Wildlife Fund and The Observer organised for Adams and naturalist Mark Carwardine to travel to Madagascar to search for the endangered aye-aye. They succeeded in capturing the first photograph of an aye-aye in the wild. Adams found the trip hugely enjoyable and profound. The two men spent 1988 travelling the world in search of other endangered species, such as the kākāpō and baiji, and chronicled their journey in a 1989 documentary radio series and 1990 companion book, both titled Last Chance to See. It was the book Adams was most proud of, and he was disappointed by its relative lack of success. Adams and Carwardine contributed the "Meeting a Gorilla" passage from their book to The Great Ape Project (1994). Adams was a signatory to the Great Ape Project, which argued for moral equality for great apes. He was also a supporter of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

In 1994, Adams participated in a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro for the British charity Save the Rhino; for part of the event he wore a rhino costume. Adams was a founder patron of Save the Rhino, and since 2003 the charity have held the annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lectures to raise money for environmental campaigns.

Technology and innovation

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Adams speaking at the Internet Security Conference in March 2000

One of the first computers Adams ever saw was a Commodore PET. He bought his first word processor (a Nexus) in 1982, having considered using one as early as 1979. When he and his future wife Jane Belson moved to Los Angeles in 1983, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England, Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 1000. He brought his Cambridge Z88 to Zaire on safari for Last Chance to See. Adams intermittently used a Hermes typewriter for writing "when he got stuck".

Adams first saw an Apple Macintosh at Infocom's Boston offices in 1984. It was "love at first sight". Adams and Stephen Fry were the first two individuals to buy a Mac in Europe. Adams accumulated numerous Macintoshes over the years, and he was also an "AppleMaster" (celebrities whom Apple used as spokespeople for its products). Adams created a rock video featuring his daughter Polly using the first version of iMovie, which was available on his .Mac homepage. Adams installed and started using Mac OS X in the weeks leading up to his death. His last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa framework: "And the promise of what's to come once people start developing in Cocoa is awesome... ". An Apple Macintosh SE/30 once owned by Adams is on display at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

"People think [Hitchhiker's is] some kind of vision of the future which it isn't. I'm not in the field of predictive science fiction... It's very much about using the ideas of science fiction and so on to look at us right here and now, so essentially it's got its feet probably more firmly planted in the area of satire and social comedy, I guess, than science fiction. But at the same time, I mean, inadvertently, [the fictional Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] turns out to be tremendously like where PDAs are going."

—Adams during one of his last interviews in May 2001

Adams was an early adopter of the internet. He used email to correspond with Steve Meretzky in the early 1980s, during their collaboration on The Hitchhiker's Guide video game. He allowed his email address to be widely publicised so he could receive fan mail. While working in New Mexico in October 1993 he began posting to his own USENET newsgroup. Adams became a prolific lecturer on information technology towards the end of his life, which friend Jon Canter said allowed him to fulfil his desire to become a writer-performer. He was a keynote speaker at the 1996 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and the April 2001 Embedded Systems Conference, both held in San Francisco.

Adams's fiction (and non-fiction) work has predicted future technology, though this was not his intention. Both Adams and critics have noted that the fictional Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which takes the form of a digital handheld device, forecasted personal digital assistants and smartphones. Adams was highly regarded by the generation of Silicon Valley technologists who had grown up with his work. Yahoo's Babel Fish translation service is named after Adams's fictional creature which translates languages. Chess-playing computers Deep Thought and Deep Blue were named after the fictional Deep Thought supercomputer. Google's AI research laboratory DeepMind was also named in homage. Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk called the writer the "best philosopher ever", and in 2018 he launched a Tesla car into space with a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide in its glovebox. Musk stated that the Grok chatbot is inspired by the fictional guide book. The Wall Street Journal also compared Eddie, the annoyingly upbeat AI from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to AI chatbots.

Writing style and themes

Despite Adams's association with science fiction, he stated that he was not a science fiction writer but rather a comedy writer working in the genre of science fiction simply because he "exaggerated so much". He also thought of himself more as a screenwriter than a novelist. His chief literary influence was humourist P. G. Wodehouse. Other influences included Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and Kurt Vonnegut. Adams downplayed comparisons between himself and Vonnegut: "Vonnegut is essentially a deeply serious writer who uses comedy to make his points, and I am essentially a comic writer who occasionally tries to slip a point about something or other 'under the counter'... I find the comparison embarrassing because he's a great writer, and I think I'm essentially a frivolous one". Adams has also been compared with Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift.

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

—The opening sentences of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), which illustrate Adams's writing style, existentialist themes and satire of modern society.

Adams's writing is characterised by wordplay and witty asides which diverge from the main plot. The Economist praised his "deftly executed one-liners". His storylines often intentionally subvert drama and narrative closure. Adams's work has been described as existentialist, as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy emphasises the insignificance of humanity's social and political troubles in a vast, meaningless universe. The ordinary Arthur Dent repeatedly finds himself accidentally travelling through ludicrous alien worlds, and resorts to a quintessentially English cup of tea to prevent himself from going mad. One of the novel's best-known jokes is the anticlimactic discovery of the answer to life, the universe and everything: "42". Additionally, a machine calculating the "Ultimate Question" of life is destroyed five minutes before its completion. Dent and Ford Prefect have been compared to the two main characters of Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy play Waiting for Godot. In contrast, the Dirk Gently series foregrounds humanity's far-reaching impact on the Earth, with Adams criticising man-made pollution and extinction.

Bureaucracy is a repetitive theme in Adams's work. The goal of his video game Bureaucracy is solely to get a bank to acknowledge a change-of-address card. The Vogons are easily recognisable as a satire of middle-management work culture. Adams invites comparisons between the Vogon captain, who unsympathetically demolishes the Earth to develop a hyperspace express route, and a bureaucratic civil servant, who unsympathetically demolishes Arthur's house to develop a bypass. Adams also commented on his frustrations with technology companies; artificially intelligent machines are programmed with "genuine people personalities", resulting in annoyingly cheerful doors, depressed robots and existential elevators. Despite billionaire Elon Musk's appreciation of The Hitchhiker's Guide, the historian Jill Lepore described the novel as "a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism". Adams wrote the novel on a typewriter that bore a sticker reading "End Apartheid". Writing for The Guardian, Jenny Turner described the story as a "post-colonial metaphor". The reveal that dolphins and mice are more intelligent than humans satirises humanity's belief in its superiority over the animal kingdom. Adams also promotes environmentalism in the Dirk Gently series. Economist Ha-Joon Chang notes that Adams references Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption as well as the theory of underconsumption.

Adams's "flimsy" characterisation of female characters has been criticised. Adams professed: "I find women completely mysterious anyway. I never know what they want. And I always get nervous about writing one as I always think I'll do something terribly wrong". Nick Webb, Adams's biographer, stated that Adams's early female characters tended to be mere foils for the male characters, but that this notably improved with the fully-rounded depiction of Kate Schechter in The Salmon of Doubt.

Personal life

Romantic relationships

From February to December 1981, Adams was in a relationship with novelist Sally Emerson, who was then separated from her husband, journalist Peter Stothard. Adams dedicated Life, the Universe and Everything to her. Emerson moved in with Adams in September, but their relationship ended when she returned to her husband.

Shortly afterwards, Adams's friends introduced him to barrister Jane Elizabeth Belson as a replacement flatmate. They became romantically involved. The couple lived in Los Angeles together in 1983 while Adams worked on an early screenplay of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film. When the deal fell through, they moved back to Islington, London. Adams and Belson separated in 1988, but resumed their relationship in 1991. They married on 25 November 1991. The couple had a daughter, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born 22 June 1994. Belson died on 7 September 2011.

Music

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Adams (wearing white) playing guitar with David Gilmour of Pink Floyd in 1994

Music was a significant part of Adams's life. During a segment on music programme Private Passions, Adams remarked that he "would have loved to have been a rock musician". He had a collection of 24 left-handed electric guitars (he was left-handed) and also studied piano as a child, though he was poor at keeping time with other musicians. Procol Harum's song Grand Hotel inspired the restaurant Milliways from The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. Adams cited the Beatles as one of his biggest creative influences. He was also a devotee of Johann Sebastian Bach and called the Mass in B minor "one of the great pinnacles of human achievement".

Adams was a huge Pink Floyd fan. His official biography shares its name with "Wish You Were Here" and an excerpt of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" was featured in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series (this was cut from commercial releases). Pink Floyd also inspired the fictional rock band Disaster Area from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Adams became good friends with the band and, for a 42nd birthday present, he was invited to play guitar with them live on stage in Earls Court. He also suggested the title for their 1994 album The Division Bell from the lyrics to its track "High Hopes". Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour performed at Adams's memorial service in 2001, and at Adams's 60th birthday charity event in 2012.

Death and legacy

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Adams's gravestone in Highgate Cemetery, North London, 2016

On 11 May 2001, Adams was resting from a workout at Platinum Fitness, a private gym in Santa Barbara, when he collapsed from a heart attack. He died the same morning at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, aged 49. Adams's funeral was held on 16 May in Santa Barbara. His ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery, London, in June 2002. A memorial service was held on 17 September 2001 at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square—the first church service broadcast online by the BBC.

The Salmon of Doubt, published in 2002, contains various essays, speeches and short stories from Adams, as well as ten chapters of an unfinished Dirk Gently novel.

On 9 May 2001, 2 days before his death, the Minor Planet Center announced that asteroid 18610 Arthurdent had been named after the protagonist of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In 2005, the asteroid 25924 Douglasadams was named in his memory.

On 25 May 2001, two weeks after Adams's death, his fans organised an annual tribute known as Towel Day. Travessa Douglas Adams, a street in São José, Brazil, is named in Adams's honour. In 2018, John Lloyd presented an episode of the BBC Radio Four documentary Archive on 4 discussing Adams's private papers held at St John's College. In 2023, Unbound published 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, a collection of Adams's notes and essays edited by Kevin Jon Davies.

Awards and nominations

Year	Award	Work	Category	Result	Notes	Ref.
1978	Imperial Tobacco Awards for Radio	The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy	Light Entertainment	Won
1979	Hugo Award		Best Dramatic Presentation	Nominated	Shared with Geoffrey Perkins
1980	Pye Radio Awards		Programme, or series of programmes, for young listeners	Won
1983	Inkpot Award	N/A	N/A	Won
	Best of Young British Novelists	N/A	N/A	Nominated

Adams was inducted into the Radio Academy's UK Radio Hall of Fame.

Body of work

Main article: List of Douglas Adams projects

Novels

• The Hitchhiker's 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)
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)
• The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)
• Mostly Harmless (1992)

Template:Col div endShort stories

• "The Private Life of Genghis Khan" (1986)
• "A Christmas Fairly Story" (1986)
• "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" (1986)

Template:Col div end Other books

• The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd; 1983)
• The Deeper Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd; 1990)
• Last Chance to See (with Mark Carwardine; 1990)

Notes

References

Citations

Sources

• Adams, Douglas (2002). "Introduction: A Guide to the Guide". The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Ballantine Books. pp. xi–xvi.
• Adams, Douglas (2005). Maggs, Dirk (ed.). The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts: The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases. Digitised by the Internet Archive in 2023. Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-43510-8.
• Ainsworth, John, ed. (2017). "The Pirate Planet, The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara". Doctor Who: The Complete History. Panini Comics, Hachette Partworks. 29. ISSN 2057-6048.
• Ainsworth, John, ed. (2019). "Shada, Dimensions in Time, The Curse of Fatal Death and Time Crash". Doctor Who: The Complete History. Panini Comics, Hachette Partworks. 90. ISSN 2057-6048.
• Donovan, Paul (1991). The Radio Companion (PDF). HarperCollins. pp. 131–132. ISBN 0246-13648-0. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 July 2024.
• Kropf, Carl R. (1988). "Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker" Novels as Mock Science Fiction (Les romans du "Hitchhiker" de Douglas Adams considérés comme de la science-fiction burlesque)". Science Fiction Studies. 15 (1): 61–70. doi:10.1525/sfs.15.1.0061. ISSN 0091-7729. JSTOR 4239859.
• Fleming, John; Adams, Douglas (1981a). McKenzie, Alan (ed.). "Don't Panic: An Interview with Douglas Adams". Starburst Magazine. Vol. 1 no. 7. Stan Lee. pp. 28–33.
• Fleming, John; Adams, Douglas (1981b). McKenzie, Alan (ed.). "Don't Panic II: The Rest of the Interview with Douglas Adams". Starburst Magazine. Vol. 3 no. 8. Stan Lee. pp. 38–42.
• Jones, Paul; Goss, James (18 January 2018). "Douglas Adams and his mad year of Doctor Who". Radio Times. Archived from the original on 7 July 2025. Retrieved 7 July 2025.
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• Roberts, Jem (2010). The Fully Authorised History of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: The Clue Bible from Footlights to Mornington Crescent. Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-1-84809-132-0.
• Roberts, Jem (10 September 2015). The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official Biography of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. London: Arrow Books. ISBN 978-0-09-959076-7. OCLC 920836076.
• Simpson, M. J. (2003). Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams (1st ed.). Boston, Mass.: Justin, Charles & Co. ISBN 1-932112-17-0.
• van der Colff, M.A. (2008). "Aliens and existential elevators: absurdity and its shadows in Douglas Adams's Hitch hiker series" (PDF). Literator: 123–138. doi:10.4102/lit.v29i3.128. ISSN 0258-2279. S2CID 170350416. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 November 2023.
• Webb, Nick (2005). Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams (Del Rey Books Trade Paperback ed.). New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-47650-6.
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• Wright, Mark, ed. (2016). "The Power of Kroll, The Armageddon Factor and Destiny of the Daleks". Doctor Who: The Complete History. Panini Comics, Hachette Partworks. 30. ISSN 2057-6048.
• Wright, Mark, ed. (2018). "City of Death, The Creature from the Pit, Nightmare of Eden and The Horns of Nimon". Doctor Who: The Complete History. Panini Comics, Hachette Partworks. 31. ISSN 2057-6048.
• Wroe, Nicholas (3 June 2000). "Planet of the japes". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 8 May 2014. Retrieved 6 December 2025.

Further reading

Books

• Colff, Marilette van der (11 August 2010). One is Never Alone with a Rubber Duck: Douglas Adams's Absurd Fictional Universe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4438-2438-5.
• Simpson, M. J. (April 2005) [2001]. The Pocket Essential Hitchhiker's Guide. Pocket Essentials. ISBN 1-904048-46-3.

Articles

Journals

• Bevan, William Ham (2019). "A Hitchhiker's Guide: It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes". Cambridge Alumni Magazine. No. 87. Cambridge University Press. pp. 30–33.
• Fatima, Zohra (December 2016). "Humor, Satire and Verbal Parody in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Relevance Theoretic Approach" (PDF). NUML Journal of Critical Inquiry. 14 (2). ISSN 2222-5706. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 August 2024.
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• Young, Jeffrey S. (May 1985). "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Douglas Adams". Macworld: 148–153.

News

• Armstrong, Stephen (27 March 2025). "Douglas Adams predicted our digital world – AI and all – but "found life extraordinarily difficult"". Radio Times. Archived from the original on 4 April 2026. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
• "Author Douglas Adams dies". BBC News. 14 May 2001. Archived from the original on 28 January 2012. Retrieved 6 December 2025.
• Buhler, Brendan (5 April 2001). "Interview: Douglas Adams". The Daily Nexus. Archived from the original on 28 December 2025. Retrieved 8 January 2026.
• "Douglas Adams". The Guardian. 22 July 2008. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 6 January 2026.
• Flood, Alison (29 May 2014). "Unseen Hitchhiker's Guide material in new Douglas Adams biography". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 7 January 2026.
• Gill, Peter (3 February 2011). "Douglas Adams and the cult of 42". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 8 January 2026.
• Roberts, Jem (16 September 2014). "Douglas Adams: How a new biography sheds light on his genius". The Independent. Retrieved 7 January 2026.
• "Douglas Adams". The Times. 14 May 2001. p. 17. Archived from the original on 5 December 2025. Retrieved 6 December 2025.
• Homer, Steve (October 1992). "Mankind as sickly as a parrot: Douglas Adams leaves his Apple Macs to tell Steve Homer how technology can rescue a human race that is stranded like a flightless bird". The Independent. Retrieved 9 January 2026.
• Mackintosh, Hamish (28 January 1999). "Working it Out - Douglas adams". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 7 January 2026.
• Walsh, John (25 August 2023). "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Douglas Adams — boy, man and comic genius". The Times. Archived from the original on 25 October 2025. Retrieved 6 December 2025.
• Wroe, Nicholas (10 April 2009). "Laughing matters". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 15 December 2025.
• Davies, Kevin Jon; Adams, Douglas (6 August 2023). "'Arthur Dent is a burk. He does not interest me': the secret doubts of Douglas Adams". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 15 March 2026.

Websites

• Adams's official web site at the Wayback Machine (archived 20 July 2011), established by him, and still operated by The Digital Village
• "Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx". vintagemacworld.com. 17 October 2004. Archived from the original on 28 November 2005.
• Adam's "Rockstar" Mac video

Broadcasts

• BBC2 Omnibus tribute to Adams, presented by Kirsty Wark, 4 August 2001
• Mueller, Rick and Greengrass, Joel (2002). Life, The Universe and Douglas Adams, documentary.
• Special edition of BBC Bookclub featuring Douglas Adams, first broadcast 2 January 2000 on BBC Radio 4

Speeches

• Template:TED speaker
• Douglas Adams speech at Digital Biota 2 (1998) Archived 2 March 2013 at the Wayback Machine (The audio of the speech) Archived 29 January 2008 at the Wayback Machine
• Adams's speech at UCSB in May 2001: "Parrots, the Universe and Everything"

External links

• Douglas Adams at IMDb
• Template:British Comedy Guide
• Interview with Douglas Adams, A DISCUSSION WITH National Authors on Tour TV Series, Episode No. 33 (1992)