![]() ![]() ![]() Then, in a twist that Mr Adams can hardly have expected when, in 1978, he first put pen to paper, the World Wide Web gave him a chance to create something like the real thing, at least for earth-bound travellers ( Douglas Adams died of a heart attack on May 11th while exercising in a gym. ![]() ![]() The idea went through several iterations, first as a radio series, then television, then a sequence of books which, though described as a trilogy, ran to five volumes. (They slip through wormholes in space to biro heaven when nobody is looking.) The second plays over the end credits and is in the style of smooth jazz. It even found room for an explanation of where ballpoint pens vanish to. The first version of the song 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish' is a Broadway-style, lively version sung by the dolphins before they leave Earth. Instead of giants, pygmies and super-intelligent horses, it was populated by bug-eyed monsters who use poetry as a form of torture, creatures whose chromosomes are so unstable that they evolve several times a day, and super-intelligent shades of the colour blue. It was a Swiftian satire for the late 20th century. Such people would, of course, need a guide to their travels: a compendium of useful information with that most useful of all injunctions, “Don't Panic”, written on the front cover in large, friendly letters. He was in a field at night (most versions of the legend place this field in Austria), looking at the stars, when the thought came to him that there might be people hitchhiking between those stars on spaceships. Legend has it that the idea for “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” came to Douglas Adams when he was, himself, hitchhiking. ![]()
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