Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomstuart | Hacker News Reader

This is my all-time favourite reply to a mundane fan question: http://www.douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cg...

View on HN

Reminds me of the movie "Galaxy Quest" when Jason (Tim Allen) snaps on his fans (lead by Justin Long as Brandon) who're trying to resolve potential inconsistencies in some episodes Galaxy Quest:

BRANDON: Commander, as I was saying... In "The Quasar Dilemma", you used the auxiliary of Deck B for Gamma override. But online blueprints indicate Deck B is independent of the guidance matrix, so we were wondering where the error lies?

JASON: It's a television show. Okay? That's all. It's just a bunch of fake sets, and wooden props, do you understand?

BRANDON: Yes but, we were wondering-

JASON: There IS no quantum flux and there Is no auxiliary... THERE'S NO GODDAMN SHIP, YOU GOT IT!?

I highly recommend the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it.

Reminds me of the Simpsons: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701245/quotes?qt0207833

Homer: [to Doug] Let me ask you a question. Why would a man whose shirt says "Genius at Work" spend all of his time watching a children's cartoon show?

[pause]

Doug: I withdraw my question. [takes a bite from a bar of chocolate]

I tracked down the clip on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/30923/the-simpsons-hardcore-fans

A nice little insight into the writing process, to boot.

The answers to certain questions have value in furthering the story you want to tell. Other kinds of questions do not. Focus on the former, ignore the latter.

Obvious, I suppose. But I also imagine it's vital to keep this in mind as you write a piece of fiction, in order to keep yourself on track.

I'd expect a less boring answer from a writer, or at least not along the lines of "well, it's just a book I wrote, there is nothing beyond it". As if we are so stupid not to understand that. Every good fiction book is a world within and beyond for the reader. And I think questions like this are more like a test for the writer: "Are you that great?". No, apparently he's not.

His answer on why 42 is as disappointing.

> "Are you that great?". No, apparently he's not.

That's not really fair - there are plenty of very good motivations for writing (and reading) fiction other than immersion in a sustained imaginative world. By that criterion, "Avatar" is a better film than than, say, "Casablanca," because James Cameron knows more about the flora of Pandora than Michael Curtiz does about Morocco.

Adams is a great writer precisely because of his lack of pretension, his humility, and his irreverence -- I'd be disappointed if he didn't regard his own work with the same outlook he had for everything else.

The grandparent is getting modded to all hell, but there is a genuine point here about the sort of writer Douglas Adams was. Not that he's a bad writer, but that he's the sort of writer who would say his main character has no existence outside the sequence of words designed to create an idea of this imaginary person in people's minds.

Some writers would consider their characters to have some kind of additional existence inside their (the writer's) own mind. They would "know" things about their characters which they never put into print; not to the level of what sort of computer they used, but certainly a more fully-functional mental model of the character beyond the words on the page.

Douglas Adams wasn't one of these writers, he was a writer for whom the characters were always to a certain extent subservient to the joke and the narrative. And Arthur Dent is a particularly strong example of this since there was never all that much to Arthur's character; he's essentially just an unidealised version of Douglas Adams himself who travels around the universe reacting to things in pretty much the same way that Douglas Adams would if Douglas Adams found himself with no home planet and no tea.

>His answer on why 42 is as disappointing.

Actually I think it's quite brilliant. With all the religions, myths, legends, verbal stories, calendars, moon phases, planet alignments, mathematical projections, physics... these things of complication, what if the understanding the universe is just as simple as 42!?

The problem is that 42 was the answer to an earlier question - once DNA had worked out 42, the original question and universe was replaced by an even more incomprehensible one. And so he has no memory of the original reason for 42.

Blasphemy! You should know better than to slam Douglas Adams in front of this crowd.

I disagree. Had the number some actual reason for being chosen, some relevance, or some greater purpose, then such would have come out in the book. As it stands, the complete and utter irrelevance of it is almost a plot point in the book. That there is a great system of machinations far greater than what any single individual could possibly understand is a fantastic premise -- that it derives a nonsensical answer that the universe can't comprehend is even more fantastical, and in my opinion, is part of what works about the story; I honestly don't think it would have held as well if the number actually had some importance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com