The Berkeley Hotel Hostage of Douglas Adams | Hacker News Reader

The Berkeley Hotel Hostage of Douglas Adams

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127 pointsthunderbong30 comments

Afterwards he wrote Mostly Harmless, which is a tough read even in the best of conditions. The rebelliousness of youth totally gives way to the grimmer realities of life in that novel

I've often felt that the series lost its free spirit and lightness and became incredibly personal towards the end. Maybe it always was incredibly personal. I don't know if it's true or if it's just Douglas's depression. The time with Fenchurch feels almost like a stolen glimpse of a very private moment.

Some points also to Eoin Colfer who didn't make a total hash of the sequel book, which I imagine is a very difficult thing to approach and would inevitably upset a lot of people.

Having read the series twice in my life. The first time Mostly Harmless felt like a horrible ending. Rereading it 15 years later, Mostly Harmless felt like a fitting ending and made me smile when it ended.

The Eoin Coifer sequel felt like mediocre fan fiction to me, unfortunately.

I read some other Eoin Colfer books before this ... and it felt like a mediocre Eoin Colfer novel to me.

Regarding the sequel, I think the phrase you're searching for is "This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

I saw him give a talk a couple years before his death where he said he wrote it when he was very depressed and regretted ending the series that way: he was considering writing another

I have a lot to say about Eoin Colfer's travesty of a sequel, but I'm not going to say it all here.

To sum it up in one word, I felt betrayed. The original books shed humorous light on so many of the rotten things in our world, in a way that had protected me. For example, I had met the Vogons before I encountered actual bureaucracy. This book depicted Vogons as people complete with awkward father/son reconciliation plot. I was certain when I read it that Adams was 'spinning in his grave' as he would have put it. I was inconsolable.

I had to opportunity to read the final manuscript in preparation for interviewing him. After reading the manuscript, which was difficult as I became increasingly upset as I slogged through it, I refused to be involved further and suggested that they not publish it. When further begged for interview questions, the best I could come up with was something along the lines of "How dare you?".

The Digital Antiquarian blog talks about Adams's struggles with writing when he was working with Infocom on two IF games, their _Hitchhiker's_ adaptation and _Bureaucracy_: https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/the-computerized-hitchhikers/ and https://www.filfre.net/2015/08/bureaucracy/

Reminds me of this little story on how Douglas Adams went to Corfu in 1978 to start writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: https://twitter.com/jasonhazeley/status/1158046572363550721

> One of these was the brainchild of Adams’s English teacher at school: define the place-name. So, ‘what is epping?’ and ‘what are devizes?’

I don’t understand a word of this.

Epping and Devizes are both towns in the UK. The idea is to take an interesting sounding proper name, pretend it's just a normal word and then come up with your own definition.

Leading to one of Adams' least-known books, "The Meaning of Liff" (1983)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Liff

I borrowed someone's copy of that once back in said 1980's. I remember there was a word for the cooler side of the pillow when you turned it over, but can't remember what it is - but I think it started with 'a'....seached the internet for it 'abilene', not to be confused with Abeline in Texas of course.

There seemed to be a lot of words related to knights having to deal with the different reasons/states of drawbridges not opening to let them in as well.

Now I have an irrational desire for Bryan Ferry to write a song similar to Avalon, but called Abilene all about how nice the cooler side of the pillow is.

Duddo (n.) The most deformed potato in any given collection of potatoes.

I use that word to this day.

I think skoonspruit (forgot the spelling) is the main one that still stuck in casual use decades later for my family.

It's the rare fountain thing a saliva gland makes eg when yawning.

There was another one for a group of cars all doing exactly the speed limit because one of them is a police car. I was better at remembering the definitions than the actual words.

You forgot the last one because of how improbable it is for a police car to drive at the speed limit..

> the rare fountain thing a saliva gland makes eg when yawning

When I was growing up everyone called that a "gleek". Though usually it only came up when people did it intentionally.

"in the beginning of the Monty Python film, the gravestone with the title "The Meaning of Liff" appears before a lightning bolt strikes the last F and converts it to an E."

I remember wondering 'what was that all about?'

The book puts names to things that are otherwise nameless, and draws those names from places in the UK. One that sticks in my mind is a "sheppey", the distance at which a sheep stops being picturesque. It has the narrative structure of a dictionary, but the ideas...

My favorite Douglas Adams quote:

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as you go past them

The single most important piece of information is missing: how long did they stay in the hotel?

Update: 2 weeks according to another site[1]. That seems like a very short time to turn out another 100+ pages of a book...

[1] https://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2017/11/06/38330/new_play_cha...

If you write 10 pages a day, that's plenty of time. Especially if you have to throw out a decent chunk of the output.

It's worth mentioning that this story is prior to 1984, when So Long and Thanks for All The Fish was published. That also happens to be the year when the Mac came out, and Adams was an ardent Mac enthusiast -- indeed AFAIK he was the first person in all of Europe to buy a Mac. So as he transitioned off of a typewriter, one would presume that the strategy employed here would become a bit harder.

I thought it was Stephen Fry, but you're right, apparently he bought the first 2, and Adams' good friend Stephen Fry bought the 3rd: https://www.whynow.co.uk/read/douglas-adams-stephen-fry-a-te...

Fun story on accidentally buying Douglas Adams' Mac IIfx from ebay: http://web.archive.org/web/20051127025410/http://www.vintage...

"When switched on for the first time, it was clear that the last user had little understanding of how to store files on the hard disk. The root directory contained hundreds of MacWrite documents. Scrolling through them was a pain and, as I have no interest in other people's private affairs, I selected the lot and deleted them. /.../

I started up MacWrite Pro and noticed that it was registered to "Douglas Adams, Serious Productions Ltd". I paid little attention to this as I had seen warez copies of Claris software where the registered user was Douglas Adams. I then started Claris Resolve, ignoring a warning dialog (mistake number two), and noted that this software was also registered to Douglas Adams. The copies of Claris Works 4.0 and Now Up-to-Date were registered to Jane Belson; I was unfamiliar with the name but a quick web search determined that she is Douglas Adams's widow."

Also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091793

Speaking of Douglas Adams, a new book titled "42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams" is about to be released: https://www.amazon.com/42-Wildly-Improbable-Ideas-Douglas/dp...

I quite enjoyed the unfinished Salmon of Doubt that was published posthumously. Now I have one more bit of Adam’s’ work to enjoy!

The South Bank Show had a delightful episode with him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMn_1vN7pi0

(p.s.: The video only has the right audio channel; switch to mono!)

Great story.

I was a huge HHGTTG fan (counting Disaster Area among my top musical influences)

When I was at UWO in the early 90's Douglas Adams came on campus for a book signing - it was to last about 45 minutes, and it was scheduled right in the middle of one of my exams.

So I decided to sit the exam, thinking "I'll catch up with him at a future book signing", alas he died before I ever got the chance.

> Douglas Adams, whose authorised biography I have just finished

After reading THHGTTG it really does not seem imposible to obtain authorization from dead people. /s

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