So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams | Hacker News Reader

So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams

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When I was in high school in the mid-90s, I emailed Douglas Adams, who freely gave out his email address at the time. I told him how reading "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" got me more interested in my Physics class, and generally helped introduce me to a world beyond computer games.

He wrote back:

"Thanks for your note. Glad you enjoyed the books. I'm glad if I got you interested. But I'm always surprised that people are surprised to find that the world we unexpectedly find ourselves in is interesting.

Best, Douglas Adams"

Not his most pithy writing to be sure, but I love that I have this personalized bit of Douglas Adams wisdom that nobody else has ever seen (well, now they have).

I agree with DNA there, the world is such an endlessly interesting place that I can't understand how people don't find it mind blowingly fascinating.

There's "The Salmon of Doubt", an excellent collection of misc essays and writings of Douglas Adams published after his death, and it contains his last unfinished Dirk Gently novel.

It's about one third finished, and it's really just wild: There's one narrative strand about Dirk Gently, a private detective, receiving mysterious anonymous payments and deciding to follow random strangers, one about a paragliding genius architect who's all by himself in a weird future architect's utopia, and one about an escaping rhinocerous that's mainly narrated in terms of what it smells.

It's fantastically creative and incredibly sad that we won't get to read AD's ending, although I doubt that he actually knew where he was going with it at the time he wrote the bits that are there. It's this grand setup that really leaves you wondering what it means and how it's supposed to come together.

I'd encourage anyone to read it and try to come up with an ending. It feels like a fiendishly hard puzzle, and really gets you in the authors head. And do let me know if you have a good one!

There were four episodes of a Dirk Gently TV series done by the BBC which I really found both clever and charming in just the right way for Dirk Gently. Some of it grated, but in a way that I feel it was correctly intended to. It's a shame it was cancelled before it could do a bit more exploration. They seemed to be onto a good thing.

The US TV Series I also enjoyed, but it's much more of a radical departure from the books than the British TV show is. But it's chaotic, it has interesting characters, and the whole crazily chaotic storyline is choreographed well and ties together cleverly.

Oh, that US series! Never has a book license been touched more gently (pun really not intended, can't think of a good replacement to avoid it). "Yeah, we can't turn this into an at least tolerably good TV series, let's do this completely unrelated things instead". And yet they captured the spirit so well!

The BBC series was really excellent. Stephen Mangan was perfectly cast. I enjoyed it way more than Sherlock or anything else at the time that took itself too seriously.

In 1988 I was working on a Mac software package and I remember the thrill of his returned “Customer Registration” card arriving. We had a small display cabinet and it went in there (along with Stanley Kubrik’s and as few others)

The Radio Series was the best, followed by the scripts to the radio series (more random access!)

The TV series was actually pretty good too (like a Tom Baker Doctor Who (Adams was also a Who editor/writer during that time and had access to all manner of polyurethane monster kit!))

I also loved the Dirk Gently books but I always felt like they needed more of a denouement. Every passage before the end was like a hand carved chocolate frog, and the endings were said frog hitting a publisher at speed.

I've also had a few famous people buy my software. It is quite a thrill. Apart from the one that I detested.

Go on, you can tell us who that one was and why you detested them.

With all likelihood anyone still producing commercial (or free!) software today, or in the last 40 years, has users that they would love to see eaten by crows.

It was a particularly loathsome British politician. But I'm not going to say which one. ;0)

The tv series was my introduction to Hitchhiker's. I loved the presentation of the guide entries.

E.g. the babelfish at 2m5s: https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=125

Yeah, the TV series is not as well done as the radio show but is pretty good. The Guide entries are the best part.

It’s a real shame the movie totally failed to understand the concept, and also didn’t match the visual wit of the TV series.

In my senior year of high school, it was midterms and I had to study. I had a horrible problem with procrastination. So there I was in the library about to start studying when I happened upon the first book of his "trilogy". I finished it without stopping to study. And then I found the next two books in the trilogy and devoured those too. I loved those books and luckily I passed my exams. It was stressful at the time knowing I had to study, but today I remember that time fondly.

In case you are unaware, the hhgttg “trilogy” is actually 5 (or 6, depending on your view) books long. “So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish” and “Mostly Harmless” are definitely worth a read!

I remember there being a collection of the first 3 called the Complete Hitchhiker's Guide. In typical Adam's fashion, after the 4th book was released a new compendium was released called the More than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide. That titling should have continued, so we'd have gotten the Even More than Complete Hitchiker's Guide and, finally, the Completest Complete Hitchiker's Guide.

Hah, yes.

"Mostly Harmless" did have this on the front:

"The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Trilogy".

Yes! Frank Zappa is the rarest of individuals cut from the same cloth as Adams, and your comment reminded me of his amazing 3rd release of instrumental cuts, aptly titled "Return of the Son of Shut Up 'N Play Your Guitar".

I definitely felt like the series dropped off hard after Life, The Universe, And Everything. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish was kind of meandering, and Mostly Harmless was just plain depressing and a terrible ending for the series. So my personal advice would be to stop after the third book.

> I had a horrible problem with procrastination.

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

-Douglas Adams

Ode to Douglas Adams: A Vogon Tribute

Oh blubbering nebulae of bureaucratic slime, Hearken to this most dolorous rhyme! For Douglas Adams, that scribe of renown, We vomit forth verses of gelatinous brown.

With squelching syntax and belching prose, We honor his mind where improbability flows. Hitchhiker’s Guide! A tome most absurd, Turning logic to gibbering, flailing bird.

Behold the beauty of bureaucrats vile, Whose forms in triplicate stretch mile by mile. For Adams, dear Adams, saw through the farce, And sculpted with words a galactic arse.

The number 42! Oh cosmic decree! A joke of the universe, but not for thee! With Marvin the Paranoid, sighing so deep, And whales who contemplate death in their sleep.

O Adams, grand spinner of nonsense profound, May your soul in hyperspace ever be found. Yet should you return, we promise you this: More poetry! More Vogon! More hideous bliss!

Arg!! My ears!!!

Aha! The answer to "who writes poetry worse than Vogons, and even worse than Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings" turns out to be "large language models".

I remember tuning in to the first episode on BBC Radio 4, having heard about it the previous evening. It was so absolutely tuned into my way of thinking it could have been written just for me. Even now, as they say, the pictures are better on radio. Other adaptations have always disappointed me, apart from the subsequent books, for the same reason.

Douglas Adams was a great loss when he died, but what we had from him was the best.

Exactly my feelings. The CD boxed set, now scratched and basically unplayable, is still one of my prized possessions. I've probably listened to it hundreds of times, often back to back.

Sadly the CDs were a little different to the original radio broadcasts due to rights issues. Notably Marvin 'humming like Pink Floyd' on the surface of Magrathea was missing :(

One of my greatest regrets in life is seeing a "ticket" on the back of an EE trade magazine to see Douglas Adams give a presentation. I believe the event was in San Diego, and I was living in Arizona. The event was that upcoming weekend. I was tempted to drive out for the event, but thought, "nah, that's a torturous drive, I'll catch him another time." He died within a year.

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." This line alone did nearly as much to shape my adolescent sense of humor as all of Mel Brooks' movies combined.

It's unpleasantly like being drunk.

What's so unpleasant about being drunk?

You ask a glass of water.

I feel like a military academy

???

Bits of me keep passing out

Hitchhikers guide was a personality defining read for me when i was younger. I also recommend this video: Parrots, the Universe and Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc

Just this week i was looking for more humour writing like Douglas Adams, PG Wodehouse. I came across this award which seems interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollinger_Everyman_Wodehouse_P...

I plan to read some of them this year.

> Just this week i was looking for more humour writing like Douglas Adams, PG Wodehouse.

They are both masters of producing an absolutely perfect phrase that could have come from no-one but them—so's Pterry, by the way—but otherwise it'd never occur to me to lump them together. They seem radically different tonally to me.

I highly recommend “High Vaultage” from that list (and the podcast that preceded it is also absolutely outstanding and hilarious).

I am a huge fan of Sir Terry Pratchett and definitely second that recommendation as well, both offer a wonderfully unique perspective.

I recommend 'The Cyberiad' by Stanislaw Lem. Get the Michael Kandel translation.

As an Adams fan since high school I was floored when I eventually read The Cyberiad and realized that Lem had laid all of the groundwork fourteen years earlier. It's very much the proto Hitchhiker's Guide. It's got it all: Intergalactic protagonists on a series of highly absurd adventures, enabled by fantastical tech, and a playful approach to themes at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and contemporary physics.

It is laugh out loud funny. Especially once you get into the first, second, and third sallys. The humor is fiendishly clever. Lem is incredibly punny and it blows my mind to know that it was translated from Polish(!). I hope Michael Kandel gets his due for keeping the spirit of this book intact, because it really hinges on some very clever use of language.

I don't know what you categorize it as (I usually call it an "educational standup"), but his last talk before his death "Parrots, The Universe, and Everything" is one of the greatest things I've ever seen. It's very funny, with a lot of interesting anecdotes about his life, with a lot of interesting facts about animals, and he manages to tie the entire thing together with a pretty clever theme about the environment. I genuinely think it's one of the greatest public speeches ever done, at least in the English language.

If you haven't seen it, it's an hour and a half long, and it's totally worth it:

https://youtu.be/_ZG8HBuDjgc

He was actually a keynote speaker at one of Apple's first WWDCs. He was a registered Apple Developer (so was Harry Anderson, who I also think was a keynote speaker).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UNG3cQoOEc (not from the WWDC. I don’t know if there are recordings of the earliest ones).

UPDATE: I think I may be wrong. I think it was another conference. I know he attended WWDC, but maybe didn’t keynote. They had some whacky keynotes and speakers. I know that Ken Kesey was a rather interesting one.

I've found that in times of great stress, re-reading HHGTTG helps the most. Without fail, it makes me laugh and think about world more lightly, regardless of the circumstances. Wonderful books.

Im with you! The Golgafrinchan government bits of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and the opening of Life the Universe and Everything are my retreats when things are rough, but the entire series is amazing!

Oh and I should say, I enjoy all the different Adams adaptations(even the movie!), but my personal favorite that I think is less well known: the HHGG audiobooks read by the author. The timing and phrasing of Douglas Adams was truly marvelous!

Whenever I see something about one of my favorite sci-fi authors, especially if the phrase existential terror is included, the Total Perspective Vortex comes to mind :-)

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

Does anyone know was Tim Berners Lee a fan and was he influenced or did he have any inkling he was manifesting the infrastructure for the guide?

I think both Adams and Berners Lee were influenced/inspired by Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu.

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

Ted actually collaborated with Adams on Hyperland TV show.

It's quite likely that he heard the original radio broadcasts in 1978. Entertainment choices were much more limited then and it was very popular, particularly among young people with technical interests.

“As We May Think”, Vannevar Bush, 1945

Mother of All Demos, Douglas Engelbart, 1968

Multiverse Employee Handbook is like something from the Time Variance Authority, the Adjustment Bureau, or Everything Everywhere All at Once - with a few shades of Severance

I like these themes about the seeming absurdness and banal transcendence of capitalist systems and work today. Fight Club also echoes.

The TVA comparison is spot-on, bureaucracy across realities is universally soul-crushing. Severance's work/life divide feels like our quantum break room that exists in multiple states (you never know what you’ll find in the fridge). And yes, Everything Everywhere captures that cosmic-meets-mundane vibe I'm after. Corporate structures and cosmic physics share an absurd truth: both function through rules nobody fully understands but everyone pretends to follow

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the riff and associations. Have you see TAB ? Do you feel there's any Fight Club connection? If you haven't seen either (for a while) they are definitely worth a rewatch!

“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.”

Yeah, climbing out of the water was a bad idea :)

I always kind of wish HHGttG was as good as the geekdom's fondness of it suggests. I read it, I enjoyed it, but really, it is such a depressing series. And there is very little that's particularly funny or interesting after the first book and a half. So many dull and drawn out scenes of characters in miserable situations. And that whole tortured Krikkit gag trying to explain the origins of cricket. Sigh.

I completely agree, it's one of those works where the pop culture lens filters a lot of things. I think Adam Douglas himself mentions in an interview that the later HHGttG books reflect his personal depression, and the enormous time pressure they were written in. Probably the whole series should have been one book, but it also makes it feel a bit human - here's this really smart guy with a lot of brilliant ideas, he just didn't manage to fully finish everything before it's shipped.

Ah, they were written under time pressure? That actually explains a lot.

I believe it's more that Douglas Adams was a huge procrastinator.

"I love deadlines. I love the WHOOSHING sound they make as they go be." -- DA

I consider myself an enormous Douglas Adam’s fan, but I only really enjoy the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so I don’t think I can get too uppity about your comment. I’m not sure I’d call it depressing though, if anything it’s absurd in the tradition of Camus, and lit up my world during some bleak periods in my youth. The cultural impact of those early works is still enormous, at least in the UK, so I can’t begrudge the later works, and I still find the end of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish quite moving.

"I still find the end of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish quite moving."

Moving, but maybe still depressing?

So warning of spoilers, but Arthurs sole mission is to find the place he is supposed to visit, before he can finally die. (His only wish because his girlfriend vanished from existence)

And in the end he finds the place, which is not what anyone expected and they indeed all die, including his daughter.

After they concluded, there is no other place, no other home, because, every other place is also falling apart. Pretty dark ending in my opinion.

That's Mostly Harmless, and yes, Adams was quite depressed when he wrote it. I still don't hate that ending - I segued in my youth from these books straight into existential philosophy (I was a tiresome bore then and still am, apologies) and I could very much sympathise with Ford at the end finding it all hilarious. But you could easily stop reading at So Long and feel quite satisfied no matter your outlook, I think, even after shedding some tears for Marvin.

Ah yes, "thanks for the fish" was rather the book of unusual luck happening to poor Arthur.

But I also don't hate the ending of "Mostly harmless". It is a fitting end alltogether. Absurd and dark, just like the very beginning of the books are.

I think it's a lot like a lot of the Monty Python stuff: a lot of it is reflecting on a social order that was particular to Britain and no longer exists in quite the same way, so a lot of the satire doesn't land any more. The offbeat quirkiness has also become mainstream in British comedy, and so has also lost its edge. I think the fandom remains stronger in the US because American comedy still feels industrially mass-produced, and so the absurdism is still a bit novel there.

Animaniacs has the same problem, they mock politicians and celebrities from the early 90's, but the person their making fun of is just a drawn version of themselves so you're assumed to know who they are and why their being made fun of.

I don’t think you need to be familiar with that specific social order to appreciate the jokes?

I really like Stephen Fry's take on the difference between American and British comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao (YouTube)

Much of the impact of comedy comes from novelty and originality. We have had several generations of comedians influenced by Adams and Python. Unsurprisingly, younger people who didn't hear them when their work was new do not appreciate the full impact of their originality.

It's a great middle school book, but it doesn't really hold up all that well afterwards. I've tried to reread the series a few times as an adult and couldn't even get through the first book.

Isn’t that more because you re-read it? I read it first as an adult, and it was still funny.

Being enjoyable the first time is just meeting the standard. To rise above mediocrity the book needs to be able to be read more than once. Great books get better the more times you read them.

I haven't re-read. Perhaps I was lucky then to have read it when it was not yet a "cultural" touchstone. "42" was not yet a meme, for example.

I kind of agree with you, much as I loved them when I first read them (and maintain a fondness based on that). I am looking forward to reading at least the first two books to my son in a few years time.

That apart, have you read the Dirk Gently books? I think those are DA's best, and I've happily re-read them multiple times.

I read the Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, but it's a good reminder to read the whole series, thank you.

>And that whole tortured Krikkit gag trying to explain the origins of cricket.

I remember the 4th and 5th books as pale shadows of the others. I got the impression they were only written for the money.

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