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Douglas Noël Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001), also known (to fans) as Bop Ad or Bob (after his illegible signature), or by his initials "DNA", was a cult British comic radio dramatist, musician and author, most notably of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (HHGG or H2G2). Hitchhiker's began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five books (which had sold more than fifteen million copies by the time of Adams' death) as well as a television series, a computer game and a feature film that was completed only after Adams's death.

In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams also wrote or co-wrote three stories of science fiction staple Doctor Who, and served the series as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, co-author credits on two Liff books and Last Chance to See, itself based on a radio series. His fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist, a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Apple Macintosh and other "techno gizmos". He was a keen technologist, using such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known.

Adams was a self-described "radical atheist." Towards the end of his life, he was a sought-after lecturer on topics including technology and the environment. Since his death at the age of 49, he is still widely revered in science fiction and fantasy circles.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Education and early works 3 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 4 Doctor Who 5 Music 5.1 Pink Floyd 5.2 Procol Harum 5.3 Other musical links 6 Computer games and projects 7 Dirk Gently 8 Personal beliefs 8.1 Religion 8.2 Environmentalism 8.3 Technology 9 Personal life 10 Adams's death 11 Biographies 12 Douglas Adams's works 12.1 Novels in the HHGG series 12.2 The Dirk Gently series 12.3 Other works 12.4 Tributes and honorifics 13 Notes 14 See also 15 External links 15.1 Fan sites

Early life

Douglas Adams was born to Janet (Donovan) Adams (now Janet Thrift) and Christopher Douglas Adams in Cambridge, England. His parents had one other child together: Susan who was born in March 1955. His parents separated and divorced in 1957, and Douglas, Susan and Janet moved in with Janet's parents, the Donovans, in Brentwood, Essex. Douglas's grandmother kept her house as an official RSPCA refuge for hurt animals, which "exacerbated young Douglas's hayfever and asthma." ^[2]

Christopher Adams remarried in July 1960, to Mary Judith Stewart (born Judith Robertson). From this marriage, Douglas Adams has a half-sister, Heather. Janet remarried in 1964, to a veterinarian, Ron Thrift, providing two more half-siblings to Douglas: Jane and James Thrift.

Education and early works

Adams first attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood, Essex. He took the exams and interviewed for Brentwood School at age six, and attended from 1959 to 1970. Adams attended different divisions of the school, including the Prep School and the Middle School. While at the prep school, he had an English class, taught by Frank Halford, where Halford awarded Adams the only ten out of ten of his entire teaching career for a creative writing exercise. Adams remembered this for the rest of his life, especially when facing writer's block. Some of Adams's earliest writing was published at the school, such as a report on the school's Photography Club in The Brentwoodian (in 1962) or spoof reviews in the school magazine Broadsheet (edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone). Adams also had a letter and short story published nationally in the UK in the boys' magazine The Eagle in 1965. Adams also met Griff Rhys Jones at the school; the two appeared together in a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 1968. He was six feet tall by the time he was 12, and he stopped growing only at 6'5" (1.96 m).

On the strength of a bravura essay on religious poetry that mixed the Beatles with William Blake, he was awarded a place at St John's College, Cambridge to read English, entering in 1971. ^[3] Adams attempted early on to get into the Footlights Dramatic Club, with which several other names in British Comedy had been affiliated. He was, however, turned down, and started to write and perform in revues with Will Adams (no relation) and Martin Smith, forming a group called "Adams-Smith-Adams." Later, on another attempt to join Footlights, Douglas Adams was encouraged by Simon Jones and Adams found himself working with Rhys Jones, among others. In 1974, Adams received a B.A. (and later, an M.A.) in English literature.

Some of his early work appeared on BBC2 (television) in 1974, in an edited version of the Footlights Revue from Cambridge, that year. A version of the same revue performed live in London's West End led to Adams being "discovered" by Monty Python's Graham Chapman. The two formed a brief writing partnership, and Adams earned a writing credit in one episode (episode 45: "Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Liberal Party") of Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the sketch, a man who had been stabbed by a nurse arrives at his doctor's office bleeding profusely from the stomach, when the doctor makes him fill out numerous senseless forms before he can administer treatment (a joke he later incorporated into the Vogons' obsession with paperwork). Adams also contributed to a sketch on the album for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Douglas also had two "blink and you miss them" appearances in the fourth series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. At the beginning of Episode 42, "The Light Entertainment War," Adams is in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to the on-screen captions), pulling on gloves, while Michael Palin narrates a sketch that introduces one person after another, and never actually gets started. At the beginning of Episode 44, "Mr Neutron," Adams is dressed in a "pepperpot" outfit and loads a missile onto a cart, driven by Terry Jones, who is calling out for scrap metal ("Any old iron..."). The two episodes were first broadcast in November 1974. Adams and Chapman also attempted a few non-Python projects, including Out of the Trees.

Some of Adams's early radio work included sketches for The Burkiss Way in 1977 and The News Huddlines. He also co-wrote, again with Graham Chapman, the 20 February 1977 episode of Doctor on the Go, a sequel to the Doctor in the House television comedy series.

As Adams had difficulty selling his jokes and stories, he took a series of "odd jobs" in order to have some income. A biography from an early edition of one of the HHGG novels provides the following description of his early career:

After graduation he spent several years contributing material to radio and television shows as well as writing, performing, and sometimes directing stage revues in London, Cambridge and at the Edinburgh Fringe. He has also worked at various times as a hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard, radio producer and script editor of Doctor Who.

Adams held the job as a bodyguard in the mid-1970s. He was employed by an Arab family, which had made its fortune in oil (and were from Qatar, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica). ^[4] He had a couple of favourite anecdotes about the job: one story related that the family once ordered one of everything from the hotel's menu, tried all of the dishes, and sent out for hamburgers. Another story had to do with a prostitute, sent to the floor Adams was guarding one evening. They acknowledged each other as she entered, and an hour later, when she left, she is said to have remarked, "At least you can read while you're on the job." ^[5]

In 1979, Adams and John Lloyd wrote the script for two half-hour episodes of Doctor Snuggles: "The Remarkable Fidgety River" and "The Great Disappearing Mystery" (episodes seven and twelve). John Lloyd was also co-author of two episodes from the original "Hitchhiker" radio series (Fit the Fifth and Fit the Sixth (a.k.a. Episodes Five and Six, see explanation below)), as well as The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff. Lloyd and Adams also collaborated on an SF movie comedy project based on The Guinness Book of World Records, which would have starred John Cleese as the UN Secretary General, and had a race of aliens beating humans in athletic competitions, but the humans winning in all of the "absurd" record categories. This latter project never proceeded past a treatment.

After the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide became successful, Adams was made a BBC radio producer, working on Week Ending and a pantomime called Black Cinderella Two Goes East. He left the position after six months to become the script editor for Doctor Who.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a concept for a science-fiction comedy radio series pitched by Adams and radio producer Simon Brett to BBC Radio 4 in 1977. Adams came up with an outline for a pilot episode, as well as a few other stories (reprinted in Neil Gaiman's book Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion) that could potentially be used in the series.

According to Adams, the idea for the title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria (though he joked that the BBC would instead claim it was Spain "because it's easier to spell" ^[6]), gazing at the stars. He had been wandering the countryside while carrying a book called the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe when he ran into a town where, as he humorously describes, everyone was either "deaf" and "dumb" or only spoke languages he couldn't. After wandering around and drinking for a while, he went to sleep in the middle of a field and was inspired by his inability to communicate with the townspeople. He later said that due to his constantly retelling this story of inspiration, he no longer had any memory of the moment of inspiration itself, and only remembered his retellings of that moment. A postscript to M. J. Simpson's biography of Adams, Hitchhiker, provides evidence that the story was in fact a fabrication and that Adams had conceived the idea some time after his trip around Europe.

Despite the original outline, Adams was said to make up the stories as he wrote. He turned to John Lloyd for help with the final two episodes of the first series. Lloyd contributed bits from an unpublished science fiction book of his own, called GiGax. ^[7] However, very little of Lloyd's material survived in later adaptations of Hitchhiker's, such as the novels and the TV series. The TV series itself was based on the first six radio episodes, but sections contributed by Lloyd were largely re-written.

BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first radio series weekly in the UK in March and April 1978. Following the success of the first series, another episode was recorded and broadcast, which was commonly known as the Christmas Episode. A second series of five episodes was broadcast one per night, during the week of 21 January - 25 January 1980.

While working on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such as The Pirate Planet) Adams developed problems keeping to writing deadlines that only got worse as he published novels. Adams was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish was completed. ^[8] He was quoted as saying, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." ^[9]

The books formed the basis for other adaptations, such as three-part comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo illustrated edition, published in 1994. This latter edition featured a 42 Puzzle designed by Adams, which was later incorporated into paperback covers of the first four "Hitchhiker's" novels (the paperback for the fifth re-used the artwork from the hardcover edition).^[10] Adams also began attempts to turn the first Hitchhiker's novel into a movie in 1980, making several trips to Los Angeles, California, and working with a number of Hollywood studios and potential producers. When he died in 2001 in California, he had been trying again to get the movie project green-lit with Disney. The screenplay finally got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick, was green-lit in September 2003, and the resulting movie was released in 2005.

Radio Producer Dirk Maggs had consulted with Adams in 1993 about creating a third radio series, based on the third novel in the Hitchhiker's series. They also vaguely discussed the possibilities of radio adaptations of the final two novels in the five-book "trilogy." As well as the movie, this project was only realized after Adams's death. The third series, The Tertiary Phase, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004 and is now available on audio CD. Douglas Adams himself can be heard playing the part of Agrajag. So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly Harmless made up the fourth and fifth radio series, respectively (on radio they were titled The Quandary Phase and The Quintessential Phase) and these were broadcast in May and June of 2005, and subsequently released on Audio CD. The last episode in the last series (with a new, "more upbeat" ending) concluded with, "The very final episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is affectionately dedicated to its author." ^[11]

Doctor Who

Adams sent the script for the HHGG pilot radio programme to the Doctor Who production office in 1978, and was commissioned to write The Pirate Planet (see below). He had also previously attempted to submit a potential movie script, called "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen," which later became his novel Life, the Universe, and Everything (which in turn became the third Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). Adams then went on to serve as script editor on the show for its seventeenth season in 1979. Altogether, he wrote three Doctor Who serials starring Tom Baker as the Doctor:

• The Pirate Planet (the second serial in the "Key To Time" arc, in Season 16)
• City of Death (with producer Graham Williams, from an original storyline by writer David Fisher. It was transmitted under the pseudonym "David Agnew")
• Shada (only partially filmed and not broadcast due to industrial disputes)

Adams was also known to allow in-jokes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to appear in the Doctor Who stories he wrote and other stories on which he served as Script Editor. Conversely, at least one reference to Doctor Who was worked into a Hitchhiker's novel. In Life, the Universe and Everything, two characters travel in time and land on the pitch at Lord's Cricket Ground. The reaction of the radio commentators to their sudden appearance is very similar to a scene in the eighth episode of the 1965-66 story The Daleks' Master Plan, which has the Doctor's TARDIS materialize on the pitch at Lord's, with the reactions of the match's commentators.

Elements of Shada and City of Death were reused in Adams's later novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in particular the character of Professor Chronotis. Big Finish Productions eventually remade Shada as an audio play starring Paul McGann as the Doctor. Accompanied by partially animated illustrations, it was webcast on the BBCi website in 2003, and subsequently released as a two-CD set later that year. An omnibus edition of this version was broadcast on the digital radio station BBC7 on 10 December 2005.

Adams is credited with introducing a fan of his, the zoologist Richard Dawkins, to Dawkins' future wife, Lalla Ward, who had played the part of Romana in Doctor Who.

When he was at school, he wrote and performed a play called Doctor Which.

Music

Adams played guitar, left-handed, and had a collection of twenty-four of these instruments when he died in 2001 (having received his first left-hand guitar in 1964). He also took piano lessons in the 1960s from the same teacher who taught Paul Wickens, who later played keyboards in Paul McCartney's band (and composed the music for the 2004-2005 editions of The Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). ^[12] Music, and in particular The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Procol Harum had great influences on Adams's professional life.

Pink Floyd

Adams included a direct reference to Pink Floyd in the original radio version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Landing on an alien planet, the main characters survey the landscape whilst an atmospheric section of Pink Floyd's "Shine on you Crazy Diamond" plays in the background; it is immediately revealed that, rather than being non-diegetic background music, the excerpt is being hummed by Marvin, an android character. See also Pink Floyd trivia or Hitchhiker's radio series trivia.

Adams's official biography shares its name with the song "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd. Adams was friendly with their guitarist David Gilmour and, as his 42nd birthday gift, was invited to make a guest appearance at one of their 1994 concerts in London, playing rhythm guitar on the songs "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse". Adams chose the name for Pink Floyd's 1994 album, The Division Bell by picking the words from the lyrics to one of its tracks. Gilmour also performed at Adams's Memorial Service.

Pink Floyd, and their reputation for lavish stage shows, were also the inspiration for the Adams-created fictional rock band "Disaster Area", renowned as the loudest band (and, in fact, the loudest noise) in the universe. One element of Disaster Area's stage show was to send a space ship hurtling into a sun, probably inspired by the airplane which would crash into the stage during some of Pink Floyd's live shows, usually at the end of "On The Run". The 1968 Pink Floyd song “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” may also have influenced part of the ideas behind Disaster Area.

Procol Harum

Douglas Adams was a good friend with Gary Brooker, the lead singer, pianist and songwriter of the progressive rock band Procol Harum. Adams is known to have invited Brooker to one of the many parties that Adams held at his house. On one such occasion Gary Brooker performed the full (4 verse) version of his hit song A Whiter Shade of Pale. Brooker also performed at Adams's Memorial Service.

Adams also appeared on stage with Brooker to perform In Held Twas in I at Redhill when the band's lyricist Keith Reid was not available. On several other occasions he had been known to introduce Procol Harum at their gigs.

Adams also let it be known that while writing he would listen to music, and this would occasionally influence his work. On one occasion the title track from the Procol Harum album Grand Hotel was playing when "suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that came out of nowhere and didn't seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought ... it sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floorshow going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe. And so that was where the idea for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from." ^[13]

Other musical links

Adams made a number of links to music of the time in his books. For example, a mouse proposes that the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is "How many roads must a man walk down?", a line from Bob Dylan's song Blowin' in the Wind.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is dedicated to the 1980 Paul Simon soundtrack album One Trick Pony. Adams says he played it "incessantly" while writing the book.

In So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, Arthur Dent listens to a Dire Straits LP and Adams goes on to pay tribute to their lead guitarist, Mark Knopfler. Adams later revealed that the particular song to which he refers in the book—although never by name—is Tunnel of Love, from the Making Movies album.

Elvis is later discovered playing in a diner attended by Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, where he is simply known as "The King".

Besides modern rock music, Douglas Adams was a great admirer of the work of JS Bach, which provides a minor plot element in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

Adams was also a major fan of the Beatles. He makes a reference to Paul McCartney in Life, The Universe, and Everything and quotes lyrics and titles from songs by the Beatles in Mostly Harmless and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

Adams also does this at least once in The Salmon of Doubt. In Chapter 3 there is a conversation between Kate and Dirk, which includes the following exchange:

"So?"

"I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair."

Taken together, these two lines form a quotation from "Norwegian Wood" on the Rubber Soul album.

Computer games and projects

Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG together with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. In 1986 he participated in a weeklong brainstorming session with the Lucasfilm Games team for the game, Labyrinth. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy (also by Infocom, but not based on any book). Adams was also responsible for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was published in 1999 by Simon and Schuster. Terry Jones wrote the accompanying book, entitled Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, since Adams was too busy with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the h2g2 collaborative writing project.

In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme Hyperland ^[14] also featuring Tom Baker as a "software agent" (similar to the "Assistants" used in several versions of Microsoft Office, derived from their failed "Bob" program), and interviews with Ted Nelson, which was essentially about the use of hypertext. Although Adams didn't invent hypertext, he was an early adopter and advocate of it, and his influence should not be underestimated. This was the same year that Tim Berners-Lee used the idea of hypertext in his HTML.

Dirk Gently

In between Adams's first trip to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine in 1985, and their series of travels that formed the basis for the radio series and non-fiction book Last Chance to See, Adams wrote two other novels with a new cast of characters. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was first published in 1987, and was described by its author as "a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics." ^[15] It received many rave reviews from American newspapers upon its publication in the USA. Adams borrowed a few ideas from two Doctor Who stories he had worked on: City of Death and Shada.

A sequel novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was published a year later. This was an entirely original work, Adams's first since So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Reviewers, however, were not as generous with praise with the second volume as they had been with the first. After the obligatory book tours, Adams was off on the trips that became Last Chance to See. The second novel became the last for the Dirk Gently character. The two novels were, however, the first two that Adams wrote and typeset for publication on his Apple Macintosh.

Personal beliefs

Religion

Adams was a self-declared "radical atheist", though he used the term for emphasis, so that he would not be asked if he in fact meant agnostic. He stated in an interview with American Atheists ^[16] that this was easier and conveyed the fact that he really meant it, had thought about it a great deal, and that it was an opinion he held seriously. He was convinced that there is not a god, seeing not a shred of evidence of one's existence, and devoted himself instead to secular causes like Environmentalism.

Environmentalism

Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of a number of endangered species. This activism included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the kakapo, and the publication of a tie-in book of the same name. In 1992, this was made into a CD-ROM combination of audio book, eBook and picture slide show a decade before such things became fashionable. His environmental activism is also recounted in the book The Salmon of Doubt in such ways as discussing walking to Mount Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit.

Technology

Adams was a serious fan of technology. Though he did not buy his first word processor until 1982, he had considered one as early as 1979. He was quoted as saying that until 1982, he had difficulties with "the impenetrable barrier of jargon. Words were flying backwards and forwards without concepts riding on their backs." In 1982, his first purchase was a 'Nexus'. In 1983, when he and Jane Belson went out to Los Angeles, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England, Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 100. ^[17]

Adams's posthumous work, The Salmon of Doubt, features multiple articles written by Douglas on the subject of technology, including reprints of articles that originally ran in MacUser magazine, and in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. In these, Adams claims that one of the first computers he ever saw was a Commodore PET, and that his love affair with the Apple Macintosh first began after seeing one at Infocom's headquarters in Massachusetts in 1983 (though that was actually very likely an Apple Lisa). ^[18]

Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out in 1984 until his death in 2001. Adams was also an "Apple Master," which was a program at Apple making various celebrities into spokespeople for their products. (Other Apple Masters included John Cleese and Gregory Hines.) Part of Adams's contributions were a rock video that he created using the first version of iMovie, with footage featuring his daughter Polly. The video can still be seen on Adams's .Mac homepage. Adams even installed and started using the first release of Mac OS X within a couple of weeks of his death. His very last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X, and the possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. ^[19] He can also be seen in the Omnibus tribute included with the Region One/NTSC DVD release of the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide using Mac OS X (version 10.0.x) on his PowerBook G3.

Adams also adopted and used e-mail extensively. He used a very early version of e-mail to correspond with Steve Meretzky when the two collaborated on Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When living in New Mexico in 1993, he set up another e-mail address, and started posting to his own USENET newsgroup: alt.fan.douglas-adams. ^[20] Many of his posts are now archived through Google. However, Adams became increasingly challenged as to the authenticity of his identity, and so eventually set up a message forum on his own website where he would not be (as frequently) challenged.

Personal life

Adams had an affair with Sally Emerson in the early 1980s. His book Life, the Universe, and Everything is dedicated to her. After their split in 1981 (Emerson went back to her husband), he was introduced through mutual friends to Jane Belson. Belson was the "Lady Barrister" mentioned in Adams's books in the mid-1980s: "He lives in Islington with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh". The two lived in Los Angeles together in 1983, during one of Adams's attempts to make Hitchhiker's into a movie. They lived in London after that, nearly got married in 1985 and lived apart briefly. They were married on 25 November 1991; Belson kept her maiden name. Adams and Belson had one daughter together, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born on 22 June 1994. It was widely pointed out to Adams that his only child was born the year he turned 42. The family lived near London until 1999, when Adams and family moved to Santa Barbara, California, until Adams's death. Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London after Douglas Adams's death. ^[21]

Adams's death

Adams died of a heart attack at the age of 49, while working out at a private gym in Santa Barbara, California. (He had moved to Santa Barbara in 1999.) He was survived by his wife Jane and daughter Polly. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery in north London.

In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, containing many short stories, essays, and letters, and eulogies from Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry (in the UK edition), Christopher Cerf (in the US edition), and Terry Jones (in the US paperback edition). It also includes eleven chapters of his long-awaited but unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, which was to be a new Dirk Gently and/or HHGG novel, or neither.

Other events after Adams's death included the completion of Shada, radio dramatizations of the final three books in the Hitchhiker's series, and the completion of the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Biographies

His official biography, Wish You Were Here, by Nick Webb, was published on 6 October 2003 (ISBN 0755311558). ^[22]

Another recent biography is Hitchhiker: a Biography of Douglas Adams (2003) by M. J. Simpson, with a foreword (in the UK edition) by John Lloyd (ISBN 0340824883). The American edition contains a foreword by Neil Gaiman (ISBN 1932112170).

Upon the mutual discovery that Webb and Simpson were both working on new posthumous biographies, the two authors agreed that the former would focus on Adams's life and personality, and the latter on his work.

The BBC produced a tribute as part of their TV series Omnibus. It was first broadcast on BBC 2 on 4 August 2001, presented by Kirsty Wark. The programme included interviews with Stephen Fry, Clive Anderson, Terry Jones, Griff Rhys Jones, Richard Dawkins and John Lloyd, among others. A copy is included with the Region One DVD release of the Hitchhiker's Guide TV series.

A movie documentary, Life, The Universe and Douglas Adams, was released in 2002, directed and produced by Rick Mueller and Joel Greengrass. Archive footage of Adams is generously included, as well as interviews with Adams's friends, colleagues and family. This documentary was narrated by Neil Gaiman and is available on VHS tape. ^[23]

Earlier biographies include:

• Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1988, 1993, 2002), Neil Gaiman et al. Reissued October 2003 (ISBN 1840237422) with new chapters by M. J. Simpson and David K. Dickson.
• The Unofficial Guide to the Hitchhiker's Guide (2001), M. J. Simpson. Published the same year as The Pocket Essential Hitchhiker's Guide in the U.K. (ISBN 1903047404). A second, revised edition was published in 2005 in the UK, with new material (ISBN 1904048463).

Douglas Adams's works

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on audio and video: The original 12 radio episodes (from 1978 and 1980) are available in CD sets from BBC Audio (as The Primary & Secondary Phases), as well as on a single MP3-CD. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was the first radio series released on Compact Disc and on MP3-CD, respectively, by the then BBC Radio Collection. The three additional phases adapted from the last three books in the series are available from BBC Audio. The Tertiary Phase was broadcast on BBC Radio 21 September to 26 October 2004, whilst The Quandary Phase was broadcast 3 May to 24 May 2005, and The Quintessential Phase followed immediately afterward, from 31 May through 21 June 2005. A script book for the original 12 episodes has been published, and a new script book for the final 14 episodes was published in July 2005. BBC Audio released a CD boxset containing all 26 episodes in October 2005. An Audio DVD for each of the three 2004-2005 series, in 5.1 surround sound, are also planned for release in 2006, starting in March, per Dirk Maggs. These DVD-Audio discs will be a first for BBC Audio. The six episode TV adaptation is also available from the BBC (or its distributors, e.g. Warner Home Video in the USA and Canada) on VHS and DVD.

Novels in the HHGG series

• 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)
• Mostly Harmless (1992)

All of the above are also available as audio books, read by Adams. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is also available as an audiobook read by Stephen Fry.

The Dirk Gently series

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

Audiobook recordings of both novels do exist, read by Adams and Simon Jones respectively, but are out of print.

Other works

• The Meaning of Liff (1983, with John Lloyd)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts (1985, with Geoffrey Perkins)
• The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book (1986, edited by Douglas Adams and Peter Fincham), which includes
  • Young Zaphod Plays it Safe (also printed in a slightly reworked version in The Wizards of Odd, The Salmon of Doubt, and several omnibus editions of Hitchhiker)
  • The Private Life of Genghis Khan, also available in the first edition of The Salmon of Doubt, though later removed due to copyright issues
  • A Christmas Fairly Story (sic) by Douglas Adams and Terry Jones
  • A "Supplement to The Meaning of Liff" with John Lloyd and Stephen Fry
• The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990, with John Lloyd; extended version of The Meaning of Liff)
• Last Chance to See (1991, with Mark Carwardine, non-fictional account of several trips to see endangered species; according to a piece in The Salmon of Doubt, this book gave Adams the most satisfaction, if not the highest sales)
• Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic (written by Terry Jones (who insists he wrote the whole thing while in the nude), based on an idea by Douglas Adams; also available as an audiobook, read by Terry Jones)
• The Salmon of Doubt (2002), unfinished novel manuscript (11 chapters), short stories, essays, and interviews (also available as an audiobook, read by Simon Jones)

In 2004, BBC Audio published a 3-CD set entitled Douglas Adams at the BBC, which covers the author's work from 1974 to 2003, including posthumous projects and tributes. The CD is again narrated by Simon Jones.

Tributes and honorifics

• There is an official appreciation society (fan club) named ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha after the sector of the galaxy that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says the planet Earth is located in.
• 18610 Arthurdent is a small main belt asteroid. Felix Hormuth discovered it on February 7, 1998. It is named after Arthur Dent, the bewildered hero of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The name was officially published and announced by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union on either 9 May or 10 May 2001 (accounts differ).
• On January 25, 2005, it was announced that asteroid with preliminary designation 2001 DA₄₂ had been named 25924 Douglasadams in his honour. It was chosen because it referenced the year of Adams's death, his initials and the number "42". ^[24]
• Every May 25, Towel Day is celebrated in recognition of Adams's genius.
• Various Douglas Adams Societies exist or have existed.

Notes

1. ^  Photographer Jill Furmanovsky's official site
2. ^  Webb, Nick (2005). Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams, First US hardcover edition, Page 32, Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-47650-6.
3. ^  Webb, Nick, ‘Adams, Douglas Noël (1952–2001)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Jan 2005 accessed 25 October 2005
4. ^  "Adams, Douglas Noël." Britannica Book of the Year, 2002 from Encyclopædia Britannica Online School Edition. accessed November 13, 2005.
5. ^  Webb, page 93.
6. ^  Adams, Douglas (2003). Geoffrey Perkins (ed.), Additional Material by M. J. Simpson The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, 25th Anniversary Edition, Page 10, Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-41957-9.
7. ^  Webb, page 120.
8. ^  May 2004 review of Don't Panic by Neil Gaiman.
9. ^  Simpson, M. J. (2003). Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, First US hardcover edition, Page 236, Justin, Charles and Co.. ISBN 1-932112-17-0.
10. ^  Internet Book List page, with links to all five novels, and reproductions of the 1990s paperback covers that included the 42 Puzzle.
11. ^  Adams, Douglas. As Dramatized and Directed by Dirk Maggs. (2005). The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts: The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases, Page 356, Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-43510-8.
12. ^  Webb, page 49.
13. ^  Text of one of Douglas Adams's introductions of Procol Harum in concert, this one was read on 8 February 1996.
14. ^  Internet Movie Database's page for Hyperland.
15. ^  Gaiman, Neil (2003). Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Second US edition, Page 169, Titan Books. ISBN 1-84023-742-2.
16. ^  David Silverman's interview with Douglas Adams which first appeared in the American Atheists' Winter 1998-1999 newsletter.
17. ^  Simpson, pages 184-5.
18. ^  Adams, Douglas (2002). The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time, First UK hardcover edition, Pages 90-1, Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-76657-1.
19. ^  Adams's final post on his forums at douglasadams.com
20. ^  alt.fan.douglas-adams access through Google's newsgroup reader.
21. ^  Webb, Chapter 10.
22. ^  Press release announcing Nick Webb's biography of Adams from 2 July 2003.
23. ^  Press release announcing the Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams documentary video from 15 April 2002.
24. ^  MSNBC article about the announcement of an Asteroid named after Adams, dated 25 January 2005.

See also

• h2g2
• Towel Day
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future, Adams's final project for BBC Radio 4 before his death.

External links

• Douglas Adams's official web site, established by him, and still operated by The Digital Village.
• Douglas Adams's .mac homepage
• Two audio interviews of Douglas Adams (1983 – 23 min. 58 sec, 1989 – 25 min. 07 sec.) by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
• Parrots, the Universe and Everything, 87 min talk at University of California Santa Barbara, 2001 (RealAudio)
• Douglas Adams speech at Digital Biota 2 (1998)
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
• Douglas Adams at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Douglas Adams at the Internet Book List
• Douglas Adams at the Internet Book Database of Fiction
• Douglas Adams at the Internet Movie Database
• Douglas Adams — Rotten.com library article.

Fan sites

• Douglas Adams Continuum, a very active fan site and forum hosted in Sweden and run by Jenz Kjellberg.
• An English Language fansite by Nicolas Botti.
• ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha The official Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy Appreciation Society
• Another Hitchhiker's Guide fansite, hosted in the USA, run by Jake Russell.
• FAQ about Adams, compiled from the alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup.