The Salmon of Doubt

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: American Atheist Press: “Interview with Douglas Adams” American Atheist, vol. 40, no. 1

(Winter 2001-2002). Reprinted by permission of the American Atheist Press. Byron Press Visual Publications:

Prologue

SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 2000

In 1979, soon after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published, Douglas Adams was invited to sign copies at a small science-fiction bookshop inSoho . As he drove there, some sort of demonstration slowed his progress. “There was a traffic jam and crowds of people were everywhere,” he recalls. It wasn’t until he had pushed his way inside thatAdams realised the crowds were there for him. Next day his publisher called to say he was number one in the London Sunday Times best-seller list and his life changed forever. “It was like being helicoptered to the top ofMount Everest ,” he says, “or having an orgasm without the foreplay.”

Hitchhiker had already been a cult radio show, and was made in both television and stage versions. It expanded into four more books that sold over 14 million copies worldwide. There were records and computer games and now, after twenty years ofHollywood prevarication, it is as close as it’s ever been to becoming a movie.

The story itself begins on earth with mild-mannered suburbanite Arthur Dent trying to stop the local council demolishing his house to build a bypass. It moves into space when his friend, Ford Prefect—some have seen him as Virgil to Dent’s Dante—reveals himself as a representative of a planet near Betelgeuse and informs Arthur that the Earth itself is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace express route. They hitch a ride on a Vogon spaceship and begin to use the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself—a usually reliable repository of all knowledge about life, the universe and everything.

Adams’s creativity and idiosyncratic intergalactic humour have had a pervasive cultural influence. The phrase “hitchhiker’s guide to ...” quickly became common parlance, and there have been numerous copycat spoof sci-fi books and TV series. His Babel fish—a small fish you can place in your ear to translate any speech into your own language—has been adopted as the name of a translation device on an Internet search engine. He followed up his success with several other novels as well as a television programme, and a book and CD-ROM on endangered species. He has founded a dot-com company, H2G2, that has recently taken the idea of the guide full circle by launching a service that promises real information on life, the universe, and everything via your mobile phone. Much of his wealth seems to have been spent fuelling his passion for technology, but he has never really been the nerdy science-fiction type.

He is relaxed, gregarious, and a solidly built two meters tall. In fact, he has more the air of those English public-school boys who became rock stars in the 1970s; he once did play guitar on stage at Earls Court with his mates Pink Floyd. In a nicely flash touch, instead of producing a passport-size photo of his daughter out of his wallet, he opens up his impressively powerful laptop, where, after a bit of fiddling about, Polly Adams, aged five, appears in a pop video spoof featuring a cameo appearance by another mate, John Cleese.

So this is what his life turned into; money, A-list friends, and nice toys. Looking at the bare facts of his CV—boarding school, Cambridge Footlights, and the BBC—it seems at first sight no surprise. But his has not been an entirely straightforward journey along well-worn establishment tracks. Douglas Noel Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952. One of his many stock gags is that he was DNA in Cambridge nine months before Crick and Watson made their discovery. His mother, Janet, was a nurse at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and his father, Christopher, had been a teacher who went on to become a postgraduate theology student, a probation officer, and finally a management consultant, which was “a very, very peculiar move,” claims Adams. “Anyone who knew my father will tell you that management was not something he knew very much about.” The family were “fairly hard up” and left Cambridge six months after Douglas was born to live in various homes on the fringes of East London. When Adams was five, his parents divorced. “It’s amazing the degree to which children treat their own lives as normal,” he says. “But of course it was difficult. My parents divorced when it wasn’t remotely as common as it is now, and to be honest I have scant memory of anything before I was five. I don’t think it was a great time, one way or another.”