The Salmon of Doubt

THE ONION. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on. What do you want to talk about first?

Douglas ADAMS. I guess there are two main things. One is that we are imminently about to finish this thing that I’ve been laboring over for what seems like two years now, called Starship Titanic, which is a CD-ROM. It’s coming out in a couple months’ time. The other thing is that I’ve just agreed to the sale of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Disney. So I guess over the next couple of years, that’s what I’m going to be doing. I’m making that movie.

O. Tell me about Starship Titanic.

D.A. Well, it’s a CD-ROM, and the most important thing is that it started as a CD-ROM. People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of Hitchhiker’s, and I thought, “No, no.” I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in. Because, really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is “What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?” Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops. So something will be very, very different if it’s developed as a CD-ROM than if it’s developed as a book. Now in fact, I tell a slight lie, because the idea as such, in a sort of single-paragraph form, actually was what it was in one of the Hitchhiker books—I think Life, the Universe, and Everything. Because whenever I’d get sort of stuck on the story line in Hitchhiker, I’d always invent a couple of other quick story lines and give them to The Guide to talk about. So here was one little idea that was sitting there, and a number of people said to me, “Oh, you should turn that into a novel.” It just seemed like too much of a good idea, and I tend to resist those. But in fact I discovered there was a very good reason why I wasn’t interested in doing Starship Titanic as a book, which was that essentially it was a story about a thing. I just thought of this idea and didn’t have any people attached to it, and you can only really tell stories about people. So, later, when I was thinking “Okay, now I want to do a CD-ROM, because I want to justify the fact that I spend all my time sitting fiddling around computers,” I actually wanted to turn it into proper grown up work. So I was thinking, what would be a good thing? Then I suddenly remembered that the problem with turning Starship Titanic into a book—that it was about a thing, about a place, about a ship—suddenly became very much to its advantage. When you’re doing a CD-ROM, what you’re eventually going to create is a place, an environment.

reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in. Because, really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is “What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?” Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops. So something will be very, very different if it’s developed as a CD-ROM than if it’s developed as a book. Now in fact, I tell a slight lie, because the idea as such, in a sort of single-paragraph form, actually was what it was in one of the Hitchhiker books—I think Life, the Universe, and Everything. Because whenever I’d get sort of stuck on the story line in Hitchhiker, I’d always invent a couple of other quick story lines and give them to The Guide to talk about. So here was one little idea that was sitting there, and a number of people said to me, “Oh, you should turn that into a novel.” It just seemed like too much of a good idea, and I tend to resist those. But in fact I discovered there was a very good reason why I wasn’t interested in doing Starship Titanic as a book, which was that essentially it was a story about a thing. I just thought of this idea and didn’t have any people attached to it, and you can only really tell stories about people. So, later, when I was thinking “Okay, now I want to do a CD-ROM, because I want to justify the fact that I spend all my time sitting fiddling around computers,” I actually wanted to turn it into proper grown up work. So I was thinking, what would be a good thing? Then I suddenly remembered that the problem with turning Starship Titanic into a book—that it was about a thing, about a place, about a ship—suddenly became very much to its advantage. When you’re doing a CD-ROM, what you’re eventually going to create is a place, an environment.

And the user becomes the character.