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).

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

“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.”

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 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.

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.

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 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.

>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.

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.