42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams

Davies, a film lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, takes readers on an enjoyable tour through the archives of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams. Full-page scans of documents from throughout Adams’s career showcase his school assignments (a fictional biography of “international playboy” Christopher Turquoise), poetry, responses to fan mail, half-baked ideas (one note proposes a story about a pair of characters who happen upon a spacecraft in their garden), and television scripts for The Burkiss Way and The News Huddlines. The papers suggest a curious mind with a passion for cutting-edge technology, as seen in a memo from the late 1990s envisioning e-readers years before they became reality: “The device must be very simple. They are not computers, they are books which have computers in them.” The materials also reveal the author’s self-doubts, related in characteristically comedic fashion, as when he writes about a subplot in an early draft of Hitchhiker’s, “Scrap that plot on account it stinks, and it’s a millstone round everyone’s neck, most of all my own.” The selections offer an intimate look inside Adams’s process (“Today I am monumentally fed up with the idea of writing,” he vents in a note while at a creative impasse), and even tossed-off memos are sprinkled with the humor that endeared him to readers. Adams’s fans will be eager to dig into this treasure trove. (Sept.)