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| 5/11/2001 |
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The Douglas Adams Galaxy
On this day in 2001 Douglas Adams died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels have sold fifteen million copies, and the Dirk Gently books have also done well, but Adams said that he was proudest of Last Chance to See, a documentary of his expeditions to observe a handful of near-extinct animal species. |
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BBC - Douglas Adams - 1952 - 2001
A selection of links to tributes, obituaries, and Adams's contributions to the BBC, including selected entries from the author's guide to the Guide:
"When I originally described The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, over twenty years ago, I was only joking. I didn't see myself as a predictive kind of science fiction writer, like Arthur C. Clarke who more or less single-handedly invented the communications satellite. The Guide was just a narrative device which allowed me to run off at tangents whenever the story seemed to be getting a bit dull...." |  | Guardian Unlimited Books
Offers a brief overview of the author's life, with links to selected articles published in the Guardian, including an obituary. Also offered is an article which describes the influence of Lewis Carroll (and others) on Adams's works:
"Carroll, along with Wodehouse, was one of Adams's comic heroes, and his affection for him tinges his writing. Like Carroll's fabulous mock-epic poem, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), the Hitchhiker series is a brilliant skit on quests for ultimate meaning of any kind. Carroll's crew fruitlessly pursues the Snark, while Adams portrays the Earth as a miscued mega-computer vainly dedicated to calculating the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. That it eventually spits out '42' is a nod to Carroll, who was obsessed with the number." | | Interviews with Don Swaim
"He got the idea for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy while hitchhiking through Europe as a teenager. Douglas Adams, author of Life, the Universe and Everything, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, calls himself a comedy writer who used the science fiction format. Douglas Adams talks to Don Swaim in 1983 about looking at the stars and deciding to write a galactic hitchhiker's guide and being influenced by the writing of P.G. Wodehouse." | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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