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Douglas Adams

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Douglas Adams

   Douglas Adams signing books at ApacheCon 2000
       Born:      March 11, 1952
                  Cambridge, England
       Died:      May 11, 2001
                  Santa Barbara, California
   Occupation(s): comedy writer, novelist, dramatist, fantasist
     Genre(s):    Science fiction, Comedy
    Influences:   Monty Python, Kurt Vonnegut, P. G. Wodehouse
      Website:    douglasadams.com

   Douglas Noël Adams ( March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001) was a British
   author, comic radio dramatist, and amateur musician. He is known most
   notably as author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
   Hitchhiker's began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five
   books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime)
   as well as a television series, a towel, a comic book series, a
   computer game and a feature film that was completed after Adams's
   death. He was known to some fans as Bop Ad (after his illegible
   signature), or by his initials " DNA".

   In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
   wrote or co-wrote three stories of the science fiction television
   series Doctor Who, and served the series as Script Editor during the
   seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently
   novels, and co-author credits on two Liff books and Last Chance to See,
   itself based on a radio series. Adams also originated the idea for the
   computer game Starship Titanic, which was realized by a company that
   Adams co-founded, and adapted into a novel by Terry Jones. A posthumous
   collection of essays and other material, including an incomplete novel,
   was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.

   His fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist, a
   self-described "radical atheist" and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the
   Macintosh computer, and other "techno gizmos." He was a keen
   technologist, using such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they
   became widely popular, or even widely known.

   Toward the end of his life, he was a sought-after lecturer on topics
   including technology and the environment. Since his death at the age of
   49, he is still widely revered in science fiction and fantasy fandom
   circles.

Early life

   Douglas Adams was born to Janet (Donovan) Adams (now Janet Thrift) and
   Christopher Douglas Adams in Cambridge, England. His parents had one
   other child together, Susan, who was born in March 1955. His parents
   separated and divorced in 1957, and Douglas, Susan, and Janet moved in
   with Janet's parents, the Donovans, in Brentwood, Essex. Douglas's
   grandmother kept her house as an official RSPCA refuge for hurt
   animals, which "exacerbated young Douglas's hayfever and asthma."

   Christopher Adams remarried in July 1960, to Mary Judith Stewart (born
   Judith Robertson). From this marriage, Douglas Adams had a half-sister,
   Heather. Janet remarried in 1964, to a veterinarian, Ron Thrift,
   providing two more half-siblings to Douglas; Jane and James Thrift.

Education and early works

   Adams first attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood. He took
   the exams and interviewed for Brentwood School at age six, and attended
   the Preparatory School from 1959 to 1964, then the main school until
   1970. He was in the top stream, and specialised in the arts in the
   sixth form, after which he stayed an extra term in a special seventh
   form class, customary in the school for those preparing for Oxbridge
   entrance exams.

   While at the Preparatory school, he had an English class, taught by
   Frank Halford, where Halford awarded Adams the only ten out of ten of
   his entire teaching career for a creative writing exercise. Adams
   remembered this for the rest of his life, especially when facing
   writer's block. Some of Adams's earliest writing was published at the
   school, such as a report on the school's Photography Club in The
   Brentwoodian (in 1962) or spoof reviews in the school magazine
   Broadsheet (edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone). Adams also had a
   letter and short story published nationally in the UK in the boys'
   magazine The Eagle in 1965. He met Griff Rhys Jones, who was in the
   year below, at the school, and was in the same class as "Stuckist"
   artist Charles Thomson; all three appeared together in a production of
   Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 1968. He was six feet tall (1.83 m) by
   the time he was 12, and he stopped growing only at 6'5" (1.96 m).
   Later, he would often make self-ironic jokes about his own towering
   stature, "...the form-master wouldn't say 'Meet under the clock tower,'
   or 'Meet under the War Memorial,' but 'Meet under Adams.'"

   On the strength of a bravura essay on religious poetry that mixed the
   Beatles with William Blake, he was awarded a place at St John's
   College, Cambridge to read English, entering in 1971. Adams attempted
   early on to get into the Footlights Dramatic Club, with which several
   other names in British Comedy had been affiliated. He was, however,
   turned down, and started to write and perform in revues with Will Adams
   (no relation) and Martin Smith, forming a group called
   "Adams-Smith-Adams." Later, on another attempt to join Footlights,
   Adams was encouraged by Simon Jones and found himself working with Rhys
   Jones, among others. In 1974, Adams graduated with a B.A. in English
   literature.

   Some of his early work appeared on BBC2 (television) in 1974, in an
   edited version of the Footlights Revue from Cambridge, that year. A
   version of the same revue performed live in London's West End led to
   Adams being "discovered" by Monty Python's Graham Chapman. The two
   formed a brief writing partnership, and Adams earned a writing credit
   in one episode (episode 45: "Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the
   Liberal Party") of Monty Python's Flying Circus for a sketch called "
   Patient Abuse." In the sketch, a man who had been stabbed by a nurse
   arrives at his doctor's office bleeding profusely from the stomach,
   when the doctor makes him fill out numerous senseless forms before he
   can administer treatment (a joke he later incorporated into the Vogons'
   obsession with paperwork). Adams also contributed to a sketch on the
   album for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

   Douglas also had two "blink and you miss them" appearances in the
   fourth series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. At the beginning of
   Episode 42, "The Light Entertainment War," Adams is in a surgeon's mask
   (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to the on-screen captions), pulling on
   gloves, while Michael Palin narrates a sketch that introduces one
   person after another, and never actually gets started. At the beginning
   of Episode 44, "Mr Neutron," Adams is dressed in a " pepperpot" outfit
   and loads a missile onto a cart, driven by Terry Jones, who is calling
   out for scrap metal ("Any old iron..."). The two episodes were first
   broadcast in November 1974. Adams and Chapman also attempted a few
   non-Python projects, including Out of the Trees.

   Some of Adams's early radio work included sketches for The Burkiss Way
   in 1977 and The News Huddlines. He also co-wrote, again with Graham
   Chapman, the 20 February 1977 episode of Doctor on the Go, a sequel to
   the Doctor in the House television comedy series.

   As Adams had difficulty selling his jokes and stories, he took a series
   of "odd jobs" in order to have some income. A biography from an early
   edition of one of the HHGG novels provides the following description of
   his early career:

          After graduation he spent several years contributing material to
          radio and television shows as well as writing, performing, and
          sometimes directing stage revues in London, Cambridge and at the
          Edinburgh Fringe. He has also worked at various times as a
          hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard,
          radio producer and script editor of Doctor Who.

   Adams held the job as a bodyguard in the mid-1970s. He was employed by
   an Arab family, which had made its fortune in oil (and were from Qatar,
   according to the Encyclopedia Britannica). He had a couple of favourite
   anecdotes about the job: one story related that the family once ordered
   one of everything from a hotel's menu, tried all of the dishes, and
   sent out for hamburgers. Another story had to do with a prostitute,
   sent to the floor Adams was guarding one evening. They acknowledged
   each other as she entered, and an hour later, when she left, she is
   said to have remarked, "At least you can read while you're on the job."

   In 1979, Adams and John Lloyd wrote the scripts for two half-hour
   episodes of Doctor Snuggles: "The Remarkable Fidgety River" and "The
   Great Disappearing Mystery" (episodes seven and twelve). John Lloyd was
   also co-author of two episodes from the original "Hitchhiker" radio
   series (Fit the Fifth and Fit the Sixth (also known as Episodes Five
   and Six, see explanation below)), as well as The Meaning of Liff and
   The Deeper Meaning of Liff. Lloyd and Adams also collaborated on an SF
   movie comedy project based on The Guinness Book of World Records, which
   would have starred John Cleese as the UN Secretary General, and had a
   race of aliens beating humans in athletic competitions, but the humans
   winning in all of the "absurd" record categories. This latter project
   never proceeded past a treatment.

   After the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide became
   successful, Adams was made a BBC radio producer, working on Week Ending
   and a pantomime called Black Cinderella Two Goes East. He left the
   position after six months to become the script editor for Doctor Who.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

   The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a concept for a
   science-fiction comedy radio series pitched by Adams and radio producer
   Simon Brett to BBC Radio 4 in 1977. Adams came up with an outline for a
   pilot episode, as well as a few other stories (reprinted in Neil
   Gaiman's book Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the
   Galaxy Companion) that could potentially be used in the series.

   According to Adams, the idea for the title The Hitchhiker's Guide to
   the Galaxy occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck,
   Austria (though he joked that the BBC would instead claim it was Spain
   "probably because it's easier to spell"), gazing at the stars. He had
   been wandering the countryside while carrying a book called the
   Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe when he ran into a town where, as he
   humourously describes, everyone was either "deaf" and "dumb" or only
   spoke languages he could not. After wandering around and drinking for a
   while, he went to sleep in the middle of a field and was inspired by
   his inability to communicate with the townspeople. He later said that
   due to his constantly retelling this story of inspiration, he no longer
   had any memory of the moment of inspiration itself, and only remembered
   his retellings of that moment. A postscript to M. J. Simpson's
   biography of Adams, Hitchhiker, provides evidence that the story was in
   fact a fabrication and that Adams had conceived the idea some time
   after his trip around Europe.

   Despite the original outline, Adams was said to make up the stories as
   he wrote. He turned to John Lloyd for help with the final two episodes
   of the first series. Lloyd contributed bits from an unpublished science
   fiction book of his own, called GiGax. However, very little of Lloyd's
   material survived in later adaptations of Hitchhiker's, such as the
   novels and the TV series. The TV series itself was based on the first
   six radio episodes, but sections contributed by Lloyd were largely
   re-written.

   BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first radio series weekly in the UK in March
   and April 1978. Following the success of the first series, another
   episode was recorded and broadcast, which was commonly known as the
   Christmas Episode. A second series of five episodes was broadcast one
   per night, during the week of 21 January - 25 January 1980.

   While working on the radio series (and with simultaneous projects such
   as The Pirate Planet) Adams developed problems keeping to writing
   deadlines that only got worse as he published novels. Adams was never a
   prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any
   writing. This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor
   for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish was
   completed. He was quoted as saying, "I love deadlines. I love the
   whooshing noise they make as they go by." Despite the difficulty with
   deadlines, Adams eventually authored five novels in the series,
   published in 1979, 1980, 1982, 1984 and 1992.

   The books formed the basis for other adaptations, such as three-part
   comic book adaptations for each of the first three books, an
   interactive text-adventure computer game, and a photo-illustrated
   edition, published in 1994. This latter edition featured a 42 Puzzle
   designed by Adams, which was later incorporated into paperback covers
   of the first four "Hitchhiker's" novels (the paperback for the fifth
   re-used the artwork from the hardcover edition). Adams also began
   attempts to turn the first Hitchhiker's novel into a movie in 1980,
   making several trips to Los Angeles, California, and working with a
   number of Hollywood studios and potential producers. When he died in
   2001 in California, he had been trying again to get the movie project
   started with Disney, which had bought the rights in 1998. The
   screenplay finally got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick, was
   green-lit in September 2003, and the resulting movie was released in
   2005.

   Radio Producer Dirk Maggs had consulted with Adams, first in 1993, and
   later in 1997 and 2000 about creating a third radio series, based on
   the third novel in the Hitchhiker's series. They also vaguely discussed
   the possibilities of radio adaptations of the final two novels in the
   five-book "trilogy." As with the movie, this project was only realized
   after Adams's death. The third series, The Tertiary Phase, was
   broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2004 and was subsequently
   released on audio CD. Douglas Adams himself can be heard playing the
   part of Agrajag. So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly
   Harmless made up the fourth and fifth radio series, respectively (on
   radio they were titled The Quandary Phase and The Quintessential Phase)
   and these were broadcast in May and June of 2005, and also subsequently
   released on Audio CD. The last episode in the last series (with a new,
   "more upbeat" ending) concluded with, "The very final episode of The
   Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is affectionately
   dedicated to its author."

   More recently, the film makers at Smoov Filmz adapted the anecdote that
   Arthur Dent relates about biscuits in So Long, and Thanks for All the
   Fish into a short film called "Cookies." Adams also discussed the
   real-life episode that inspired the anecdote in a 2001 speech,
   reprinted in his posthumous collection The Salmon of Doubt. He also
   told the story on the radio programme It Makes Me Laugh on 19 July
   1981.

Doctor Who

   Adams sent the script for the HHGG pilot radio programme to the Doctor
   Who production office in 1978, and was commissioned to write The Pirate
   Planet (see below). He had also previously attempted to submit a
   potential movie script, called "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen," which
   later became his novel Life, the Universe, and Everything (which in
   turn became the third Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). Adams then went
   on to serve as script editor on the show for its seventeenth season in
   1979. Altogether, he wrote three Doctor Who serials starring Tom Baker
   as the Doctor:
     * The Pirate Planet (the second serial in the " Key To Time" arc, in
       Season 16)
     * City of Death (with producer Graham Williams, from an original
       storyline by writer David Fisher. It was transmitted under the
       pseudonym " David Agnew")
     * Shada (only partially filmed and not broadcast due to industrial
       disputes)

   Adams was also known to allow in-jokes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to
   appear in the Doctor Who stories he wrote and other stories on which he
   served as Script Editor. Subsequent writers have also inserted
   Hitchhiker's references, even as recently as 2005. Conversely, at least
   one reference to Doctor Who was worked into a Hitchhiker's novel. In
   Life, the Universe and Everything, two characters travel in time and
   land on the pitch at Lord's Cricket Ground. The reaction of the radio
   commentators to their sudden appearance is very similar to the
   reactions of commentators in a scene in the eighth episode of the
   1965-66 story The Daleks' Master Plan, which has the Doctor's TARDIS
   materialise on the pitch at Lord's.

   Elements of Shada and City of Death were reused in Adams's later novel
   Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in particular the character of
   Professor Chronotis, and Dirk Gently himself clearly fills much the
   same plot role as the Doctor (though the character is very different).
   Big Finish Productions eventually remade Shada as an audio play
   starring Paul McGann as the Doctor. Accompanied by partially animated
   illustrations, it was webcast on the BBCi website in 2003, and
   subsequently released as a two-CD set later that year. An omnibus
   edition of this version was broadcast on the digital radio station BBC7
   on 10 December 2005.

   Adams is credited with introducing a fan and later friend of his, the
   zoologist Richard Dawkins, to Dawkins' future wife, Lalla Ward, who had
   played the part of Romana in Doctor Who. Dawkins confirmed this in his
   published eulogy of Adams.

   When he was at school, he wrote and performed a play called Doctor
   Which.

Music

   Adams played the guitar left-handed and had a collection of twenty-four
   left-handed guitars when he died in 2001 (having received his first
   guitar in 1964). He also studied piano in the 1960s with the same
   teacher as Paul Wickens, the pianist who later played in Paul
   McCartney's band (and composed the music for the 2004-2005 editions of
   the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). The Beatles, Pink Floyd and
   Procol Harum all had great influence on Adams's work.

Pink Floyd

   Adams included a direct reference to Pink Floyd in the original radio
   version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which he describes
   the main characters surveying the landscape of an alien planet while
   Marvin, their android companion, hums Pink Floyd's " Shine on You Crazy
   Diamond". See also Pink Floyd trivia or Hitchhiker's radio series
   trivia.

   Adams's official biography shares its name with the song " Wish You
   Were Here" by Pink Floyd. Adams was friendly with their guitarist David
   Gilmour and, on the occasion of his 42nd birthday (the number 42 having
   especial significance, being The Answer to Life, the Universe and
   Everything and also Adams' age when his daughter Polly was born), was
   invited to make a guest appearance at their October 28, 1994 concert at
   Earls Court in London, playing rhythm guitar on the songs " Brain
   Damage" and " Eclipse". Adams chose the name for Pink Floyd's 1994
   album, The Division Bell by picking the words from the lyrics to one of
   its tracks, namely "High Hopes". Gilmour also performed at Adams's
   Memorial Service.

   Pink Floyd and their lavish stage shows were also the inspiration for
   the Adams-created fictional rock band " Disaster Area", described in
   the Hitchhiker's Guide as not only the loudest rock band in the galaxy,
   but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. One element of
   Disaster Area's stage show was to send a space ship hurtling into a
   sun, probably inspired by the plane that would crash into the stage
   during some of Pink Floyd's live shows, usually at the end of " On the
   Run". The 1968 Pink Floyd song " Set the Controls for the Heart of the
   Sun" may also have influenced part of the ideas behind Disaster Area.

Procol Harum

   Douglas Adams was a good friend of Gary Brooker, the lead singer,
   pianist and songwriter of the progressive rock band Procol Harum. Adams
   is known to have invited Brooker to one of the many parties that Adams
   held at his house. On one such occasion Gary Brooker performed the full
   (4 verse) version of his hit song "' A Whiter Shade of Pale". Brooker
   also performed at Adams's Memorial Service.

   Adams also appeared on stage with Brooker to perform "In Held Twas in
   I" at Redhill when the band's lyricist Keith Reid was not available. On
   several other occasions he had been known to introduce Procol Harum at
   their gigs.

   Adams also let it be known that while writing he would listen to music,
   and this would occasionally influence his work. On one occasion the
   title track from the Procol Harum album Grand Hotel was playing when...

   “  Suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral
     climax that came out of nowhere and didn't seem to be about anything. I
      kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background?
       And I eventually thought ... it sounds as if there ought to be some
       sort of floorshow going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like,
     well, like the end of the universe. And so that was where the idea for
              The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from.          „

                —Douglas Adams, Procol Harum at The Barbican

Other musical links

   Adams made a number of references to music and musicians who had
   influenced his work through his books. In the Hitchhiker's Guide
   series, examples include one of the two mice, in The Hitchhiker's Guide
   to the Galaxy, suggesting that as they have not found the Ultimate
   Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, they should instead make
   it up, proposing to use the question "How many roads must a man walk
   down?" This is a line from Bob Dylan's song, " Blowin' in the Wind".
   Prior to this scene, in the same novel, the ship's computer onboard the
   Heart of Gold, unable to assist or prevent the ship's impending
   destruction with two nuclear missiles closing in on it, sings " You'll
   Never Walk Alone" in the background, a Rodgers and Hammerstein hit from
   the musical Carousel which had been an early 1960s rock hit in the UK
   and then was adopted as a crowd chant by many football fans, in
   particular Liverpool supporters.

   The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second novel in the
   series, is dedicated to the 1980 Paul Simon soundtrack album, One-Trick
   Pony. Adams says he played it "incessantly" while writing the book. In
   one scene in the fourth novel, So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish,
   Arthur Dent listens to a Dire Straits LP and Adams goes on to pay
   tribute to their lead guitarist, Mark Knopfler. Adams later revealed
   that the particular song to which he refers in the book — although
   never by name — is "Tunnel of Love", from the Making Movies album. And
   in the final novel, Mostly Harmless, Elvis is discovered playing in a
   diner attended by Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, where he is simply
   known as "The King".

   Besides modern rock music, Douglas Adams was a great admirer of the
   work of JS Bach, which provides a minor plot element in Dirk Gently's
   Holistic Detective Agency. Adams was also good friends with The
   Monkees' Michael Nesmith. In the early 1990s, one of the aborted
   attempts to have The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy adapted into a
   movie would have had Nesmith as its producer.

   Adams was also a major fan of The Beatles. He makes a reference to Paul
   McCartney in Life, The Universe, and Everything and quotes lyrics and
   titles from songs by The Beatles in Mostly Harmless and Dirk Gently's
   Holistic Detective Agency. Adams also does this at least once in The
   Salmon of Doubt. In Chapter 3 there is a conversation between Kate and
   Dirk, which includes the following exchange:

          "So?"
          "I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair."

   Taken together, these two lines form a quotation from " Norwegian Wood"
   on the Rubber Soul album.

Computer games and projects

   Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG together
   with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. In 1986 he participated in a
   weeklong brainstorming session with the Lucasfilm Games team for the
   game Labyrinth. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy
   (also by Infocom, but not based on any book). Adams was also
   responsible for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was published
   in 1999 by Simon and Schuster. Terry Jones wrote the accompanying book,
   entitled Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, since Adams was too busy
   with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the
   h2g2 collaborative writing project, an experimental attempt at making
   The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a reality.

   In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme
   Hyperland which featured Tom Baker as a "software agent" (similar to
   the "Assistants" used in several versions of Microsoft Office, derived
   from their failed "Bob" program), and interviews with Ted Nelson, which
   was essentially about the use of hypertext. Although Adams did not
   invent hypertext, he was an early adopter and advocate of it. This was
   the same year that Tim Berners-Lee used the idea of hypertext in his
   HTML.

The Dirk Gently series

   In between Adams's first trip to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine in
   1985, and their series of travels that formed the basis for the radio
   series and non-fiction book Last Chance to See, Adams wrote two other
   novels with a new cast of characters. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
   Agency was first published in 1987, and was described by its author as
   "a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic,
   mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics." It received
   many rave reviews from American newspapers upon its publication in the
   USA. Adams borrowed a few ideas from two Doctor Who stories he had
   worked on: City of Death and Shada.

   A sequel novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was published a year
   later. This was an entirely original work, Adams's first since So Long,
   and Thanks for All the Fish. Reviewers, however, were not as generous
   with praise for the second volume as they had been for the first. After
   the obligatory book tours, Adams was off on his round-the-world
   excursion which supplied him with the material for Last Chance to See.

Personal beliefs

Religion

   Adams was a self-declared "radical atheist", though he used the term
   for emphasis, so that he would not be asked if he in fact meant
   agnostic. He stated in an interview with American Atheists that this
   made things easier, but most importantly that it conveyed the fact that
   he really meant it, had thought about it a great deal, and that it was
   an opinion he held seriously. He was convinced that there is no God,
   having never seen one shred of evidence to convince him otherwise, and
   devoted himself instead to secular causes such as environmentalism.
   Despite this, he did state in the same interview that he was
   "fascinated by religion." [...] "I love to keep poking and prodding at
   it. I’ve thought about it so much over the years that that fascination
   is bound to spill over into my writing." His fascination he ascribed to
   the fact that so many "otherwise rational... intelligent people...
   nevertheless take it [the existence of God] seriously".

   In The God Delusion, the evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard
   Dawkins repeatedly claims Adams as one of his 'converts' to atheism.
   Dawkins dedicated the book to Adams' memory.

   One analogy that Adams put forward on the subject of religion was that
   of the "sentient puddle". This analogy is intended to refute the
   suggestion that the existence of God and His love for mankind would be
   proven by the fact that the world is perfectly designed for our needs.
   He compared such thinkers to an intelligent puddle of water. He said
   the puddle is pleased with itself and certain that the hole in the
   ground it occupies must have been designed specifically for it since it
   fits so well in it. The puddle looks up to the sun above and worships
   its divine benefactor. The fate of the puddle is to exist under the sun
   until it has entirely evaporated.

Environmental activism

   Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of a
   number of endangered species. This activism included the production of
   the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and
   naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the Kakapo, and
   the publication of a tie-in book of the same name. In 1992, this was
   made into a CD-ROM combination of audio book, e-book and picture slide
   show years before such things became fashionable.

   Adams and Mark Carwardine contributed the 'Meeting a Gorilla' passage
   from Last Chance to See to the book The Great Ape Project. This book,
   edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer launched a wider-scale
   project in 1993, which calls for the extension of moral equality to
   include all great apes, human or nonhuman.

   In 1994 he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro while wearing a rhino suit for the
   British charity organization Save the Rhino. About £100,000 were raised
   through that event, benefiting schools in Kenya and a Black Rhinoceros
   preservation programme in Tanzania. Adams was also an active supporter
   of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

   Since 2003, Save the Rhino has held an annual Douglas Adams Memorial
   Lecture around the time of his birthday to raise money for
   environmental campaigns. The lectures in the series are:
     * 2003 Richard Dawkins — Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness
       of science
     * 2004 Robert Swan — on walking across Antarctica and his
       environmental work there
     * 2005 Mark Carwardine — Last Chance to See… Just a bit more
     * 2006 Robert Winston — Is the Human an Endangered Species?
     * 2007 Richard Leakey — Wildlife Management in East Africa – Is there
       a future?

Technology

   Adams was a serious fan of technology. Though he did not buy his first
   word processor until 1982, he had considered one as early as 1979. He
   was quoted as saying that until 1982, he had difficulties with "the
   impenetrable barrier of jargon. Words were flying backwards and
   forwards without concepts riding on their backs." In 1982, his first
   purchase was a 'Nexus'. In 1983, when he and Jane Belson went out to
   Los Angeles, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England,
   Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 100. In Last
   Chance to See Adams mentions his Cambridge Z88, which he had taken to
   Zaire on a quest to find the Northern White Rhinoceros.

   Adams's posthumously published work, The Salmon of Doubt, features
   multiple articles written by Douglas on the subject of technology,
   including reprints of articles that originally ran in MacUser magazine,
   and in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. In these, Adams claims that
   one of the first computers he ever saw was a Commodore PET, and that
   his love affair with the Apple Macintosh first began after seeing one
   at Infocom's headquarters in Massachusetts in 1983 (though that was
   actually very likely an Apple Lisa).

   Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out in 1984
   until his death in 2001. He was the second person to buy a Mac in the
   UK (the first being Stephen Fry - though some accounts differ on this,
   saying Adams bought the first two, and Fry bought the third). Adams was
   also an "Apple Master," one of several celebrities whom Apple made into
   spokespeople for its products (other Apple Masters included John Cleese
   and Gregory Hines). Adams's contributions included a rock video that he
   created using the first version of iMovie with footage featuring his
   daughter Polly. The video can still be seen on Adams's .Mac homepage.
   Adams even installed and started using the first release of Mac OS X in
   the weeks leading up to his death. His very last post to his own forum
   was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa
   programming framework. Adams can also be seen in the Omnibus tribute
   included with the Region One/NTSC DVD release of the TV adaptation of
   The Hitchhiker's Guide using Mac OS X (version 10.0.x) on his PowerBook
   G3.

   Adams used e-mail extensively from the technology's infancy, adopting a
   very early version of e-mail to correspond with Steve Meretzky during
   the pair's collaboration on Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide
   to the Galaxy. While living in New Mexico in 1993 he set up another
   e-mail address and began posting to his own USENET newsgroup,
   alt.fan.douglas-adams, and occasionally, when his computer was acting
   up, to the comp.sys.mac hierarchy. Many of his posts are now archived
   through Google. Challenges to the authenticity of his messages later
   led Adams to set up a message forum on his own website to avoid the
   issue.

Personal life

   In the early 1980s, Adams had an affair with married novelist Sally
   Emerson, to whom he dedicated his book Life, the Universe, and
   Everything. Emerson returned to her husband after splitting with Adams
   in 1981, and Adams was soon afterward introduced by friends to Jane
   Belson, with whom he later became romantically involved. Belson was the
   "lady barrister" mentioned in the jacket-flap biography printed in his
   books during the mid-1980s ("He [Adams] lives in Islington with a lady
   barrister and an Apple Macintosh"). The two lived in Los Angeles
   together during 1983 while Adams worked on an early screenplay
   adaptation of Hitchhiker's. When the deal fell through, they moved to
   London, and after several separations ("He is currently not certain
   where he lives, or with whom") and an aborted engagement, they were
   married on 25 November 1991. Adams and Belson had one daughter
   together, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born on 22 June 1994, in the year
   that Adams turned 42. In 1999, the family moved from London to Santa
   Barbara, California, where they lived until Adams's death. Following
   his funeral, Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London, where they
   currently reside.

Death

   Adams died of a heart attack at the age of 49 on Friday 11 May 2001,
   while working out at a private gym in Montecito, California. He
   suffered a narrowing of the coronary arteries which led to a myocardial
   infarction and a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. He was survived by his wife
   Jane and daughter Polly. His funeral was held on 16 May 2001 in Santa
   Barbara, California. Several friends and people he had worked with were
   in attendance. His ashes were placed in Highgate Cemetery in north
   London that June.

   A memorial service was held on 17 September 2001 at St.
   Martin-in-the-Fields Church, Trafalgar Square, London. This became the
   first church service of any kind broadcast live on the web by the BBC.
   Video clips of the service are still available on the BBC's website for
   download.

   In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, containing many short
   stories, essays, and letters, as well as eulogies from Richard Dawkins,
   Stephen Fry (in the UK edition), Christopher Cerf (in the U.S.
   edition), and Terry Jones (in the U.S. paperback edition). It also
   includes eleven chapters of his long-awaited but unfinished novel, The
   Salmon of Doubt, which was possibly to become a new Dirk Gently novel,
   Hitchhiker novel or original fiction.

   Other events after Adams's death included the completion of Shada,
   radio dramatizations of the final three books in the Hitchhiker's
   series, and the completion of the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's
   Guide to the Galaxy.

Biographies

   His official biography, Wish You Were Here, by Nick Webb, was published
   on 6 October 2003 ( ISBN 0-7553-1155-8).

   Another biography is Hitchhiker: a Biography of Douglas Adams (2003) by
   M. J. Simpson, with a foreword (in the UK edition) by John Lloyd ( ISBN
   0-340-82488-3). The American edition contains a foreword by Neil Gaiman
   ( ISBN 1-932112-17-0).

   Upon the mutual discovery that Webb and Simpson were both working on
   new posthumous biographies, the two authors agreed that the former
   would focus on Adams's life and personality, and the latter on his
   work.

   The BBC produced a tribute as part of their TV series Omnibus. It was
   first broadcast on BBC 2 on 4 August 2001, presented by Kirsty Wark.
   The programme included interviews with Stephen Fry, Clive Anderson,
   Terry Jones, Griff Rhys Jones, Richard Dawkins and John Lloyd, among
   others. A copy is included with the Region One DVD release of the
   Hitchhiker's Guide TV series.

   A movie documentary, Life, The Universe and Douglas Adams, was released
   in 2002, directed and produced by Rick Mueller and Joel Greengrass.
   Archive footage of Adams is generously included, as well as interviews
   with Adams's friends, colleagues and family. This documentary was
   narrated by Neil Gaiman and is available on VHS tape.

   Earlier biographies include:
     * Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
       Companion (1988, 1993, 2002), Neil Gaiman et al. Reissued October
       2003 ( ISBN 1-84023-742-2) with new chapters by M. J. Simpson and
       David K. Dickson.
     * The Unofficial Guide to the Hitchhiker's Guide (2001), M. J.
       Simpson. Published the same year as The Pocket Essential
       Hitchhiker's Guide in the UK ( ISBN 1-903047-40-4). A second,
       revised edition was published in 2005 in the UK, with new material
       ( ISBN 1-904048-46-3).

Works

   The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on audio and video: The original
   12 radio episodes (from 1978 and 1980) are available in CD sets from
   BBC Audio (as The Primary & Secondary Phases), as well as on a single
   MP3-CD. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was the first radio series
   released on Compact Disc and on MP3-CD, respectively, by the then BBC
   Radio Collection. The three additional phases adapted from the last
   three books in the series are available from BBC Audio. The Tertiary
   Phase was broadcast on BBC Radio 21 September to 26 October 2004,
   whilst The Quandary Phase was broadcast 3 May to 24 May 2005, and The
   Quintessential Phase followed immediately afterward, from 31 May
   through 21 June 2005. A script book for the original 12 episodes has
   been published, and a new script book for the final 14 episodes was
   published in July 2005. BBC Audio released a CD boxset containing all
   26 episodes in October 2005. An Audio DVD for each of the three
   2004-2005 series, in 5.1 surround sound, are also planned for release
   in 2006, starting in October, per Dirk Maggs. These DVD-Audio discs
   will be a first for BBC Audio. The six episode TV adaptation is also
   available from the BBC (or its distributors, e.g. Warner Home Video in
   the USA and Canada) on VHS and DVD.

Novels in the Hitchhiker series

     * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
     * The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
     * Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)
     * So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish (1984)
     * Mostly Harmless (1992)

   All of the above are also available as unabridged audio books, read by
   Adams. These were preceded by abridged audio books of the first four
   novels, read by Stephen Moore. To tie in with the film release, The
   Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is also available as an audiobook read
   by Stephen Fry. Martin Freeman, who portrayed Arthur Dent in the movie
   adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide, has recorded audiobook editions
   of the last four books in the series, to be released between June and
   December 2006.

The Dirk Gently series

     * Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)
     * The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)

   Adams himself recorded an abridged audiobook adaptation of the first
   novel in this series in the 1980s. The sequel was performed by Simon
   Jones, also in an abridged adaptation. Both were released by Simon and
   Schuster Audioworks in the United States, and are out of print. Adams,
   a decade later, recorded unabridged adaptations of both novels, which
   are both available in six CD sets.

Other books

     * The Meaning of Liff (1983, with John Lloyd)
     * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts
       (1985, with Geoffrey Perkins)
     * The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book (1986, edited
       by Douglas Adams and Peter Fincham), which includes
          + Young Zaphod Plays it Safe (also printed in a slightly
            reworked version in The Wizards of Odd, The Salmon of Doubt,
            and several omnibus editions of Hitchhiker)
          + The Private Life of Genghis Khan, also available in the first
            edition of The Salmon of Doubt, though later removed due to
            copyright issues
          + A Christmas Fairly Story [ sic] by Douglas Adams and Terry
            Jones
          + A "Supplement to The Meaning of Liff" with John Lloyd and
            Stephen Fry
     * The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990, with John Lloyd; extended version
       of The Meaning of Liff)
     * Last Chance to See (1991, with Mark Carwardine, non-fictional
       account of several trips to see endangered species; according to a
       piece in The Salmon of Doubt, this book gave Adams the most
       satisfaction, if not the highest sales. An abridged audiobook
       version read by Adams was also released.)
     * The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1994)
     * Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic (1997, written by Terry Jones (who
       insists he wrote the whole thing while in the nude), based on an
       idea by Douglas Adams; also available as an audiobook, read by
       Terry Jones)
     * The Salmon of Doubt (2002), unfinished novel manuscript (11
       chapters), short stories, essays, and interviews (also available as
       an audiobook, read by Simon Jones)

Other works

     * The Pirate Planet - a Doctor Who serial first broadcast in 1978,
       available on VHS and DVD
     * City of Death - a Doctor Who serial, cowritten with Graham
       Williams, based on a story by David Fisher, first broadcast in
       October 1978, available on VHS and DVD.
     * Shada - a Doctor Who serial, originally intended to be broadcast in
       January/February 1980. Available footage released on video in 1992.
       A complete, animated form was made available on the web in 2003,
       and on CD later that same year.
     * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (computer game) (1984, with
       Steve Meretzky)
     * Bureaucracy (computer game) (1987)
     * Hyperland (TV documentary) (1990)
     * Starship Titanic (computer game) (1998)
     * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future (radio series) (2001)

   In 2004, BBC Audio published a 3-CD set entitled Douglas Adams at the
   BBC, which covers the author's work from 1974 to 2003, including
   posthumous projects and tributes. The CD is again narrated by Simon
   Jones.

Tributes and honorifics

     * There is an official appreciation society (fan club) named ZZ9
       Plural Z Alpha after the sector of the galaxy in which The
       Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says the planet Earth is located.
     * 18610 Arthurdent is a small main belt asteroid. Felix Hormuth
       discovered it on February 7, 1998. It is named after Arthur Dent,
       the bewildered hero of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The
       name was officially published and announced by the Minor Planet
       Centre of the International Astronomical Union on either 9 May or
       10 May 2001 (accounts differ).
     * On January 25, 2005, it was announced that asteroid with
       preliminary designation 2001 DA[42] had been named 25924
       Douglasadams in his honour. It was chosen because it referenced the
       year of Adams's death, his initials and the number " 42".
     * Every May 25, Towel Day is celebrated in recognition of Adams's
       genius.
     * In various British Universities, notably Oxford, York and Exeter,
       student societies, known as a "Douglas Adams Society", or "
       DougSoc" for short, were formed to honour the spirit engendered in
       Adams' works.
     * Deep Thought is a chess computer developed by IBM and named after
       the fictional computer in the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

   Because of the popularity of various versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide
   to the Galaxy, references to the works have appeared in a number of
   media in popular culture. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy cultural
   references lists a number of these.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
