Wish You Were Here (47 page)

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Interview with Duncan Fallowell, 1995.

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Oddly much the same applies to books. Bestselling authors, whose names on their books are huge and embossed (and whose titles are mere footnotes), still twitch in case they come up with something so doggy that it inhibits potential buyers at the point of sale.

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In many ways this is the most satisfying of the
Hitchhiker’s
books.

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Douglas was always huge in Germany which, despite the stereotype, seems to have a weakness for surreal British humour. They even made a German version of Monty Python’s
Fliegender Zirkus
once, with all the Pythons learning their lines phonetically.

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Jonny Brock tells a story of being a house guest with a large party when Douglas had his place in Provence. Towards the end of the holiday, Douglas suggested that they all go to one of the world’s most famous and expensive restaurants on the Swiss border. There was much gulping and surreptitious wincing, until Jonny took Douglas aside and explained that most of them could not afford it and would feel uncomfortable about being feasted so extravagantly. The solution was for everybody to buy their own food, but Douglas would treat the party to the fearsomely costly component—the wine.

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Sonny is a supremely civilized man, but he is not a person in whom the blood reaches the higher cognitive functions before around 10:30 a.m.

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These trips are fun. You charge around the industry seeing old mates and usually being treated to a great deal of lunch, but after a week of three or four meetings in the morning, lunch in the line of duty, four meetings in the afternoon, early evening drinks and sometimes dinner, your hotel room is ankle deep in manuscripts and you’re in such a state of fugue that you would not recognize a bestseller if it bit you on the bum.

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Much later, when she had turned into a fine writer herself, she wrote for
GQ
magazine one of the most insightful pieces about Douglas ever published.

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The critics were harsh about this one. For instance, Tom Shippey, the academic SF expert and reviewer, found it “too cool, as Adams is now edging down from Vogon poetry to mere satire of British Rail sandwiches . . .”

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¹³⁸
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
was Pan’s first hardcover edition. They had been licensing library editions to Arthur Barker, but they realized they were missing a trick. It was a very elegant book, all black, designed by Gary Day Ellison with an odd lenticular image on the front that alternated between a walrus and a plesiosaur depending on the angle. David Bleasdale, their Production Director, had picked up a job lot of these images in Hong Kong. It didn’t have much to do with the text, but somehow it worked and the book is now a collector’s item.

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Would make a two-hander play?

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¹⁴⁰
Haruki Murakami,
Sputnik Sweetheart,
translated by Philip Gabriel (Vintage Books, 1999).

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For those of you too young to remember, in March 1982 the Argentine military dictator, Colonel Leopoldo Galtieri, facing economic crisis and unrest at home, invaded the Falkland Islands, some 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, to which the Argentines had long laid claim. By the end of June, after a bitter 72-day campaign, Britain had retaken the islands by force. Nearly a thousand men from both sides had died. Galtieri was deposed; Margaret Thatcher lasted until the end of the decade.

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Politicians often invoke this philosophically hazy concept when they are arguing some spiteful spasm of policy is a necessity.

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Named after the legendary editor, Hugo Gernsback, this is SF’s highest annual accolade.

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See his interview with Neil Gaiman in
Don’t Panic.

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However, there is now research underway on growing animal tissue in tanks on a collagen substrate in suitable growth medium, perhaps for consumption on long space journeys. Chicken in a pot? See “Raising the Steaks” by Wendy Wolfson,
New Scientist,
21–28 December 2002.

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When the series was completed, Alan made a speech congratulating all concerned. In one of those mock jocular asides indicating some deep feeling that etiquette obliges you to disguise, he said that everybody was happy except the radio producer—and that didn’t count.

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Serious buffs are referred to the excellent
The Making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
available as part of a double DVD (and also on video) from the BBC. Douglas, with a stupendous effort at tact writ large on his guileless features, remarks on this DVD that he might not have done Sandra a favour when he declined her offer to do an English accent. She has an excellent range of accents. He was, on the other hand, thrilled with her comic timing.

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Some say that the ennobling nature of great art means that it is likely to be executed by decent human beings, but there are many counter-examples that suggest the opposite may be true. You need a certain self-regarding single-mindedness and indifference to others to pursue an idea to the death. Douglas proved an honourable exception as he was—most of the time—a sweetiepie.

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I have a soft spot for the creature representing the editor at Megadodo House for, despite looking like a hairy alien polyp, it is called Web Nixo.

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Kevin Davies was in fact more than a fan. Not only did his timely intrusion on Alan Bell help get Pearce Studios the graphics contract, but Kevin produced the props for the ill-fated Rainbow Theatre show and he was closely involved in the creation of
The Illustrated Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
He also produced and directed
The Making of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide.

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The nearest Douglas and Terry got to a major film undertaking was when Douglas bought some tickets for Abel Gance’s
Napoleon
and persuaded Terry to accompany him. Over five hours of silent movie struck them as such an awful prospect that they simply had to see it.

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Jim is an author and communications scholar. Because of Jim’s research interests, Douglas once called him a “massacre expert.”

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A popular legend has it that Belushi’s character in the movie was modelled on the early days of George W. Bush.

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An option is a short-term arrangement whereby the option holder buys certain rights in the author’s intellectual property—in this case, film—for a sum that is an advance against a larger fee. This more serious money only becomes payable if the option is exercised by putting the work into production. Within the agreed time the purchaser has an exclusive lien on the rights, and after the expiry of that term the rights granted revert to the author again. Options are frequently renewed and can evolve into a decent source of income, but it’s ultimately frustrating if the work is not filmed. Producers often have a portfolio of options, but they change their minds as often as their socks.

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Though he believed that American cars are only for going in straight lines and not around corners. In
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
(Pan Books, 1984) he has a fantasy about this in which he concludes that it’s better to hire a car that’s already headed in the right direction than attempt to negotiate an American one around a bend.

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Max Headroom—a wonderful cyberspace character who appeared in his own bizarre and anarchic TV series in the mid-eighties.

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The cartoon was by a Brit whose
nom de plume
was Paul Crum. His real name was Roger Pettiward. He was 6’51⁄2", and he died with lots of brave Canadians during the disastrous commando raid on Dieppe in World War Two. The cartoon was first published in
Punch
and then republished in the
New Yorker.
In the history of the genre, Crum is important as he prefigures by decades the kind of humour found in the
Goon Show
or
Monty Python.
I am indebted for this information to Dr. Mark Bryant whose encyclopaedic knowledge of cartoons is second to none.

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One honourable exception is the hilarious
Dark Star,
an early John Carpenter movie (1974), made on a budget of sixpence with a terrific screenplay by Dan O’Bannon. Like
Starship Titanic,
it also features a talking bomb.

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Douglas had earlier enjoyed some success with an email to the studio in which he had listed every conceivable number on which he could be reached, not excluding his daughter’s nanny’s mobile and the local supermarket where he might be shopping. He said if they did not call, they were trying very hard not to. It was funny, angry and powerfully written. There is probably nobody else in the world who could have sent an email like that and got away with it. It is republished in
The Salmon of Doubt.

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Life, the Universe and Everything
(Pan Books, 1982).

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I’m sorry, readers, there is no list of romantic attachments. Pepys made diary notes about his sexual activities using a primitive code deciphered by scholars for the amusement of later generations, but that was in the seventeenth century . . .

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Pan hardback edition (1984), p. 108–9.

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Games People Play,
Eric Berne (Penguin Books 1978).

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Sue and I went to dinner there on Friday 18 June 1982, shortly after they had got together. “Guess what Jane does,” a grinning Douglas challenged us after some articulate and well-sustained riff from Jane on a subject long forgotten. “Hmm,” I said, “doctor, journo, academic philosopher . . . ?” Sue twigged it at once because she noticed the formal clothes as well as the orderly marshalling of ideas. [Info courtesy of Sue Webb’s addiction to diaries.] It was slow of me not to get it, though Jane managed to keep her professional reflexes contained in the courtroom, unlike one barrister of our acquaintance. If you say “good morning” to him, he counterattacks: “I put it to you that it is Not a good morning . . .”

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Mine said: On your left is Anita Carey. Good thing to ask her about: her grandmother and Bernard Shaw.

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Lisa Eveleigh, the literary agent, recounts how she was once in ZEN NW3 (a restaurant, what else?) with all the agents from A.P. Watt who were making a huge fuss of their client, Graham Swift, the Booker Prize winner. By chance Douglas and some friends were in the same restaurant. Douglas came over and toasted them with these ambivalent words: “Commercial fiction pays homage to literary fiction . . .”

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Douglas did several tours in Germany, both for book promotion and as a guest speaker at scientific conferences. He enjoyed them very much. The audiences, a sophisticated lot, had no trouble with his English and they very much got his off-beat sense of humour. Why is it that the mischievous stereotypes about national characteristics die so hard?

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The architects’ converted mews in St. Alban’s Place was part of the elaborate pun about “stable events” in the dedication in
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
Incidentally, Huntsham Court was a remarkable, converted country house in Somerset where Douglas liked to retreat in order to write—or angstify (
sic?
) about not writing. This was another part of the stable event in the dedication.

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Inside Story
published by the Abbey National, spring 1990.

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Friedrich von Schelling,
Philosophie der Kunst
(1809).

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My experience of driving down to the south of France is that the Germans win the prize of Mad Turbo-charged Bastards of Europe, closely followed by the French and the British. Belgium at that time had such lax licensing standards that one seldom saw Belgians who had lasted that far.

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From Stephen Fry’s introduction to The 2003 DNA Memorial Lecture.

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When Melvyn Bragg did a
South Bank Show,
the UK’s premier TV arts programme, on Douglas, they were so taken with the idea that they arranged for an electric monk on a white horse to climb the steps of Douglas’s Islington terrace and walk down the corridor into the house.

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Chaos
by James Gleick (Heinemann, 1986).

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If you are unfamiliar with chaos theory, it is worth reading up on it. It describes how complexity can emerge from the iteration of simple rules (cf. life itself) and how complex systems are exquisitely sensitive both to their initial conditions and to minute perturbations to which they respond in unpredictable ways. In chaos theory outputs are non-linear, and this is satisfyingly like everyday experience. That wobbly table did not half collapse when you put half the pile of books upon it. Our scientific descriptions of events are in some ways an enormous formalism that we impose upon the world which resolutely refuses to behave as it ought. In
Dirk Gently
the tiniest events cascade outwards to mind-boggling consequences.