Hitchhiker's Guide returns

15/10/2009

Russell T Davies and Neil Gaiman remember their literary hero and discuss the future of the series 30 years on

When Douglas Adams died suddenly in 2001, Stephen Fry said we had lost “a giant of a man” – and he wasn’t just talking about his friend’s 6’5” frame. As creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams not only sold more than 15 million books but also found a very important place in millions of people’s hearts.

Starting out as a radio series, before spawning a “trilogy of five books”, multiple amateur and professional stage productions, a TV series, a computer game, comic books, bath towels and most recently a Hollywood film, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is among the most beloved of all sci-fi series. The latest reissues of the books – released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the very first novel, which made its debut on October 12, 1979 – feature tributes by former Python Terry Jones, Doctor Who head honcho Russell T Davies and author Neil Gaiman. The list of celebrity fans is much broader than that, though, including scientist Richard Dawkins, TV presenter Clive Anderson and Simpsons actor Harry Shearer.

“Douglas was a genius, a unique writer,” Gaiman tells The Big Issue. He recalls hearing the first broadcast of the radio show while in his car, and sitting in the driveway until it was finished because he didn’t want to miss a thing. “There are some writers who do not stale – Wodehouse was one, I think Douglas will prove to be another.”

Before The Sandman or Stardust or Coraline, Gaiman wrote an effusive book about Adams’ life and work. Through the process they became friends.

“After he died, I was interviewed a lot, asked about Douglas,” says Gaiman. “I said that I didn’t think that he had ever been a novelist, not really, despite having been an internationally  best-selling novelist who had written several books which are, 30 years later, becoming seen as classics. Writing novels was a profession he had backed into, or stumbled over, or sat down on very suddenly and broken.”

H2G2 (as Gaiman abbreviated The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) is indeed now widely seen as a classic. In any case, it has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a drunken reverie by Adams as he lay on his back in a field in Austria in 1971, while on a hitchhiking trip round Europe, and contemplated the vast, huge, mind-boggling scale of the universe. What if, Adams wondered, instead of having a hitchhiker’s guide to Europe, you had a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy?

Adams put the imaginary guide – “the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor”, which had beaten off all competition by being “slightly cheaper” and having “DON’T PANIC” written in large, friendly letters on its cover – at the centre of his story.

“Don’t panic” proves to be rather good advice almost immediately, as the story begins with the hapless Arthur Dent protesting at the demolition of his home to make way for a bypass, only to have that fairly major disaster overshadowed by the demolition of the planet Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

Luckily for Dent his mate Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien on Earth to research the aforementioned guide, and they both manage to escape aboard a passing spaceship piloted by two-headed Galactic President and outlaw Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Thus begins a series of very funny adventures across the universe (as well as multiple dimensions and times) during which it is revealed, among many other things, that humans are descended not from apes but from hairdressers and management consultants, that all it takes to understand any language is to insert a fish in your ear and that we should all pay much more attention to what dolphins are trying to tell us.

Words: Laura Kelly

To read what Russell T Davies and Eoin Colfer think of the new Hitchhikers, see this week's mag. On the streets until October 18.