Gaiman,Neil - Don' t Panic

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Scanned and corrected by Dirk Gently- as usual. If you have some interesting books to be scanned

(Finnish and Estonian preferred!), and they'd interest me as well, you can contact me. Don't

forget the three letters: i-R-C! Sorry, no Email addy is possible. I had lots of probs

scanning/editing this text, so it'd be great (if you are a DNA fan) if you sent me some greets in

demoz/diskmags of yours, if you appreciate my effort to make this book available for you.

I recommend you keeping the file's Word format coz I've edited the text with Bold and Italic

characters as well.

There were some TIFFs as well in the archive. COVER.TIF was the TrueColor TIFF of the cover. The

other TIFFs were:

6.tif: the name (and the text) speaks for itself :) (600 dpi, BW 256, 20%)

APP1_1... APP1_4.tif: Appendix 1's 4 pages (900 dpi, BW 256, 20%)

Anyway, to make life easier, I've also typed in the contents of the

mentioned TIFs so you won't need to get the TIFFs.

*************************COVER***********************

'IT'S ALL

ABSOLUTELY

DEVASTATINGLY

TRUE -

EXCEPT THE BITS

THAT ARE LIES'

This is the story of an ape-descended human called

Douglas adams who, in a field in Innsbruck, in 1971,

had an idea.

It us also the story of a book called, at a very high level

of improbality, The Hith Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy;

of the radio series that started it all; the five book

trilogy it comprises; and the computer game, towel

and television series that it, in its turn, has spawned.

'DESERVES AS MUCH CULT

SUCCESS AS THE HITCH HIKER'S

BOOKS THEMSELVES'

Time Out

REVISED & UPDATED

************************************************

********************************************************************

`Hilarious fun... a source of much delightful trivia'

- Publisbers Weekly

`Fanciful and irreverent... adds much extra information'

- Forecast

`Droll and informative... indispensable'

- American Library Association

`Indispensable... a treasure trove of quotes and anecdotes'

- Locus

Full of fun... and much more information than most books

of this type'

- Science Fiction Chronicle

`An excellent insight into the creative process'

- Vector

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BOOKS BY DOUGLAS ADAMS

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Life, the Universe, and Everything

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Mostly Harmless

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts

The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief

Christmas Book (Editor)

The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd)

Thc Decper Mcaning of Liff (with John Lloyd)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Thc Long Dark Tca-Timc of thc Soul

Last Chance to See (with Mark Carwardine)

OTHER BOOKS BY NEIL GAIMAN

Black Orchid

Thc Books of Magic

Ghastly Beyond Belief

Sandman: Thc Doll's House

Sandman: Dream Country

Sandman: A Game of You

Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes

Sandman: Season of Mists

Violent Cases

DON'T PANIC - DOUGLAS ADAMS & THE

HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

ISBN 185286 411 7

Published by

Titan Books Ltd

19 Valentine Place

London SE1 8QH

First edition published as `Don't Panic: The Official

Hitehhiker's Guide to tbe Galaxy Companion' January 1988

Second revised edition July 1993

1098765432

Copyright (C) Neil Gaiman 1987,1993

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all extracts from

the works of Douglas Adams are copyright Douglas

Adams 1987-1993 and used by permission of William

Heinemann Ltd

used with permission.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue

record for this book is available from thc British Library.

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by

way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or

otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in

any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox and Wyman Ltd,

Reading, Berhshire

Because she's threatened me with consequences too dreadful

to consider if I don't dedicate a book to her...

And because she's taken to starting every transatlantic

conversation with "Have you dedicated a book to me yet?"...

I would like to dedicate this book to intelligent life forms

everywhere.

And to my sister, Claire.

CONTENTS

Foreword ix

0 The Hitchhiker's Gvide to Europe 1

1 DNA 3

2 Cambridge and Other Recurrent Phenonema 9

3 The Wilderness Years 14

4 Gherkin Swallowing, Walking

Backwards and All That 19

5 When Yov Hitch Upon a Star 23

6 Radio, Radio 31

1 A Slightly Unreliable Producer 43

8 Have Tardis, Will Travel 47

9 H2 G2 53

10 All the Galaxy's a Stage 62

11 "Childish, Pointless, Codswalloping Drivel..." 68

12 level 42 72

13 Of Mice, ond Men, ond Tired TV Producers 76

14 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 101

15 Invasion USA 105

16 Life, the Universe, ond Everything 111

11 Making Movies 119

18 Liff, and Other Places 125

19 SLATFAT fish 131

20 Do You Know Where Your Towel Is? 146

21 Games with Computers 148

22 Letters to Douglas Adams 157

23 Dirk Gently and Time for Tea 167

24 Saving the World at No Extra Charge 174

25 Douglas and Other Animals 179

26 Anything That Happens, Happens 185

Appendix I: Hitchhiker's - the Original Sypnosis 191

Appendix II: The Variant Texts of Hitchhiker's-

What Happens Where and Why 195

Appendix III: Who's Who in the Galaxy-

Some Comments by Douglas Adams 201

Appendix IV: The Definitive How to Leave the Planet 210

Appendix V: Dr Who and the Krikkitmen-

an Excerpt from the film Treatment by Douglas Adams 214

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Foreword

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY is the most

remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out

of the great publishing companies of Ursa Minor. It is about the

size of a paperback book, but looks more like a large pocket

calculator, having upon its face over a hundred flat press-buttons

and a screen about four inches square, upon which any one of

over six million pages can be summoned almost instantly. It

comes in a durable plastic cover, upon which the words

DON'T PANIC!

are printed in large, friendly letters.

There are no known copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the

Galaxy on this planet at this time.

This is not its story.

It is, however, the story of a book also called, at a very high

level of improbability, The HitchHiker's Guide to tbe Galaxy; of

the radio series that started it all; the five-book trilogy it

comprises; the computer game, towel, and television series that it,

in its turn, has spawned.

To tell the story of the book - and the radio series, and the

towel - it is best to tell the story of some of the minds behind it.

Foremost among these is an ape-descended human from the

planet Earth, although at the time our story starts he no more

knows his destiny (which will include international travel,

computers, an almost infinite number of lunches, and becoming

mindbogglingly rich) than an olive knows how to mix a Pan

Galactic Gargle Blaster.

His name is Douglas Adams, he is six foot five inches tall,

and he is about to have an idea.

0

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe

THE IDEA IN QUESTION bubbled into Douglas Adams's mind

quite spontaneously, in a field in Innsbruck. He no longer has

any personal memory of it having happened. But it's the story he

tells, and, if there can be such a thing, it's the beginning. If you

have to take a flag reading THE STORY STARTS HERE and

stick it into the story, then there is no other place to put it.

It was 1971, and the eighteen-year-old Douglas Adams was

hitchhiking his way across Europe with a copy of The

Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe that he had stolen (he hadn't

bothered `borrowing' a copy of Europe on $5 a Day; he didn't

have that kind of money).

He was drunk. He was poverty-stricken. He was too poor to

afford a room at a youth hostel (the entire story is told at length

in his introduction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A

Trilogy in Four Parts in England, and The Hitchhiker's Trilogy in

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the US) and he wound up, at the end of a harrowing day, flat on

his back in a field in Innsbruck, staring up at the stars.

"Somebody," he thought, "somebody really ought to write a

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

He forgot about the idea shortly thereafter.

Five years later, while he was struggling to think of a

legitimate reason for an alien to visit Earth, the phrase returned to him. The rest is history,

and will be told in this book.

The field in Innsbruck has since been transformed into an

unremarkable section of autobahn.

***************************************************************

"When you're a student or whatever, and you can't afford a car,

or a plane fare, or even a train fare, all you can do is hope that

someone will stop and pick you up.

"At the moment we can't afford to go to other planets. We

don't have the ships to take us there. There may be other people

out there (I don't have any opinions about Life Out There,I just

don't know) but it's nice to think that one could, even here and

now, be whisked away just by hitchhiking."

- Douglas Adams,1984.

***************************************************************

1

DNA

DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID, commonly known as DNA, is the

fundamental genetic building block for all living creatures. The

structure of DNA was discovered and unravelled, along with its

significance, in Cambridge, England, in 1952, and announced to

the world in March 1953.

This was not the first DNA to appear in Cambridge,

however. A year earlier, on the 11 th March 1952, Douglas Noel

Adams was born in a former Victorian workhouse in Cambridge.

His mother was a nurse, his father a postgraduate theology

student who was training for holy orders, but gave it up when his

friends managed to persuade him it was a terrible idea.

His parents moved from Cambridge when he was six months

old, and divorced when he was five. At that time, Douglas was

considered a little strange, possibly even retarded. He had only

just learned to talk and, "I was the only kid who anybody I knew

has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide

open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on

inside, because there sure as hell didn't seem to be anything going

on on the outside!"

Douglas was a solitary child; he had few close friends, and

one sister, Susan, three years younger than he was.

In September 1959 he started at Brentwood School in Essex,

where he stayed until 1970. He says of the school, "We tended to

produce a lot of media trendies. Me, Griff Rhys Jones, Noel

Edmunds, Simon Bell (who wrote the novelisation for Griff and

Mel Smith's famous non-award winning movie, Morons from

Outer Space; he's not a megastar yet, but he gives great parties). A

lot of the people who designed the Amstrad Computer were at

Brentwood, as well. But we had a very major lack of archbishops,

prime ministers and generals."

He was not particularly happy at school, most of his

memories having to do with "basically trying to get off games".

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Although he was quite good at cricket and swimming he was

terrible at football and "diabolically bad at rugby - the first time

I ever played it, I broke my own nose on my knee. It's quite a

trick, especially standing up.

"They could never work out at school whether I was terribly

clever or terribly stupid. I always had to understand everything

fully before I was prepared to say anything."

He was a tall and gawky child, self-conscious of his height:

"My last year at prep school we had to wear short trousers, and I

was so absurdly lanky, and looked so ridiculous, that my mother

applied for special permission for me to wear long trousers. And

they said no, pointing out I was just about to go into the main

school. I went to the main school and was allowed to wear long

trousers, at which point we discovered they didn't have any long

enough for me. So for the first term I still had to go to school in

short trousers."

His ambitions at that time had more to do with the sciences

than the arts: "At the age when most kids wanted to be firemen, I

wanted to be a nuclear physicist. I never made it because my

arithmetic was too bad - I was good at maths conceptually, but

lousy at arithmetic, so I didn't specialise in the sciences. If I had known what they were, I

would have liked to be a software

engineer... but they didn't have them then."

His hobbies revolved around making model aeroplanes ("I had

a big display on top of a chest of drawers at home. There was a large

old mirror that stood behind them, and one day the mirror fell

forward and crushed the lot of them. I never made a model plane

after that, I was upset, distraught for days. It was this mindless blow

that fate had dealt me..."), playing the guitar, and reading.

"I didn't read as much as, looking back, I wish I had done.

And not the right things, either. (When I have children I'll do as

much to encourage them to read as possible. You know, like hit

them if they don't.) I read Biggles, and Captain W. E. Johns's

famous science fiction series -I particularly remember a book

called Quest for the Perfect Planet, a major influence, that was.

There was an author called Eric Leyland, who nobody else ever

seems to have heard of: he had a hero called David Flame, who

was the James Bond of the ten-year-olds. But when I should have

been packing in the old Dickens, I was reading Eric Leyland

instead. But there you go - you can' tell kids, can you?"

Douglas was also an avid reader of Eagle, at that time

Britain's top children's comic, and home of Dan Dare. `Dan

Dare', drawn by artist Frank Hampson, was a science fiction strip

detailing the banle between jut-jawed space pilot Dare, his comic

sidekick Digby, and the evil green Mekon. It was in Eagle that

Douglas first saw print. He had two letters published there at the

age of eleven, and was paid the (then) enormous sum of ten

shillings each for them. The short story shows a certain

precocious talent (see page 6).

Of Alice in Wonderland, often cited as an influence, he says I

read - or rather, had read to me - Alice in Wonderland as a child

and I hated it. It really frightened me. Some months ago, I tried to

go back to it and read a few pages, and I thought, `This is jolly

good stuff, but still...' If it wasn't for that slightly nightmarish

quality that I remember as a kid I'd've enjoyed it, but I couldn't

shake that feeling. So although people like to suggest that Carroll

was a big influence - using the number 42 and all that - he really

was not. "

The first time that Douglas ever thought seriously about

writing was at the age of ten: "There was a master at school called

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Halford. Every Thursday after break we had an hour's class called

composition. We had to write a story. And I was the only person

**************** Dirk: look at 6.tif! *************

EAGLE merry-go-round

EAGLE AND BOYS' WORLD 27 FEBRUARY 1965

SHORT STORY

"' London Transporrt Lost Property Office'- this is it," said Mr. Smith, looking in at the

window. As he went in, he tripped over the little step and almost crashed through the glass door.

"That could be dangerous - I must remember it when I go out," he muttered.

"Can I help you?" asked the lost-property officer.

"Yes, I lost something on the 86 bus yesterday."

"Well, what was it you lost?" asked the officer.

"I'm afraid I can't remember," said Mr. Smith.

"Well, I can't help you, then," said the exasperated officer.

"Was anything found on the bus?" asked Mr Smith.

"I'm afraid not, but can you remember anything about this thing?" said the officer, desperately

tryting to be helpful.

"Yes, I can remember that it was a very bad - whatever-it-was."

"Anything else?"

"Ah, yes, now I come to think of it, it was something like a sieve," said Mr. Smith, and he put

his elbow on the highly polished counter and rested his chin oon his hands. Suddenly, his chin met

the counter with a resounding crack. But before the officer could assist him up, Mr Smith jumped

triumphantly into the air.

"Thank you very much," he said.

"What for?" said the officer.

"I've found it," said Mr. Smith

"Found what?"

"My memory!" said Mr Smith, and he turned round, tripped over the step and smashed through the

glass door!

D.N.Adams (12), Brentwood, Essex.

who ever got ten out of ten for a story. I've never forgotten that.

And the odd thing is, I was talking to someone who has a kid in

the same class, and apparently they were all grumbling about how

Mr Halford never gave out decent marks for stories. And he told

them, `I did once. The only person I ever gave ten out of ten to

was Douglas Adams.' He remembers as well.

"I was pleased by that. Whenever I'm stuck on a writer's block

(which is most of the time) and 1 just sit there, and 1 can't think of

anything,I think, `Ah! But I once did get ten out of ten!' In a way

it gives me more of a boost than having sold a million copies of this

or a million of that. I think, `I got ten out of ten once. . ."'

His writing career was not always that successful.

"I don't know when the first thoughts of writing came, but it

was actually quite early on. Rather silly thoughts, really, as there

was nothing to suggest that I could actually do it. All of my life

I've been attracted by the idea of being a writer, but like all

writers I don't so much like writing as having written. I came

across some old school literary magazines a couple of years ago,

and I went through them to go back and find the stuff 1 was

writing then. But I couldn't find anything I'd written, which

puzzled me until 1 remembered that each time I meant to try to

write something, I'd miss the deadline by two weeks."

He appeared in school plays, and discovered a love of

performing ("I was a slightly strange actor. There tended to be

things I could do well and other things I couldn't begin to do. . .I

couldn't do dwarves for example; I had a lot of trouble with dwarf

parts."). Then, while watching The Frost Report one evening, his

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ambitions of a life well-spent as a nuclear physicist, eminent

surgeon, or professor of English began to evaporate. Douglas's

attention was caught by six-foot five-inch future Python John

Cleese, performing in sketches that were mostly self-written. "I

can do that!" thought Douglas, "I'm as tall as he is!" [Although at first glance this theory may

seem flippant, a brief examination shows that thc field of British comedy is littered with

incredibly tall people. John Cleese, Peter Cook, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and Adams himself arc

all 6'5", Frank Muir is 6'6", as is Dennis Norden.. Douglas has often mentioned that the late

Graham Chapman, at only 6'3', was thus four per cent less funny than the rest. .]

In order to become a writer-performer, he had to write. This

caused problems: "I used to spend a lot of time in front of a

typewriter wondering what to write, tearing up pieces of paper

and never actually writing anything." This not-writing quality

was to become a hallmark of Douglas's later work.

But the die had been cast. Adams abandoned all his

daydreams, even those of being a rock star (he was, and indeed is;

a creditable guitarist), and set out to be a writer-performer.

He left school in December 1970, and, on the strength of an

essay on the revival of religious poetry (which brought together

on one sheet of foolscap Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley

Hopkins and John Lennon), he won an exhibition to study

English at Cambridge.

And it was important to Douglas that it was Cambridge.

Not just because his father had been to Cambridge, or simply

because he had been born there. He wanted to go to Cambridge

because it was from a Cambridge University society that the

writers and performers of such shows as Beyond the Fringe, That

Was The Week That Was, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, and, of

course, many of the Monty Python's Flying Circus team had come.

Douglas Adams wanted to join Footlights.

2

Cambridge and Other

Recurrent Phenomena

BEFORE GOING UP TO CAMBRIDGE, Douglas Adams had

begun the series of jobs that would serve him on book jackets

ever after. He had decided to hitchhike to Istanbul, and in order

to make the money to travel he worked first as a chicken-shed

cleaner, then as a porter in the X-ray department of Yeovil

General Hospital (while at school he had worked as a porter in a

mental hospital).

The hitchhike itself was not spectacularly successful:

although he reached Istanbul, he contracted food poisoning there,

and was forced to return to England by train. He slept in the

corridors, felt extremely sorry for himself, and was hospitalised

on his return to England. Perhaps it was a combination of his

illness with the hospital work he had been doing, but on his

arrival home he began to feel guilty for not going on to study

medicine.

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"I come from a somewhat medical family. My mother was a

nurse, my stepfather was a vet, and my father's father (whom I

never actually met) was a very eminent ear nose and throat

specialist in Glasgow. I kept working in hospitals as well. And I

had the feeling that, if there is Anyone Up There, He kept tapping

me on the shoulder and saying, `Oy! Oy! Get your stethoscope

out! This is what you should be doing!' But I never did."

Douglas rejected medicine, in part because he wanted to be a

writer-performer (although at least four top British writer-

performers have been doctors - Jonathan Miller, Graham

Chapman, Graeme Garden and Rob Buckman) and in part

because it would have meant going off for another two years to

get a new set of A-levels. Douglas went on to study English

literature at St John's College, Cambridge.

Academically, Douglas's career was covered in less than

glory, although he is still proud of the work he did on

Christopher Smart, the eighteenth-century poet.

"For years Smart stayed at Cambridge as the most drunken

and lecherous student they'd ever had. He used to do drag revues

drank in the same pub that I did. He went from Cambridge to

Grub Street, where he was the most debauched journalist they

had ever had, when suddenly he underwent an extreme religious

conversion and did things like falling on his knees in the middle

of the street and praying to God aloud. It was for that that he was

thrust into a loony bin, in which he wrote his only work, the

Jubilate Agno, which was as long as Paradise Lost, and was an

attempt to write the first Hebraic verse in English."

Even as an undergraduate, Douglas was perpetually missing

deadlines: in three years he only managed to complete three

essays. This however may have had less to do with his fabled

lateness than with the fact that his studies came in a poor third to

his other interests - performing and pubs.

Although Douglas had gone to Cambridge with the intention

of joining Footlights, he was never happy with them, nor they

with him. His first term attempt to join Footlights was a failure

- he found them "aloof and rather pleased with themselves"

and, being made to feel rather a `new boy', he wound up joining

CULES (Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society)

and doing jolly little shows in hospitals, prisons, and the like.

These shows were not particularly popular (especially not in the

prisons), and Douglas now regards the whole thing with no little

embarrassment.

In his second term, feeling slightly more confident, he

auditioned with a friend called Keith Jeffrey at one of the

Footlights `smokers' - informal evenings at which anybody could

get up and perform. "It was there that I discovered that there was

one guy, totally unlike the rest of the Footlights Committee, who

was actually friendly and helpful, all the things the others weren't,

a completely nice guy named Simon Jones. He encouraged me, and

from then on I got on increasingly well in Footlights.

"But Footlights had a very traditional role to fulfil: it had to

produce a pantomime at Christmas, a late-night revue in the

middle term, and a spectacular commercial show at the end of

every year, as a result of which it couldn't afford to take any risks.

"I think it was Henry Porter, a history don who was

treasurer of Footlights, who said that the shows that had gone on

to become famous were not the Cambridge shows but subsequent

reworkings. Beyond the Fringe wasn't a Footlights show, neither

was Cambridge Circus (the show that launched John Cleese et

al), it wasn't the Cambridge show but a reworking done after

they'd all left Cambridge. Footlights shows themselves had to

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fight against the constraints of what Footlights had to produce

every year. "

Douglas rapidly earned a reputation for suggesting ideas that

struck everyone else as hopelessly implausible. He felt strait-

jacketed by Footlights (and by the fact that nobody in Footlights

seemed to feel his ideas were particularly funny) and, with two

friends, he formed a `guerilla' revue group called Adams-Smith-

Adams (because two members of the group were called Adams,

and the third, as you might already have guessed, was called

Smith)". (Will Adams joined a knitwear company upon leaving university; Martin Smith

went into advertising, and was later immortalised as `bloody Martin Smith of

Croydon' in a book written by Douglas.)

As Douglas explained, "We invested all our money - $40, or

whatever it was - in hiring a theatre for a week, and then we knew

we had to do it. So we wrote it, performed it, and had a

considerable hit with it. It was a great moment. I really loved that."

It was then that Douglas made an irrevocable decision to become a writer. This was to cause him

no little anguish and

aggravation in the years to come.

The show was called Several Poor Players Strutting and

Fretting, and this extract from the programme notes has the

flavour of early Douglas Adams:

By the time you've read the opposite page (cast and credits)

you'll probably be feeling restive and wondering when the

show will start. Well, it should start at the exact moment that

you read the first word of the next sentence. If it hasn't started

yet, you're reading too fast. If it still hasn't started, you're

reading much too fast, and we can recommend our own book

`How To Impair Your Reading Ability', written and published

by Adams-Smith-Adams. With the aid of this slim volume, you

will find that your reading powers shrink to practically nothing

within a very short space of time. The more you read, the

slower you get. Theoretically, you will never get to the end,

which makes it the best value book you will ever have bought!

The following year Adams-Smith-Adams (aided in performance

by the female presence of Margaret Thomas, who, the programme

booklet declared, was `getting quite fed up with the improper

advances that are continually being made to her by the other

three, all of whom are deeply and tragically in love with her')

took to the stage again in their second revue, The Patter of Tiny

Minds. These shows were popular, packed out, and generally

considered to be somewhat better than the orthodox Footlights'

offerings.

Douglas considers his favourite sketches of this period to be

one about a railway signalman who caused havoc over the entire

Southern Region by attempting to demonstrate the principles of

existentialism using the points system, and another of which he

says, "It's hard to describe what it was about - there was a lot of

stuff about cat-shaving, which was very bizarre but seemed quite

funny at the time."

It was shortly after this that Douglas Adams gave up

performing permanently to concentrate on writing; this was due

to his continuing upset with Footlights, and specifically with the

1974 Footlights Show. As he explains, "It is something that

happened with Footlights that I still get upset about, because I

think that Footlights should be a writer-performer show. But, in

my day, Footlights became a producer's show. The producer says

who's going to be in it, and who he wants to write it, they are

file:///F|/rah/Neil%20Gaiman/Neil%20Gaiman%20-%20Don't%20Panic.txt (10 of 126) [8/27/03 9:14:32 PM]

Gaiman, Neil - Don' t Panic

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