Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt

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The Salmon of Doubt

Douglas Adams

Editor’s Note

I first met Douglas Adams in 1990. Newly appointed his editor at Harmony Books, I had flown

toLondon in search ofDouglas ’s long-overdue fifth Hitchhiker novel, Mostly Harmless. No sooner was I

buzzed in the door to the Adams residence in Islington than a large, ebullient man bounded down the long

staircase, greeted me warmly, and thrust a handful of pages at me. “See what you think of these,” he said

over his shoulder as he bounded back up the stairs. An hour later he was back, new pages in hand, eager

to hear my opinion of the first batch. And so the afternoon passed, quiet stretches of reading alternating

with more bounding, more conversation, and fresh pages. This, it turned out, wasDouglas ’s favorite way

of working.

In September 2001, four months afterDouglas ’s tragic, unexpected death, I received a phone call from

his agent, Ed Victor. A good friend had preserved the contents ofDouglas ’s many beloved Macintosh

computers; would I be interested in combing through the files to see if they contained the makings of a

book? A few days later a package arrived, and, curiosity whetted, I tore it open. My first thought was

thatDouglas ’s friend, Chris Ogle, had undertaken a Herculean task—which, as it turned out, he had. The

CD-ROM onto whichDouglas ’s writing had been collected contained 2,579 items, ranging from huge

files that stored the complete text ofDouglas ’s books to letters on behalf of “Save the Rhino,” a favorite

charity. Here, too, were fascinating glimpses into dozens of half-brewed ideas for books, films, and

television programs, some as brief as a sentence or two, others running to half-a-dozen pages. Alongside

these were drafts of speeches, pieces Douglas had written for his website, introductions to various books

and events, and musings on subjects near to Douglas’s heart: music, technology, science, endangered

species, travel, and single-malt whisky (to name just a few). Finally, I found dozens of versions of the

new novelDouglas had been wrestling with for the better part of the past decade. Sorting these out to

arrive at the work-in-progress you’ll find in the third section of this book would prove my greatest

challenge, although that makes it sound difficult. It was not. As quickly as questions arose they seemed to

answer themselves.

Conceived as a third Dirk Gently novel,Douglas ’s novel-in-progress began life as A Spoon Too Short,

and was described as such in his files until August 1993. From this point forward, folders refer to the

novel as The Salmon of Doubt, and fall into three categories. From oldest to most recent, they are: “The

Old Salmon,” “The Salmon of Doubt,” and “LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor.” Reading through these various

versions, I decided that for the purposes of this book,Douglas would be best served if I stitched together

the strongest material, regardless of when it was written, much as I might have proposed doing were he

still alive. So from “The Old Salmon” I reinstated what is now the first chapter, on DaveLand. The

following six chapters come intact from the second, and longest, continuous version, “The Salmon of

Doubt.” Then, with an eye to keeping the story line clear, I dropped in two of his three most recent

chapters from “LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor” (which became Chapters Eight and Nine). For Chapter Ten I

went back to the last chapter from “The Salmon of Doubt,” then concluded with the final chapter

fromDouglas ’s most recent work from “LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor.” To give the reader a sense of

whatDouglas planned for the rest of the novel, I preceded all this with a fax fromDouglas to hisLondon

editor, Sue Freestone, who worked closely withDouglas on his books from the very first. Inspired by

reading theseAdams treasures on the CD-ROM, I enlisted the invaluable aid ofDouglas ’s personal

assistant, Sophie Astin, to cast the net wider. Were there other jewels we might include in a book tribute

toDouglas ’s life? As it turned out, during fallow periods between books or multimedia

mega-projects,Douglas had written articles for newspapers and magazines. These, together with the text

on the CD-ROM, provided the magnificent pool of writings that gave life to this book.

The next task was selection, which involved not the slightest shred of objectivity. Sophie Astin, Ed

Victor, andDouglas ’s wife, Jane Belson, suggested their favorite bits, beyond which I simply chose

pieces I liked best. WhenDouglas ’s friend and business partner Robbie Stamp suggested the book

follow the structure ofDouglas ’s website (“life, the universe, and everything”), everything fell into place.

To my delight, the arc of the collected work took on the distinct trajectory of Douglas Adams’s too brief

but remarkably rich creative life.

My most recent visit withDouglas took place inCalifornia , our afternoon stroll alongSanta Barbara ’s

wintry beach punctuated by running races with his then six-year-old daughter, Polly. I had never

seenDouglas so happy, and I had no inkling that this time together would be our last. SinceDouglas died

he has come to mind with astonishing frequency, which seems to be the experience of many who were

close to him. His presence is still remarkably powerful nearly a year after his death, and I can’t help

thinking he had a hand in the amazing ease with which this book came together. I know he would have

keenly wanted you to enjoy it, and I hope you will.

Peter Guzzardi

Chapel Hill,North Carolina

FEBRUARY 12, 2002

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published

material: American Atheist Press: “Interview with Douglas Adams” American Atheist, vol. 40, no. 1

(Winter 2001-2002). Reprinted by permission of the American Atheist Press. Byron Press Visual

Publications:

“Introduction” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Collected Edition) DC Comics, volume 1

(May 1997). Reprinted by permission of Byron Press Visual Publications. Daily Nexus: “Interview with

Daily Nexus” by Brendan Buhler, of theUniversityofCalifornia Santa Barbara Daily Nexus, Artsweek,

(April 5, 2001). Reprinted by permission of Daily Nexus. Richard Dawkins: “A Lament for Douglas

Adams” by Richard Dawkins, The Guardian (May 14, 2001). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Newsome. Reprinted by permission of the author. The Onion A.V. Club: “Douglas Adams Interview” by

Keith Phipps, from The Onion A.V. Club (January 1998). Reprinted by permission of The Onion A.V.

Club. Pan Macmillan: Excerpts from the Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts by Douglas Adams & G.

imprint of Pan Macmillan. Robson Books: “Maggie and Trudie” from Animal Passions edited by Alan

Coven. Reprinted by permission of Robson Books. Virgin Net Limited: “Interview with Virgin.net, Ltd.”

conducted by Claire Smith (September 22, 1999). Reprinted by permission of Virgin Net Limited.

Nicholas Wroe: “The Biography of Douglas Adams” by Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian (June 3, 2000).

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Contents

Prologue

Foreword

LIFE

THE UNIVERSE

AND EVERYTHING

Epilogue

THE

SALMON

DOUBT

Prologue

Nicholas Wroe, in The Guardian

SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 2000

In 1979, soon after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published, Douglas Adams was invited to

sign copies at a small science-fiction bookshop inSoho . As he drove there, some sort of demonstration

slowed his progress. “There was a traffic jam and crowds of people were everywhere,” he recalls. It

wasn’t until he had pushed his way inside thatAdams realised the crowds were there for him. Next day

his publisher called to say he was number one in the London Sunday Times best-seller list and his life

changed forever. “It was like being helicoptered to the top ofMount Everest ,” he says, “or having an

orgasm without the foreplay.”

Hitchhiker had already been a cult radio show, and was made in both television and stage versions. It

expanded into four more books that sold over 14 million copies worldwide. There were records and

computer games and now, after twenty years ofHollywood prevarication, it is as close as it’s ever been

to becoming a movie.

The story itself begins on earth with mild-mannered suburbanite Arthur Dent trying to stop the local

council demolishing his house to build a bypass. It moves into space when his friend, Ford

Prefect—some have seen him as Virgil to Dent’s Dante—reveals himself as a representative of a planet

near Betelgeuse and informs Arthur that the Earth itself is about to be demolished to make way for a

hyperspace express route. They hitch a ride on a Vogon spaceship and begin to use the Hitchhiker’s

Guide itself—a usually reliable repository of all knowledge about life, the universe and everything.

Adams’s creativity and idiosyncratic intergalactic humour have had a pervasive cultural influence. The

phrase “hitchhiker’s guide to . . .” quickly became common parlance, and there have been numerous

copycat spoof sci-fi books and TV series. His Babel fish—a small fish you can place in your ear to

translate any speech into your own language—has been adopted as the name of a translation device on

an Internet search engine. He followed up his success with several other novels as well as a television

programme, and a book and CD-ROM on endangered species. He has founded a dot-com company,

H2G2, that has recently taken the idea of the guide full circle by launching a service that promises real

information on life, the universe, and everything via your mobile phone. Much of his wealth seems to have

been spent fuelling his passion for technology, but he has never really been the nerdy science-fiction type.

He is relaxed, gregarious, and a solidly built two meters tall. In fact, he has more the air of those English

public-school boys who became rock stars in the 1970s; he once did play guitar on stage at Earls Court

with his mates Pink Floyd. In a nicely flash touch, instead of producing a passport-size photo of his

daughter out of his wallet, he opens up his impressively powerful laptop, where, after a bit of fiddling

about, Polly Adams, aged five, appears in a pop video spoof featuring a cameo appearance by another

mate, John Cleese.

So this is what his life turned into; money, A-list friends, and nice toys. Looking at the bare facts of his

CV—boarding school, Cambridge Footlights, and the BBC—it seems at first sight no surprise. But his

has not been an entirely straightforward journey along well-worn establishment tracks. Douglas Noel

Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952. One of his many stock gags is that he was DNA in Cambridge

nine months before Crick and Watson made their discovery. His mother, Janet, was a nurse at

Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and his father, Christopher, had been a teacher who went on to become a

postgraduate theology student, a probation officer, and finally a management consultant, which was “a

very, very peculiar move,” claims Adams. “Anyone who knew my father will tell you that management

was not something he knew very much about.” The family were “fairly hard up” and left Cambridge six

months after Douglas was born to live in various homes on the fringes of East London. When Adams was

five, his parents divorced. “It’s amazing the degree to which children treat their own lives as normal,” he

says. “But of course it was difficult. My parents divorced when it wasn’t remotely as common as it is

now, and to be honest I have scant memory of anything before I was five. I don’t think it was a great

time, one way or another.”

After the breakup, Douglas and his younger sister went with their mother to Brentwood in Essex, where

she ran a hostel for sick animals. He saw his by now comparatively wealthy father at weekends, and

these visits became a source of confusion and tension. To add to the complications, several step-siblings

emerged as his parents remarried. Adams has said that while he accepted all this as normal on one level,

he did “behave oddly as a result,” and remembers himself as a twitchy and somewhat strange child. For a

time his teachers thought he was educationally subnormal, but by the time he went to the direct-grant

Brentwood Prep School, he was regarded as extremely bright.

The school boasts a remarkably diverse list of postwar alumni: clothing designer Hardy Amies; the

disgraced historian David Irving; TV presenter Noel Edmonds;

Home Secretary Jack Straw; and London Times editor Peter Stothard were all there before Adams,

while comedians Griff Rhys Jones and Keith Allen were a few years behind him. There are four

alumni—two Labour and two Conservative—in the current House of Commons. In a scene that now

seems rather incongruous in the light of Keith Allen’s hard-living image, it was Adams who helped the

seven-year-old Allen with his piano lessons.

When Adams was thirteen, his mother remarried and moved to Dorset, and Adams changed from being

a “day boy” at the school to a boarder. It appears to have been an entirely beneficial experience.

“Whenever I left school at four in the afternoon, I always used to look at what the boarders were doing

rather wistfully,” he says. “They seemed to be having a good time, and in fact I thoroughly enjoyed

boarding. There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature. But more

accurately I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit. There is nothing

better than a few constraints you can comfortably kick against.” Adams ascribes the quality of his

education to being taught by some “very good, committed, obsessed and charismatic people.” At a

recent party in London he confronted Jack Straw on New Labour’s apparent antipathy to direct-grant

schools, on the basis that it had done neither of them much harm. Frank Halford was a master at the

school and remembers Adams as “very tall even then, and popular. He wrote an end-of-term play when

Doctor Who had just started on television. He called it ‘Doctor Which.’ ” Many years later, Adams did

write scripts for Doctor Who. He describes Halford as an inspirational teacher who is still a support. “He

once gave me ten out of ten for a story, which was the only time he did throughout his long school career.

And even now, when I have a dark night of the soul as a writer and think that I can’t do this anymore, the

thing that I reach for is not the fact that I have had best-sellers or huge advances. It is the fact that Frank

Halford once gave me ten out of ten, and at some fundamental level I must be able to do it.”

It seems that from the beginning Adams had a facility for turning his writing into cash. He sold some

short, “almost haiku-length,” stories to the Eagle comic and received ten shillings. “You could practically

buy a yacht for ten shillings then,” he laughs. But his real interest was music. He learned to play the guitar

by copying note for note the intricate finger-picking patterns on an early Paul Simon album. He now has a

huge collection of left-handed electric guitars, but admits that he’s “really a folkie at heart. Even with Pink

Floyd on stage, I played a very simple guitar figure from ‘Brain Damage’ which was in a finger-picking

style.”

Adams grew up in the sixties, and the Beatles “planted a seed in my head that made it explode. Every

nine months there’d be a new album which would be an earth-shattering development from where they

were before. We were so obsessed by them that when ‘Penny Lane’ came out and we hadn’t heard it on

the radio, we beat up this boy who had heard it until he hummed the tune to us. People now ask if Oasis

are as good as the Beatles. I don’t think they are as good as the Rutles.”

The other key influence was Monty Python. Having listened to mainstream British radio comedy of the

fifties he describes it as an “epiphanous” moment when he discovered that being funny could be a way in

which intelligent people expressed themselves—“and be very, very silly at the same time.”

The logical next step was to go to Cambridge University, “because I wanted to join Footlights,” he says.

“I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me

some time to realise that the job was in fact taken.”

At university he quickly abandoned performing—“I just wasn’t reliable”—and began to write

self-confessed Pythonesque sketches. He recalls one about a railway worker who was reprimanded for

leaving all the switches open on the southern region to prove a point about existentialism; and another

about the difficulties in staging the Crawley Paranoid Society annual general meeting. The arts

administrator Mary Allen, formerly of the Arts Council and the Royal Opera, was a contemporary at

Cambridge and has remained a friend ever since. She performed his material and remembers him as

“always noticed even amongst a very talented group of people. Douglas’s material was very quirky and

individualistic. You had to suit it, and it had to suit you. Even in short sketches he created a weird world.”

Adams says, “I did have something of a guilt thing about reading English. I thought I should have done

something useful and challenging. But while I was whingeing, I also relished the chance not to do very

much.” Even his essays were full of jokes. “If I had known then what I know now, I would have done

biology or zoology. At the time I had no idea that was an interesting subject, but now I think it is the most

interesting subject in the world.”

Other contemporaries included the lawyer and TV presenter Clive Anderson. The culture secretary

Chris Smith was president of the union. Adams used to do warm-up routines for debates, but not

because of any political interest: “I was just looking for anywhere I could do gags. It is very strange

seeing these people dotted around the public landscape now. My contemporaries are starting to win

lifetime achievement awards, which obviously makes one feel nervous.” After university, Adams got the

chance to work with one of his heroes. Python member Graham Chapman had been impressed by some

Footlights sketches and had made contact. When Adams went to see him, he was asked, much to his

delight, to help out with a script Chapman had to finish that afternoon. “We ended up working together

for about a year. Mostly on a prospective TV series which never made it beyond the pilot.” Chapman at

this time was “sucking down a couple of bottles of gin every day, which obviously gets in the way a bit.”

But Adams believes he was enormously talented. “He was naturally part of a team and needed other

people’s discipline to enable his brilliance to work. His strength was flinging something into the mix that

would turn it all upside down.” After he split up with Chapman, Adams’s career stalled badly. He

continued to write sketches but was not making anything like a living. “It turned out I wasn’t terribly good

at writing sketches. I could never write to order, and couldn’t really do topical stuff. But occasionally I’d

come out with something terrific from left field.”

Geoffrey Perkins, head of comedy at BBC television, was the producer of the radio version of

Hitchhiker. He remembers first coming across Adams when he directed a Footlights show. “He was

being heckled by a cast member, and then he fell into a chair. I next came across him when he was trying

to write sketches for the radio show Weekending, then regarded as the big training ground for writers.

Douglas was one of those writers who honourably failed to get anywhere with Weekending. It put a

premium on people who could write things that lasted thirty seconds, and Douglas was incapable of

writing a single sentence that lasted less than thirty seconds.”

With his dreams of being a writer crumbling around him, Adams took a series of bizarre jobs, including

working as a chicken-shed cleaner and as a bodyguard to the ruling family of Qatar. “I think the security

firm must have been desperate. I got the job from an ad in the Evening Standard.” Griff Rhys Jones did

the same job for a while on Adams’s recommendation. Adams recalls becoming increasingly depressed

as he endured night shifts of sitting outside hotel bedrooms: “I kept thinking this wasn’t how it was

supposed to have worked out.” At Christmas he went to visit his mother and stayed there for the next

year. He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he still sent in the

occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his

subsequent success and wealth, this propensity for a lack of confidence has continued. “I have terrible

periods of lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the

contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it is just like a

farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.” So

has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs.

Hitchhiker was the last throw of the dice, but in retrospect the timing was absolutely right. Star Wars had

made science fiction voguish, and the aftermath of Monty Python meant that while a sketch show was out

of the question, there was scope to appeal to the same comic sensibility.

Python Terry Jones heard the tapes before transmission and remembers being struck by Adams’s

“intellectual approach and strong conceptual ideas. You feel the stuff he is writing has come from a

criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold might say. It has a moral basis and a critical basis that has a strong

mind behind it. For instance, John Cleese has a powerful mind, but he is more logical and analytical.

Douglas is more quirky and analytical.” Geoffrey Perkins agrees, but remembers there was little grand

plan behind the project. “Douglas went into it with a whole load of ideas but very little notion of what the

story would be. He was writing it in an almost Dickensian mode of episodic weekly installments without

quite knowing how it would end.” By the time the series aired in 1978, Adams says, he had put about

nine months’ solid work into it and had been paid one thousand pounds. “There seemed to be quite a

long way to go before I broke even,” so he accepted a producer’s job at the BBC but quit six months

later when he found himself simultaneously writing a second radio series, the novel, the television series,

and episodes of Doctor Who. Despite this remarkable workload, he was already building a legendary

reputation for not writing. “I love deadlines,” he has said. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they

go by.”

Success only added to his ability to prevaricate. His publishing editor, Sue Freestone, quickly realised

that he treated writing as performance art, and so she set up her office in his dining room. “He needs an

instant audience to bounce things off, but sometimes this can weirdly backfire. “There was a scene early

in one book when he talked about some plates with, very definitely, one banana on each. This was

obviously significant, so I asked him to explain. But he liked to tease his audience and he said he’d tell me

later. We eventually got to the end of the book and I asked him again, ‘Okay, Douglas, what’s with the

bananas?’ He looked at me completely blankly. He had forgotten all about the bananas. I still

occasionally ask him if he has remembered yet, but apparently he hasn’t.”

Writer and producer John Lloyd has been a friend and collaborator with Adams since before Hitchhiker.

He remembers the “agonies of indecision and panic” Adams got into when writing. “We were on holiday

in Corfu with three friends when he was finishing a book, and he ended up taking over the whole house.

He had a room to write in, a room to sleep in, a room to go to when he couldn’t sleep, and so on. It

didn’t occur to him that other people might want a good night’s sleep as well. He goes through life with a

brain the size of a planet, and often seems to be living on a different one. He is absolutely not a malicious

person, but when he is in the throes of panic and terror and unable to finish a book, everything else pales

into insignificance.” However the work was dragged out, it was extremely popular. The books all

became bestsellers, and Adams was given an advance of over $2 million by his American publishers. He

wrote a hilarious spoof dictionary with John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff, in which easily recognised

concepts, such as the feeling you get at four in the afternoon when you haven’t got enough done, were

given the names of towns—Farnham being the perfect choice for this low-grade depression. In the late

eighties he completed two spoof detective novels featuring Dirk Gently. For all his facility with humour,

Freestone says she has been touched by how profoundly Adams’s work has connected with some

readers. “In Hitchhiker, all you have to do to be safe is have your towel with you,” she explains. “I heard

about this woman who was dying in a hospice who felt she would be fine because she had her towel with

her. She had taken Douglas’s universe and incorporated it into her own. It embarrassed the hell out of

Douglas when he heard about it. But for her it was literally a symbol of safety when embarking on an

unknown journey.” There are serious themes within his work. The second Dirk Gently novel can easily

be read as being about people who are homeless, displaced, and alienated from society. “His imagination

goes much deeper than just cleverness,” says Freestone. “The social criticism is usually buried by the

comedy, but it’s there if you want to find it.”

Having been through such a lean period, Adams worked constantly until the mid-nineties, when he very

deliberately applied the brakes. “I had got absolutely stuck in the middle of a novel, and although it

sounds ungrateful, having to do huge book signings would drive me to angry depressions.” He says that

he still thought of himself as a scriptwriter and only inadvertently found himself as a novelist. “It sounds

absurd, but a bit of me felt cheated and it also felt as if I had cheated. And then there is the money cycle.

You’re paid a lot and you’re not happy, so the first thing you do is buy stuff that you don’t want or

need—for which you need more money.” His financial affairs got into a mess in the 1980s, he says. He

won’t discuss the details, but says that the knock-on effect was considerable, so that everyone assumed

he was wealthier than he actually was. It is possible to track the movement of Adams’s life even between

the first and second series of the radio show. In the first there were a lot of jokes about pubs and being

without any money. The second had more jokes about expensive restaurants and accountants.

“I felt like a mouse in a wheel,” he says. “There was no pleasure coming into the cycle at any point.

When you write your first book aged twenty-five or so, you have twenty-five years of experience, albeit

much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty

soon you begin to run on empty.”

His response to running out of fuel was to attempt some “creative crop rotation.” In particular, his

interest in technology took off, as did a burgeoning passion for environmental issues. In 1990 he wrote

Last Chance to See. “As is the way of these things, it was my least successful book, but is still the thing I

am most proud of.”

The book began when he was sent to Madagascar by a magazine to find a rare type of lemur. He

thought this would be quite interesting, but it turned into a complete revelation. His fascination with

ecology led to an interest in evolution. “I’d been given a thread to pull, and following that lead began to

open up issues to me that became the object of the greatest fascination.” A link at the bottom of his

e-mails now directs people to the Dian Fossey Trust, which works to protect gorillas, and Save the

Rhino. Adams was also a signatory to the Great Ape Project, which argued for a change of moral status

for great apes, recognising their rights to “life, liberty, and freedom from torture.” He was a founding

member of the team that launched Comic Relief, but he has never been a hairshirt sort of activist. The

parties he held at his Islington home would feature music by various legendary rock stars—Gary Brooker

of Procol Harum once sang the whole of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” including all the abandoned

verses—and were peopled by media aristocracy and high-tech billionaires. Slightly less orthodoxly—for

an enthusiastic, almost evangelical atheist—he would also host carol services every Christmas. “As a

child I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always

such an emotional thing.” He adds Bach to the Beatles and the Pythons in his pantheon of influences, but

how does this square with his passionate atheism? “Life is full of things that move or affect you in one

way or another,” he explains. “The fact that I think Bach was mistaken doesn’t alter the fact that I think

the B-minor Mass is one of the great pinnacles of human achievement. It still absolutely moves me to

tears to hear it. I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that

otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.” This attachment to traditional structures, if not traditional

beliefs, is carried over in the fact that his daughter, Polly, who was born in 1994, has four

non-godparents. Mary Allen is one of them, and it was she who introduced Adams to his wife, the

barrister Jane Belson. Allen says, “In the early eighties Douglas was going through some writing crisis and

was ringing me every day. I eventually asked him whether he was lonely. It seemed that he was, so we

decided he needed someone to share his huge flat. Jane moved in.” After several false starts, they

married in 1991 and lived in Islington until last year, when the family moved to Santa Barbara.

Adams says the initial move was harder than he expected. “I’ve only recently understood how opposed

to the move my wife was.” He now says he would recommend it to anyone “in the depths of middle age

just upping sticks and going somewhere else. You reinvent your life and start again. It is invigorating.” His

role in his dot-com business fits into this sense of invigoration. His job title is chief fantasist. “I’ve never

thought of myself in the role of a predictive science-fiction writer, I was never an Arthur C. Clarke

wannabe. The Guide was a narrative device for absorbing all those ideas that spark off the flywheel, but

it has turned out to be a very good idea. But it’s early days,” he warns. “We’re still in a swimming pool

and there is an ocean out there.” Other new ventures are a novel—eight years late and counting—talk of

a Dirk Gently film, the H2G2 Web site and an e-novel. “I’ve been talking about how electronic books

will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a

complete idiot, as it should have been me.” The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and

he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into

the room and breathing on it.” He is surprisingly enthusiastic about this apparently antique art form.

“With new, more-immature technologies there is a danger in getting excited about all the ways you can

push them forward at the expense of what you want to say. It is therefore rewarding to work in a

medium where you don’t have to solve those problems because it is a mature medium.”

After such a long fallow period he wisely notes that many of these new projects and ideas will fall by the

wayside. “But I’ve been out of the mainstream of novel writing for several years and I really needed to

take that break. I’ve been thinking hard and thinking creatively about a whole load of stuff that is not

novel writing. As opposed to running on empty, it now feels like the tank is full again.”

LIFE AT A GLANCE: Douglas Noel Adams

BORN: March 11, 1952, Cambridge.

EDUCATION: Brentwood School, Essex; St. John’s College, Cambridge.

MARRIED: 1991 Jane Belson (one daughter, Polly, born 1994).

CAREER: 1974-78 radio and television writer; 1978 BBC radio producer. SOME SCRIPTS: The

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1978 and 1980 (radio), 1981 (television).

GAMES: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984; Bureaucracy, 1987; Starship Titanic, 1997.

BOOKS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,

1980; Life, the Universe and Everything, 1982; The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd), 1983; So Long,

and Thanks for All the Fish, 1984; Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987; The Long Dark

Tea-Time of the Soul, 1988; Last Chance to See, 1990; The Deeper Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd),

1990; Mostly Harmless, 1992.

Foreword

This is a very Douglassy moment for me. Douglassy moments are most likely to involve:

Apple Macintosh Computers

Impossible deadlines

Ed Victor, Douglas’s agent

Endangered species

Excessively expensive five star-hotels

I am tapping at a (Macintosh) computer as I fight a deadline imposed on me by Ed Victor. Would I

please see if I might provide a foreword for The Salmon of Doubt by next Tuesday?

I am in the most outrageously luxurious hotel in Peru, the Miraflores Park Hotel, Lima, enjoying the

encellophaned bowls of fruit and Louis Roederer as I prepare to go upcountry in pursuit of spectacled

bears, one of the least understood and most threatened mammals on the planet. Being an expensive hotel,

high-bandwidth Internet connections are available in each room and I have just watched a two-hour film

on my computer, showing Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, making his keynote address to the Macintosh

Expo in San Francisco. The Emperor of Computer Cool has just unveiled the new I-Mac and I haven’t

been able to call up or email Douglas to talk about it. A new revolutionary piece of sexy and

extraordinary Apple hardware and Douglas won’t get to see it. He won’t have played with an I-Pod or

messed around in I-Photo. To anyone who knew Douglas, and I am including his millions of readers

here, the misery and frustration of this will be appallingly evident. It is dreadful for him because he has

missed New Stuff and it is dreadful for us because the New Stuff will never now be celebrated by the

acknowledged Poet of New Stuff. You see, I want to know what to think. I want to know what the new

machines look like: yes, I can use my own eyes and my own sensibility, but I have got used to the

superior insights offered by Douglas. He would have offered the exact epithet, the perfect metaphor, the

crowning simile. Not just on the subject of New Stuff, of course. He would have found a way of linking

the amiably odd behaviour and character of spectacled bears both to familiar human experience and to

abstract scientific thought. Much of the world that we move in has been seen through Douglas’s eyes and

become clearer. Which is to say the very confusion and absurd lack of clarity of our world has become

clearer. We never quite knew how conflicting and insane the universe was or how ludicrous and

feeble-minded the human race could be until Douglas explained it in the uniquely affable, paradoxical and

unforced style that marks him out for greatness. I’ve just visited the bathroom and noted that the soap on

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TheSalmonofDoubtDouglasAdams Editor’sNoteIfirstmetDouglasAdamsin1990.NewlyappointedhiseditoratHarmonyBooks,IhadflowntoLondoninsearchofDouglas’slong-overduefifthHitchhikernovel,MostlyHarmless.NosoonerwasIbuzzedinthedoortotheAdamsresidenceinIslingtonthanalarge,ebullientmanboundeddownthelongstair...

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Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt

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