Douglas Adams: The Legacy
Some info on Douglas Adams, first of all...
Douglas Adams
The best Science Fiction writer of all time. Born in Cambridge, England, 1952.
The author of the best selling: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at
the end of the universe, Life the Universe and Everything and more. This man was
once a hospital reporter, bodyguard, and chicken-shed cleaner.
How Hitchhiker's began...
The story tells of Arthur Dent, whose house is demolished to make way
for a bypass, then, in a Pythonesque style, the Earth is destroyed for
exactly the same reason. Luckily, Arthur's friend Ford Prefect, who
turns out to be from "a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse,
and not from Guildford after all" knows of the Earth's impending doom, and
manages to get a lift from the very ships that were sent to demolish the
planet. Luckily for them, the in-flight caterers, Dentrassi, hate their
bosses, the Vogons.
If you wonder about 42, it is the answer to the Ultimate question, but for
some reason the Ultimate question has been messed up with Arthur Dent.
Instead of what should be 6 times 7 turns out to be 6 by 9. I know that is
wierd, but that's just the way it is.
Ah yes, the Guide...
The guide is a very interesting piece of machinery. It tells of the many
things there are to know of the Universe. Ford Prefect collects info for it.
The book's view on it:
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on
Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or
heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out
of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no
Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly
successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care
Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero
Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of
philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of
God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern
Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted
the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of
all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and
contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate,
it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important
respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words
Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
The Book's view of Earth and it's Solar System...
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of
the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded
yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles
is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-
descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still
think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most
of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these
were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces
of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small
green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and
most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big
mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And
some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no
one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man
had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be
nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a
small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that
had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the
world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was
right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to
anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone-
about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea
was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some
of its consequences.
Now, on to the links..
