Don't Panic
I'm working on it
History
I have found two similar stories on the
inspiration for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They both claim to be from Adams and
occur in the same time, place, and state. The first says that Adams came up with the title in an 1971 incident while he was hitch-hiking around Europe as a young man with a copy of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe book, and while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck with a copy of the book and looking up at the stars, thought it would be a good idea for someone to write a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as well. The
second says that according to Adams, the idea for the title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria gazing at the stars. He had been wandering the countryside while carrying a book called the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe when he ran into a town where, as he humorously describes, everyone was either "deaf" and "dumb" or only spoke languages he couldn't. After wandering around and drinking for a while, he went to sleep in the middle of a field and was inspired by his inability to communicate with the townspeople. He later said that due to his constantly retelling this story of inspiration, he no longer had any memory of the moment of inspiration itself, and only remembered his retellings of that moment. A postscript to M. J. Simpson's biography of Adams, Hitchhiker, provides evidence that the story was in fact a fabrication and that Adams had conceived the idea some time after his trip around Europe.
Now The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a radio show, a book, a tv series, a game, a move, and has other infiltrations into our culture.
The first radio series comes from a proposal called 'The Ends of the Earth': six self-contained episodes, all ending with the Earth being destroyed in a different way. While writing the first episode, Adams realized that he needed someone on the planet who was an alien to provide some context, and that this alien needed a reason to be there. Adams finally settled on making the alien a roving researcher for a "wholly remarkable book" named The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As the first radio episode's writing progressed, the Guide became the centre of his story, and he decided to focus the series on it, with the destruction of Earth being the only hold-over.
The first radio series of six episodes (called "Fits" after an obscure term for a part of a poem) was broadcast weekly in the UK in March and April 1978. Despite a low-key launch of the series (the first episode was broadcast at 10:30 pm on Wednesday, 8 March 1978), it received generally good reviews and a tremendous audience reaction for radio. Then another episode was recorded and broadcast, which was commonly known as the Christmas Episode. In the forward to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it talks about the Christmas Episode and how it didn't have anything to do with Christmas and that it was broadcast on Christmas Eve which is not Christmas and so on. The episode as transmitted served as a bridge between the two series. It was released as part of the second radio series when they were released on tape and CD. The second series, of five episodes, was broadcast one per night, during the week of 21 January - 25 January 1980.
The second series was also notable for its use of sound, being the first comedy series to be produced in stereo. Adams said that he wanted the program's production to be comparable to that of a modern rock album. Much of the program's budget was spent on sound effects. The fact that they were at the forefront of modern radio production in 1978 and 1980 was reflected when the three new series of Hitchhiker's became some of the first radio shows to be mixed into 5.1 surround sound. This will also be featured on DVD-Audio releases of series 3-5 in 2006. The twelve episodes were released on CD and cassette in 1988, becoming the first CD release in the BBC Radio Collection. They were re-released in 1992, and at this time Adams suggested that they could retitle Fits the First through Sixth as "The Primary Phase" and Fits the Seventh through Twelfth as "The Secondary Phase" instead of just "the first series" and "the second series." It was about at this time that a "Tertiary Phase" was first discussed with Dirk Maggs, adapting Life, the Universe and Everything, but this series would not be recorded for another ten years.
The Tertiary Phase was broadcast 21 September to 26 October 2004. It adaptation followed Life, the Universe, and the Everything very closely. The core cast remained the same, except for the replacement of Peter Jones by William Franklyn as the Book, and Richard Vernon by Richard Griffiths as Slartibartfast, since they had died.
The Quandary Phase was broadcast 3 May to 24 May 2005. The adaptation is a little more varied from the book with some events in Mostly Harmless being foreshadowed in the adaptation of So Long and Thanks For All The Fish. Interesting "Thanks to the wonders of digital technology, Douglas Adams himself can be heard playing the part of Agrajag."
The Quintessential Phase was broadcast 31 May to 21 June 2005. Its adaptation also varies for Mostly Harmless originally had rather a bleak ending, so Dirk
Maggs created a different ending for the transmitted radio version,
ending it on a much more upbeat note.
The BBC
supposedly sales all five series in a book set, but the best I've found is websites that sale them all
separately. Though I just found this website that has all five series for download.
The fellowing is unprocessed information.
The books are described as "a trilogy in five parts", having been described as a trilogy on the release of the third book, and then a "trilogy in four parts" on the release of the fourth book. The US edition of the fifth book was originally released with the legend "The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" on the cover. Subsequent re-releases of the other novels bore the legend "The [first, second, third, fourth] in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's trilogy."
The plots of the television and radio series are more or less the same as that of the first two novels, though some of the events occur in a different order and many of the details are changed. Much of parts five and six of the radio series were written by John Lloyd, but his material did not make it into the other versions of the story and is not included here. Some consider the books' version of events to be definitive, because they are the most readily accessible and widely distributed version of the story. However, they are not the final version that Adams produced.
It was not truly clear that the series was over (since it was already a trilogy with five books) until Adams died of a heart attack at age 49 in 2001. Indeed, Adams said that the new novel he was working on, The Salmon of Doubt, was not working as a Dirk Gently story, and suggested it might instead become a sixth book in the Hitchhiker's series. He described Mostly Harmless in an interview as "a very bleak book" and said he "would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note". Adams also remarked that if he were to write a sixth installment, he would at least start with all the characters in the same place
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (published in 1979), the characters visit the legendary planet Magrathea, home to the now-collapsed planet building industry, and meet Slartibartfast, a planetary coastline designer who was responsible for the fjords of Norway. Through archival recordings, he relates the story of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who built a computer named Deep Thought to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When the answer was revealed as 42, they were forced to build a more powerful computer to work out what the Ultimate Question actually was, but their plans never come to fruition. (Later on, referencing this, Adams would create a puzzle which could be approached in multiple ways, all yielding the answer 42.)
The computer, often mistaken for a planet (because of its size and use of biological components), was the Earth, and was destroyed by Vogons five minutes before the conclusion of its 10-million-year program. The hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, who turn out to be Trillian's mice, want to dissect Arthur's brain to help reconstruct the question, since he is the last remaining survivor from Earth at the moment when it was destroyed. Trillian is also human but had left Earth six months previously with Zaphod Beeblebrox. Our protagonists escape, setting course for "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe." The mice, in Arthur's absence, create a phony question since it is too troublesome for them to wait 10 million years again just to cash in on a lucrative deal. Their new question was "How many roads must a man walk down?"
The book was adapted from the first four radio episodes. It was first published in 1979, initially in paperback, by Pan Books, after BBC Publishing had turned down the offer of publishing a novelisation, an action they would later regret [10]. The book reached number one on the book charts in only its second week, and sold over 250,000 copies within three months of its release. A hardback edition was published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House in the United States in October 1980, and the 1981 US paperback edition was promoted by the give-away of 3,000 free copies in the magazine Rolling Stone to build word of mouth.
A photo-illustrated edition of the first novel appeared in 1994.
In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (published in 1980), Zaphod is separated from the others and finds he is part of a conspiracy to uncover whoever really runs the Universe. Zaphod meets Zarniwoop, a co-conspirator and editor for The Guide, who knows where to find the secret ruler. Briefly reunited with the others for a trip to Milliways, the restaurant of the title, Zaphod and Trillian discover that the Universe is in the safe hands of a simple man living on a remote planet in a wooden shack with his cat.
Ford and Arthur, meanwhile, fall backwards through time and end up on a spacecraft full of the outcasts of the Golgafrinchan civilisation. The ship crashes on prehistoric Earth; Ford and Arthur are stranded, and it becomes clear that the inept Golgafrinchans are the ancestors of modern humans, having displaced the Earth's indigenous hominids. This has disrupted the Earth's programming so that when Ford and Arthur manage to extract the final readout from Arthur's subconscious mind by pulling lettered tiles from a Scrabble set, it is "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" Arthur then comments, "I've always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."
The book was adapted from the remaining material in the radio series — covering from the fifth episode to the twelfth episode, although the ordering was greatly changed (in particular, the events of Fit the Sixth, with Ford and Arthur being stranded on pre-historic earth, end the book, and their rescue in Fit the Seventh is deleted), and most of the Brontitall incident was omitted. Instead of the Haggunenon sequence, co-written by John Lloyd, the Disaster Area stuntship was substituted — this having first been introduced in the LP version.
In Life, the Universe and Everything (published in 1982), Ford and Arthur travel through the space-time continuum from prehistoric Earth to Lord's Cricket Ground. There they run into Slartibartfast, who enlists their aid in preventing galactic war. Long ago, the people of Krikkit attempted to wipe out all life in the Universe, but they were stopped and imprisoned on their home planet; now they are poised to escape. With the help of Marvin, Zaphod and Trillian, our heroes prevent the destruction of life in the Universe and go their separate ways.
This was the first Hitchhiker's book originally written as a book and not adapted from radio. Its story was based on a treatment Adams had written for a Doctor Who movie, with the Doctor role being split between Slartibartfast (to begin with), and later Trillian and Arthur. In 2004 it was adapted for radio as the Tertiary Phase of the radio series.
In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (published in 1984), Arthur returns home to Earth, rather surprisingly since it was destroyed when he left. He meets and falls in love with a girl named Fenchurch, and discovers this Earth is a replacement provided by the dolphins in their Save the Humans campaign. Eventually he rejoins Ford, who claims to have saved the Universe in the meantime, to hitch-hike one last time and see God's Final Message to His Creation.
This was the first Hitchhiker's novel which was not an adaptation of any previously written story or script. In 2005 it was adapted for radio as the Quandary Phase of the radio series.
Finally, in Mostly Harmless (published in 1992), Vogons take over The Hitchhiker's Guide (under the name of Infinidim Enterprises), to finish, once and for all, the task of obliterating the Earth. After abruptly losing Fenchurch and travelling around the galaxy despondently, Arthur's spaceship crashes on the planet Lamuella, where he settles in happily as the official sandwich-maker for a small village of simple, peaceful people. Meanwhile, Ford Prefect breaks into The Guide's offices, gets himself an infinite expense account from the computer system, and then meets The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Mark II, an artificially intelligent, multi-dimensional guide with vast power and a hidden purpose. After he declines this dangerously powerful machine's aid (which he receives anyway), he sends it to Arthur Dent for safety ("Oh yes, whose?" — Arthur).
Trillian uses DNA that Arthur donated for travelling money to have a daughter, and when she goes to cover a war, she leaves her daughter Random Frequent Flyer Dent with Arthur. Random, a more-than-typically troubled teenager, steals The Guide Mark II and uses it to get to Earth. Arthur, Ford, Trillian, Random, and Tricia McMillan (Trillian in this alternate universe) follow her to a crowded club, where an anguished Random tries to kill her father. The shot misses Arthur and kills a man (the ever-unfortunate Agrajag). Immediately afterwards, The Guide Mark II causes the removal of all possible Earths from probability. All of the main characters, save Zaphod, were on Earth at the time and are apparently killed, bringing a good deal of satisfaction to the Vogons.
In 2005 it was adapted for radio as the Quintessential Phase of the radio series, with the final episode first transmitted on 21 June 2005.
The Salmon of Doubt (full title: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time) is a collection of previously unpublished material by Douglas Adams, published after the author's death in 2001. English editions of the book were published in the USA and UK in May 2002, exactly one year after the author's death. It consists largely of a compilation of essays, most of which have a technological edge, but its major selling point is the inclusion of the incomplete novel on which Adams was working when he died (and from which the collection gets its title).
In a 1998 interview with Matt Newsome [1], Adams commented as to whether "The Salmon of Doubt" was going to be a "Dirk Gently" book or a continuation of the "Hitchhiker's Guide" series:
- Adams: The thing with Dirk was that I felt I had lost contact with that character, I couldn't make that book viable, which is why I said, "Okay, let's go off and do something else." Then looking back at all the ideas that were there in "Salmon of Doubt", I looked at it again about a year later and suddenly realised what it was that I'd been getting wrong, which was that these are essentially much more like Hitch-Hiker ideas and not like Dirk Gently ideas.
- So, there will come a point I suspect at some point in the future where I will write a sixth Hitch-Hiker book. But I kind of want to do that in an odd kind of way because people have said, quite rightly, that "Mostly Harmless" is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. The reason for that is very simple—I was having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that I don't want to go into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book!
- I would love to finish Hitch-Hiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number. I think that a lot of the stuff which was originally in "Salmon of Doubt", was planned into "Salmon Doubt" and really wasn't working, I think could be yanked out and put together some new thoughts.
- Newsome: Yes, because certainly some people have heard that, "Salmon of Doubt", was now going to be a new Hitch-Hiker book.
- Adams: Well, In a sense, because I shall be salvaging some of the ideas I couldn't make work within a Dirk Gently framework and putting them in a Hitch-Hiker framework, undergoing necessary changes on the way. And, for old time's sake, I may call it, "Salmon of Doubt", I may call it -- well who knows!
The actual manuscript of the proposed novel is extremely short and only gives a glimpse of what The Salmon of Doubt would have been. It is composed of the best content out of several drafts (as were many of Adams' books). The book is set a few weeks after the events in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. A faxed summary reprinted before the text mentions travelling "through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos". Although both a rhinoceros and "The Way of the Nostril" (in the mysterious "DaveLand") are mentioned, no such nostril-based time travel occurs in the existent text.
The existing plot involves Dirk Gently, the detective protagonist of two earlier Adams novels, refusing to help find half a missing cat, receiving large amounts of money from an unknown client, and then flying to the United States. After refusing the case about the missing half of a cat, Dirk pays a visit to Kate Schechter (the second time any character other than Dirk reappeared in a Dirk Gently story). Dirk tells Kate that prior to the potential client, he had been so bored that he had started a habit of dialing his own phone number, and discovered that he'd answered his own call. This may have been foreshadowing some sort of time travel later on.
One of the interviews reprinted in the book reveals that Adams did not like the ending he wrote to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy", and realised that the ideas he had been working on for Salmon of Doubt might work better as a sixth book in that series. In the book, Dirk follows around a ginger haired actor; Ford Prefect is described as having ginger-coloured hair, and his disguise during his stay on Earth includes his being an out-of-work actor. It is possible that this is him, and forms a link between the two series, or that the text was in a state of metamorphosis from one to the other – but no one will ever know.
There are slight differences in varying editions of the book. The UK edition includes a foreword by Stephen Fry, and the US edition, instead, has an introduction by Christopher Cerf. The audiobook edition consists of 7 CDs, mostly read by Simon Jones, but also includes both of the aforementioned introductions, read by their respective authors, as well as the tributes written and read by Professor Richard Dawkins. US Paperback editions have yet another introduction, written by Terry Jones, and omit some material due to issues with copyright.
Douglas Adams and Geoffrey Perkins collaborated on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, first published in the United Kingdom and United States in 1985. A tenth anniversary edition was printed in 1995, and a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was printed in 2003.
A short story was also written, Young Zaphod Plays it Safe. This story first appeared in The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book a special large print compilation of different stories and pictures which raised money for the new (at the time) Comic Relief charity in the UK. It now appears in some of the omnibus editions of the trilogy, and in The Salmon of Doubt. It is almost, but not quite, entirely unrelated to the rest of the trilogy. There are two versions of this story, one of which is slightly more explicit in its already heavy-handed political commentary.
A novel, Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic written by Terry Jones, is based on Adams' computer game of the same name, which in turn is based on an idea from Life, the Universe and Everything.
Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, a character from Life, the Universe and Everything, also appears in a short story by Adams titled The Private Life of Genghis Khan which appears in some early editions of The Salmon of Doubt.
For some information on understanding the philosophy of the Guide, or Douglas Adams's influence on technology, see The Anthology at the End of the Universe, a series of essays edited by Glenn Yeffeth, published in 2005.
Michael Hanlon published The Science of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 2005. Topics include space tourism, parallel universes, instant translation devices and sentient computers.
Dirk Maggs, who adapted and dramatized the last three novels for radio, released a collection of their scripts in July 2005, with Maggs providing notes for each episode. This second radio script book is entitled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts: The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases. Douglas Adams gets the primary writer's credit (as he wrote the original novels), and there is a foreword by Simon Jones, introductions by Bruce Hyman and Dirk Maggs, and other introductory notes from other members of the cast.
This included being locked in a hotel suite with his editor for three weeks to ensure that So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish was completed.
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Most of the information on this page came from Wikipedia and the BBC .