The English author Douglas Adams was educated
at Cambridge University. His first serious brush
with science fiction came as a writer and script editor for the popular British television series Doctor
Who. For that program, he wrote three of the more
popular installments: “City of Death,” “The Invasion
of Time,” and “Pirate Planet,” and the never completed “Shada.” He is most famous as the author of
the Hitch-Hiker series—originally written as a
radio play, later turned into a novel and several sequels, and eventually brought to television by the
BBC. (A more elaborate film version is currently
under development.) The popularity of the series
in Europe has been rivaled only by that of Terry
Pratchett’s Discworld series, but both in Europe
and in the United States this popularity was less
prevalent among seasoned SF readers than it was
with the general public.
Although humor has always been a significant
element in science fiction, SF works that depend
primarily on humor generally have been regarded by
critics as of less merit than “serious” fiction. This
prejudice is deeply rooted, and for a long time
seemed completely unshakable. However, with the
publication of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(1979), it became much more difficult to dismiss
humorous SF out of hand. Nevertheless, it is not
altogether surprising that genre writers made no
significant effort to emulate Adams’s success. The
near uniqueness of Adams’s work is probably a contributing factor to its continued popularity.
The humor in the Hitch-Hiker series is
primarily slapstick, seasoned with mild satire,
wordplay, and absurd situations. Earth has been
destroyed in order to make room for an interstellar
highway, and Arthur Dent, apparently the lone
survivor, is rescued by an alien visitor who was
doing research for the latest edition of the travel
guide of the title. They subsequently encounter a
variety of increasingly bizarre characters including
an alien spaceship captain with a fondness for truly
awful verse, a two-headed space rogue who is also
president of the galaxy, Marvin the paranoid robot,
and even less-likely persons, human and otherwise.
Their travels are made easier by the use of babel
fish, a convenient animal that—when inserted in
one’s ear—functions as a universal translator.
Their misguided and frequently hilarious adventures lampoon a variety of targets, not the least of
which is the science fiction genre itself.
The story continues in The Restaurant at the
Edge of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and
Everything (1982), and So Long and Thanks for All
the Fish (1984), and concludes in Mostly Harmless
(1992). Adams also had added short embellishments in The More Than Complete Hitch-Hiker’s
Guide (1987) and was working on a further installment, incomplete at the time of his death and included in the posthumous collection The Salmon of
Doubt (2003). Arthur Dent pays a visit to the end
of time, then goes into the past to visit prehistoric
Earth, where he discovers that the human race was
actually created as an organic super computer. Still
on his quest to discover the true meaning of the
universe, he investigates the reasons why all of the
dolphins abandoned Earth and then helps his companion unravel the truth about his daughter. The
last two volumes never measured up to the first
three, however, depending too heavily on variations of jokes and situations already employed.
Adams began a new series in 1987 with Dirk
Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and continued it
in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988); but
this series never approached the success of his first
inspiration. The hero of these books, Dirk Gently,
is an atypical private detective, which allowed
Adams to spoof that genre as well as a host of fantastic fiction conventions. In the first volume, he is
hired to investigate a series of mysterious murders
that appear to have a supernatural explanation.
The sequel further distorts the boundaries among
genres when Dirk discovers that at least some of
the ancient gods were actually living entities and
not supernatural creatures, and that they have survived into the modern age. The Dirk Gently stories display a more restrained brand of humor than
Adams’s other fiction, and they seem at times
hastily written and uneven in quality.
Although the Hitch-Hiker books are almost
certain to remain popular for generations to come,
Adams has not proven to be an influential figure
within the genre. His success is almost anomalous.
He occupies a small but distinguished territory of
his own, but has not had any noticeable impact on
his fellow writers.