Starship Titanic by Douglas Adams
Starship Titanic by Douglas Adams
Introduction
The idea for Starship Titanic first surfaced in the way that a lot of ideas originate, as a mere couple of sentences out of nowhere. Years ago it was just a little digression in Life, the Universe and Everything. I said that the Starship Titanic had, shortly into its maiden voyage, undergone Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. It’s just one of those bits that you put in while you are waiting for the plot to develop. You think, ‘Well, I’ll develop another quick plot while I’m about it.’ So it sat there as a couple of sentences in L, U & E and after a while I thought, ‘Well, I think there is a little bit more to this idea,’ and tossed it around for a while. At one point I even considered developing it as a novel in itself and then thought, no, it sounded too much like a good idea, and I’m always wary of those.
In the mid eighties I did a text-only computer game version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide with a company called Infocom. I had a lot of fun working on it. The player gets caught up in a virtual conversation with the machine. In writing such a thing you are trying to imagine and prepare for the reactions of a virtual audience.
There’s a lot you can do with text, as several thousand years of human culture can attest, but it seemed to me that what the computer enabled us to do was to reach back to the days before printing and recreate the old art of interactive storytelling. They didn’t call it interactive in those days, of course. They didn’t know of anything that wasn’t interactive, so they didn’t need a special name for it. When someone stood up and recounted a story, the audience responded. And the storyteller responded right back at them. It was the coming of print that took away the interactive element, and locked stories into rigid forms. It seemed to me that interactive computer-mediated storytelling might be able to combine some of the best of both forms. However, while the medium was still in its infancy, along came computer graphics and killed it off. Text may be a very rich medium, but it looks boring on the screen. It doesn’t flash and hop about and so it had to give way to things that did.
Early computer graphics, of course, were slow, crude and ugly. As a medium it didn’t interest me, so I thought I’d sit things out and wait till the graphics got good.
Ten years later they were good. But interaction had largely been reduced to pointing at things and clicking. I missed the conversations that text games used to engage you in. Maybe, I thought, it would be possible to combine both…
At about this time, I was involved with a group of friends in the setting up of a new digital media company, The Digital Village (
As we embarked on what grew into a huge project, the subject of novelization came up. Now, writing novels is what I normally do, and here was a peach because, in an amazing departure from my normal practice, I had developed a story which not only had a beginning but also a middle and (phenomenally enough) a recognizable end. However, the publishers insisted that the novel would have to come out at the same time as the game to enable them to sell it. (This struck me as odd since they had managed previously to sell books of mine without any attendant CD-ROM game at all, but this is publisher logic, and publishers are, as we all know, from the planet Zog.) I couldn’t do both simultaneously. I had to accept that I couldn’t do the novel except at the cost of not doing what I had set out to do in the first place, which was the game. So who could possibly write the novel?