More than anything, Douglas Adams made us laugh

 

The Infinitely Improbable World of Douglas Adams

by Del Miller

May 17, 2001

 

I don't feel much like writing an obituary for Douglas Adams. I'm afraid that the attempt would just make me terribly sad, and I'd just as soon go on believing that he was still about and conjuring his wonderful and wacky worlds. And anyway, what purpose would be served with a grey and maudlin dirge for a man whose work spread such joy and wonder across this mostly harmless planet? For Douglas Adams achieved a goal that few writers can ever hope to achieve; he invented a world that will live on in the hearts and minds of the millions who read his books and listen to his radio plays. What he wrote was something very special, the kind of work that a reader never forgets and that somehow strikes a bond between all that have read his books. Yes, I think it would be better to talk here about that singular achievement and leave alone the silly, carbon-based notion of earthly mortality.

 

Everyone remembers discovering The Hitchhiker's Guide

Twenty years ago a long-lost friend dropped by to see me. We reminisced at a mad, breathless pace and caught up on the years since we'd last met. We told our tales in the shorthand of old friends, our roots so deep that detail wasn't necessary to understand all that really mattered. But then he said something to me about a babel fish. I had no idea of what a babel fish might be, which stunned him. He couldn't believe that I had not read, much less even heard of a book, by a man named Adams, called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And so he told me the story.

For two solid hours, he spun the most convoluted and marvelous story, apparently with total recall, regarding the adventures of Earthman Arthur Dent and galactic hitchhiker Ford Prefect, following the destruction of earth and of their unwitting rescue by the Vogon Constructor Fleet. He described the odd biology of the babel fish which translated any and all galactic tongues into the native language of any individual who had slipped the fish into his ear. He explained how Arthur and Ford were thrown from a Vogon airlock into deep space only to be immediately and most improbably rescued by the Spaceship Heart of Gold, powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive, fueled by a cup of tea and piloted by two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Galaxy, starship thief and, as it just happened, Ford's cousin. Zaphod was accompanied by the lovely Trillian, recently from the planet Damogran, who also by the scarcest of coincidence had jilted Arthur at a London party a few weeks earlier.

I also learned of Marvin the paranoid android and of Pan Galactic Gargleblasters and Eddies in the space-time continuum. I found that the destruction of Earth was an administrative error that interrupted a four-billion year long research project by hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings which looked like small white mice, and who aimed to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and, well...Everything. And then there was...oh my, there is just too much to tell.

I was so enthralled that I immediately trotted to the nearest bookstore and bought a copy of my own, fearing as I did so that having already heard the the entire story would spoil the book.

 

Don't Panic

I needn't have worried; I laughed and giggled and gaped as I read it in a single sitting and immediately marched out to find the sequels, all of which were fully as good as the first. I've lost count of the number of times I've reread them, but they are a delight every single time.

Douglas Adams' prose is a roller coaster of twisted subtlety and unexpected understatement so unique that complete strangers often recognize each other as fans by sharing a simple phrase that only Douglas Adams could coin. His plotlines looped giddily from one bizzare scene to the next, each one bound to return in a plotline of ever increasing complexity. It's terribly difficult to write both wacky and well. Goofball plots and absurd characterizations can easily distance the story from an earthbound reader and it can cheapen the best of concepts into a clownish and trivial farce. Somehow though, Douglas Adams made the ludicrous believable, the alien familiar, and even his strangest characters quite real. It was pure genius, really.

The origin of the starship Heart of Gold's Infinite Improbability Drive was based upon an accident in a physics lab, involving a cup of hot tea, that found immediate application as a scientist's parlour trick for removing a victim's underpants, based on the sheer improbability that all of the atoms in said underpants might suddenly find themselve an armslength to the north. If one could compute the exact improbability of such event, then it could be made to happen. And if underpants could be made to rematerialize a couple of feet away, then a starship could find itself at any point in the universe as well.

A side effect of all this improbable physics was the generation of an improbability field that caused the infinitely improbable to occur every time it was used. This was Adam's literary license to make the most absurd things occur and to be perfectly reasonable at the same time. He used this sort of device so well, that the bizarre goings on in H2G2 were smushed into the reader's credulity like soapy water into a sponge. This artistic slight of hand was described in terms that are frighteningly close to descriptions of today's quantum computing experiments. One researcher recently claimed that the quantum computer of tomorrow might operate on "the random quantum states found in a cup of hot coffee." Small wonder that Adam's clever device sounded so reasonable.

 

Forty-Two

For despite the improbable origin, Douglas Adams' world was never that far from our own. To this day I cannot board one of those obnoxious, talking, airport trams, nor hear my fax machine babbling on about the progress of my transmission without reflecting upon the Genuine People Personalities of the supremely annoying robots from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Marvin the paranoid android is merely an extrapolation of society's venal tendency to animate the inanimate, and thus he becomes an entirely believable character.

No matter how absurd the situations that Adam's dreamed up, we always see ourselves and our fellow creatures in the reflection. When a human population is shipwrecked on an alien planet, they must form a new society and the first decision is to make tree leaves the official currency. The immediate result is the defoliation of the entire planet in a blaze of greed, resulting in hyperinflation and an economic depression. This patent foolishness is absurd enough for a laugh, but having just observed the rise and fall of the dot.com economy, I wonder if Wall Street might not be driven by some macro-economic improbability drive.

And what could be more human than to move heaven and earth for the answers to life, the universe and every thing, only to find that we hadn't really asked the right question in the first place? The Hitchhiker's Guide is, at the end of the day, a morality play about the human condition, couched in such outrageous hilarity that it becomes palatable and non-threatening. Douglas Adams held up the funhouse mirror to all of us and we just laughed at those funny looking people - until we looked closer.

 

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water."

But more than anything, Douglas Adams made us laugh. He pulled you out of this crazy, improbable, unfunny, earthbound world and plopped you down into his crazy, improbable, funny one, and when you turned the last page you found yourself simply grateful that he had written it. His stories were more than just good reading, they were simply his gifts to us - just to make us smile. There's a word for someone who gives you a gift like that - he's called a friend.

And that is why we will miss him.

Copyright 2001, Del Miller. All rights reserved.

Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com

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