So Long, Douglas Adams, and Thanks for All the Fish

Douglas Adams held a grudge against his home planet. In the opening of his surreal parody of science fiction, the slim book for which he was best known and often pigeonholed, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” he destroys Earth. After pegging the place as “an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet” orbiting “a small unregarded yellow sun,” Adams has an alien construction crew demolish it to make room for an interstellar highway. Four sequels later, in his last work of fiction, 1992’s “Mostly Harmless,” he annihilates all possible Earths, in all parallel universes and dimensions. Just to be sure.

Adams, 49, who died suddenly May 11 of a heart attack in Santa Barbara, created a vast universe where his home was the butt of a giant, intergalactic joke. And maybe it should be: That one of our most original, daring and influential writers should die so young, and unknown to so many, is exactly the sort of cosmic injustice he’d send up in a chapter of wry, incisive satire. Last weekend, as the mainstream press canonized greatest-generation crooner Perry Como, Web sites run by teens and Gen-Xers lit up with elegies, confessions and outraged litanies about the death of an idol. This was big news. The largest literary influence on the modern geek mind--only George Lucas can compete--had passed. And what’s more, who aside from the faithful noticed?

Though he hadn’t published a novel in nearly a decade, though he wrote silly-looking books with tongue-wagging green planets on the cover, a key subculture of his planet--the geeks, those of us coding and writing and creating a new digital world--rightly recognized Adams as an intellectual leader, a living god of sorts. He wrote about Very Big Things with an easy wit and sharp eye and taught many of us, at an early age, that philosophy, science and sci-fi could be funny and, more important, meaningful. He simultaneously made sense and nonsense of Asimov, Camus and Einstein, spoofing the foundations of his own stories, exposing the fundamental absurdity of existence, destroying the planet on which he dwelt.

Throughout five “Hitchhiker’s” books, outlandish detective fiction and elaborate video games, Douglas Adams wove existential enormity into the fabric of comedy so deftly that many missed the point, that this good-natured British comic-turned-prophet was painfully aware of his--and our--ultimate place in the universe.

In 1978, Adams set out to meld humor and science fiction, something that few people, if any, had ever done. Having worked on both “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and British time-warp drama “Doctor Who,” Adams had the right credentials, and so created a radio serial on the BBC called “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The wacky, episodic sound-effects extravaganza caught on and launched a bestselling book series, a short-lived (and, frankly, awful) TV show and a popular sensation that lasted, in Britain and America, through much of the 1980s.

The “Hitchhiker’s” universe, his central but certainly not only work, was filled with concepts and characters now standard knowledge for the geeky hordes of this Earth, right up there with Luke, Leia and the Force. Chief among them: Arthur Dent, the earthling everyman who spends decades hitchhiking around space in his bathrobe; Zaphod Beeblebrox, two-headed president of the known universe; and Marvin the paranoid android, who’s so openly depressed that he’s abandoned by his friends on a planet of sentient mattresses.

Within the story, the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” is a portable encyclopedia of everything. Its voluminous entries describe how to make a powerful beverage called the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, how to fly (“Throw yourself at the ground and miss”), and where to find Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six. The entry on Earth says only this: “Harmless.”

The books are as much parody as celebration of 20th century sci-fi, a spoof of Asimov’s knowledge-is-life “Foundation” series, of “Star Trek’s” utopian socialism, and a deeper explanation of both. Philosophy and religion take hit after hit (the fictional “Guide” outsells philosophical blockbusters “Where God Went Wrong,” “Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes” and “Who Is This God Person Anyway?”), and life on Earth is mocked with loving vigor.

Adams countered his destructive streak with a childlike awe for the gee-whiz built into the cosmos. He constructed whimsical mind-benders such as a spaceship powered by “infinite improbability” and a primitive poet whose posthumous success is ruined by time-traveling correction-fluid salesmen. These are the mental twists that become geek glue, the elements of cultural literacy that now stick together so many of our brains. It’s as if those of us who traveled the galaxy with Arthur Dent share a childhood bond, as if we went to the same boarding school. To find a fellow “Hitchhiker” fan is to find a brother.

The greatest tragedy of his career might be the fact that Adams, when it came down to it, didn’t much like to write. He couldn’t hit a book deadline, even for a relatively thin volume based on a radio show he’d already plotted out, without being locked in a hotel room for a week. He spent most of the last decade searching for new, better forms of expression, launching a digital entertainment company and fiddling with gadgets, games and Web sites. He went on the lecture circuit, talking about trends in technology. He didn’t even write his last book, farming the text of “Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic,” “Hitchhiker’s” spinoff, to longtime friend and “Python” alum Terry Jones. And his last major project was either a realization or rehash of his first: a real-world version of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” an online community called H2G2.com, meant to catalog life, the universe and everything. But the practical new-economy, ready-for-wireless sheen of this online guide couldn’t hide the boyish wonder of Hey, we can do this? Why not. Adams had become a technogeek, too, lurking among us, a friendly face who still talked to his fans, who signed books with a smile and even returned the occasional e-mail.

During “Hitchhiker’s” heyday, the 1980s, a time when Adams was almost a household name, when the words printed on “The Guide’s” cover (DON’T PANIC) nearly became buzzwords, the book’s true nature was lost in the noise: It is a lasting work of imagination and heart, literature that changes lives and moves cultures. Adams’ writing is often imitated, but his particular vision and perspective are what transcended the pages. He often took his talent into new territories, too, scripting video games with all the complexity and power of a novel. Bureaucracy, a little-known text-adventure game Adams wrote in 1987, was an absurdist morality play about the mundane acts of life (cashing a check, filling out a change-of-address form) turned maddening. Here, as in his books, Adams skewered everything from the packaging of crackers to the belief that we really exist, opening doors on every level of the mind, letting in the idea that nothing isn’t funny, not God, not the absolute speed of light, not this planet.

The bestsellers faded from sight, but their characters and places are seeded so deeply into the consciousness of so many that they’re almost taken for granted. Of course agent Fox Mulder lives in apartment No. 42 on “The X-Files,” a reference to the nonsensical answer to “life, the universe and everything” found by the galaxy’s largest computer. Of course my iMac’s hard drive is named Zaphod Beeblebrox. The verses of alien Vogon poetry, the third worst in the universe (“Oh freddled gruntbuggly thy micturations are to me--”), are as familiar to many of us as the slythy toves of Lewis Caroll’s “Jabberwocky.” This stuff is simply part of the world.

Those of us who stuck with Adams after the boom saw that his writing, while more scarce, only improved. “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,” published in 1988, was a brilliant twist of Sherlock Holmes and quantum mechanics, the story of a private eye tuned into “the interconnectedness of all things” and the strange behavior of subatomic particles. The puzzles in this book still vex his fans, and I may never figure out exactly how the sofa got stuck in that stairwell--it has something to do with quarks and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like its sequel, “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul” and the last two “Hitchhiker’s” installments, it’s a complete and complex book, one without the episodic feel of a radio show jammed into prose, accomplished and often somber.

It’s in these final works that you’ll find some of Adams’ darkest moments, his most comic dynamite jobs: A robotic monk as a timesaving appliance that believes things so that you don’t have to. And God’s Final Message to His Creation, a 30-foot wall of flaming letters on a distant, desolate planet, spelling out yet another in a long line of jokes meant to obscure the obvious, the fact that Adams knew exactly where he stood in this silly world: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

It’s OK, Douglas. We forgive you.