It's a sad day, indeed. Especially since he was only a year older than me. All of a sudden, I feel my mortality a little more sharply. Then I bethink me of Bill Hunt ...
tsuwm asks what Douglas Adams had written recently. The answer is at best amorphous, and I refer you to:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author=Adams, Douglas/102-3433212-8346539as being the best demi-answer I can come up with.
With all the will in the world, I have to say I regard Douglas Adams as a one-hit wonder to some extent, as was Frank Herbert with the Dune series. HHGTTG was an
idea first and foremost, one of the few truly new ones to emerge in the genre for many years. And it caught the popular imagination through the radio series, the TV series and the books themselves.
Adams was one of the first authors to use science fiction as the basis for hilarious comedy about current issues, rather than the other way round. He dealt with it brilliantly. And it is very
British humour. Even in Zild, there are people who just don't get the joke.
And no one has done it better since.
The series (six books in the trilogy) are probably more widely known than any other similar type of book. Once when I was giving a reasonably important presentation to a client's management team and the video projector failed to start, I muttered "Must have been built by the Syrius Cybernetics Corporation." as I struggled with the damned thing. Nearly everyone in the room laughed - they all knew what I meant.
I don't think I can come up with a "favourite" passage, Wordcrazy. There are so many. But I guess if I had to pick one, it'd be the HHGTTG's explanation of the Babel Fish and logic, which goes:
'The Babel fish,' said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, 'is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterms you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
'Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
'The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
' "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
' "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
' "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
'Most theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.
'Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.'The world will be a poorer place without the creator of such household names as Zaphod Beeblebrox, Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Slartibartfast, the Improbability Drive, Marvin the Paranoid Android, the Encyclopaedia Galactica, and, of course, the
fictional Max Quordlepleen. May where he's gone be as funny as the worlds of his imagination!
