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Hitchhiker's Guide Turns 30
XaN-ASMoDi writes "Yesterday saw the 30th anniversary of the very first broadcast of Douglas Adam's seminal work, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", to mark this, Mark Vernon has written an article for the BBC News Magazine on the answer to The Question.
'It's 30 years since Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made its debut on BBC radio, but its most famous mystery is still waiting to be resolved...'"
But it's more than just geek humor.
Adams didn't just poke fun at his characters, he wrote with a real sympathy for them. Well, just look at the man, he was a person who cared about things like the extinction of bizarre species that the vast majority of humanity has never heard of, much less seen for themselves. Empathy. That's the secret of reaching the apex of funniness. When the reader in his imagination steps into a character's shoes, he takes the metaphorical pies in the face personally.
Adams wrote as if the way the universe is mattered.
He also wrote as if the way the universe is happens to be funny.
The fact that the way things are both matters and is funny isn't exactly funny itself. Or rather it's very funny, and it's very something else, which there isn't a perfect word for. To capture that something else, you'd have to write a bunch of books.
Which is just what Douglas Adams did.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I thought it was meant to show that the Golgafrinchans (sp?) did, in fact, mess up the program when they crashed on prehistoric earth, and Arthur was a last generation product of that bug...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
A much more important question: do you know where your towel is?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
...is that Adams was referring to the pivotal clause #42 of the official rules for the game Mornington Crescent (using the pre-Livingstone concordance, obviously, since Adams was writing in 1978) - which also explains the significance of Fenchurch Street Station in the later books. Regular listeners to BBC Radio 4 (on which the original radio versions of HHGTTG were broadcast) will immediately grasp how following this philosophy allows the follower to confidently navigate the complexities and contradictions of life - but slashdotters from the USA and elsewhere may need to look it up.
Of course, it could be that Adams was merely satirising humanity's strange obsession with seeking simplistic answers without actually understanding the question - but that seems unlikely considering the masses of evidence for a deeper numerological significance.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Well, I've often reflected that only an atheist could be as funny as Douglas Adams, which in a sense makes his books spiritual.
It's not that atheists are automatically funny, quite the opposite. Most are drearily dull as any priest. If you want to be a bore, be deeply and earnestly concerned that other people might commit, speak, or think an error.
For Adams, life consists of a series of wrong turns that lead you to places you never intended to be. In that he's not too far from the most interesting religious thinkers; the Buddha once compared his teaching to a raft you might throw together to cross a river. Once you're over, you have no use for it, so you throw it away. In Adams books, you might say the characters are constantly struggling with the question of "why am I here?" because they're never quite where they expected to go.
Given the perverse randomness of the universe, it's rather quixotic to be obsessed with the errors of thought other people make. Somehow, it all feels like a big mistake, at least if you're paying attention.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.