
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions - sohkamyung
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02969-8
======
mattkevan
Adams' thoughts on computers and technology are gold. He was also the first
person in the UK to buy an Apple Mac, Stephen Fry being a close second.

"I didn't really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the
computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course – the computer
industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."

"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn
numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we
discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide
Web, we've realised it's a brochure."

"A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in
front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the
universe and move bits of it about."

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1\. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and
is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2\. Anything that's
invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and
revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3\. Anything invented
after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

"I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to
perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten
seconds to do by hand."

~~~
woopwoop
From Dirk Gently:

“What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way
is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in
your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have
to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the
essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into
little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly
learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the
pupil. Isn’t that true?”

~~~
rcarmo
I keep waiting for someone to implement Anthem as an Excel plugin.

------
bmmayer1
"Technology," Adams once said, "is a word that describes something that
doesn’t work yet."

This could not be more true. When was the last time you referred to a teapot
or a bicycle as "technology"? Even Google wouldn't be called "technology"
anymore by most people who use it -- it's just Google, and it just works.

~~~
chunkyslink
Also “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Salmon of Doubt

~~~
HONEST_ANNIE
Adams was extreme procrastinator.

He could not self-manage his work once he had wealth and had no need to write
for living. Once his editor rented cheap hotel room, removed all distractions
and hovered over him until the book was done. Adams worked with Salmon of
Doubt 10 years and didn't even manage the first draft.

~~~
sirn
My favorite Douglas Adams' procrastination story is when he was offered
£50,000 to write Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy calendar. He then
procrastinate it until the deal fallen through and got paid £25,000 for doing
nothing.[1]

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsham_Court#Notable_guests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsham_Court#Notable_guests)

------
acheron
One of my favorite quotes ever:

 _For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more
intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New
York, wars, and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about
in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always
believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the
same reasons._

~~~
mclightning
Unpopular opinion: I haven't been able to get into the whole hype about this
book.

This quote is perfect example of my frustration actually. Maybe I am OCD or
something, I dont know. I do not see the humor or anything profound with it.
Except it sounds a bit quirky.

Is it suppose to profoundly compare pure happiness versus struggle for
progress?

...or take the whole babel fish thing; Why a fish for translation?

ps: I dont mean to target your favorite quote. It was just perfect example :D
Sorry to take out my frustration on your comment.

~~~
chrisweekly
I hear you; Douglas Adams (like Monty Python) isn't for everyone. But, before
you give up on his works forever, I highly recommend listening to* just the
first chapter of his last book -- The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. It's
possibly the funniest thing I've ever listened to, and I say that as someone
who read but never went bonkers over his paperbacks as a young reader.

*"listen" vs read, bc he narrates the audiobook himself, and it's pitch-perfect. Also, Audible lets me give away one free audiobook to any non-subscriber, so if you're willing to provide a non-audible-associated email address I'd be happy to send it to you gratis.

~~~
marzell
I find this whole scenario kinda interesting - I don't expect to be able to
explain why anything from Douglas Adams should appeal to someone... they can
only read it and see if it clicks for them. It definitely clicks for me.

On the other hand, I feel that Terry Pratchet has a similar sense of humor.
However, I got all the way through The Colour Of Magic, giving it an honest
shot, and deciding that it just wasn't for me. I find his humor to miss the
mark, and be more obnoxious than funny. I can't quite put my finger on why I
have such a polar reaction to two authors with a seemingly similar sense of
humor. I guess maybe I find Pratchett to be more self-indulgent (not that
Adams isn't!) while Adams adds a lot of witty perspective and his observations
within his sci-fi universe are always actually observations about our
universe.

~~~
jfengel
The Colour of Magic is probably not the best place to start. He hadn't yet hit
whatever it is that makes Discworld click for people.

There is considerable debate about the best order in which to read
Discworld[1]. I know a lot of people who recommend Guards! Guards! as a good
place to start, as being good in itself and the beginning of a very popular
story arc. (Discworld has a number of running plots, which sometimes interact
but can be read independently.)

So if you didn't care for Colour of Magic, it might be worth the effort to
pick up one of the later books, after he'd worked out his style and
worldbuilding. There's still no guarantee it'll work for you, but you won't
really know if you start at the chronological beginning.

I'll note that I myself am agnostic on where to start. I like Pratchett
(enough to have read all of Discworld) but do not love his work the way many
people do.

[1] [https://www.discworldemporium.com/content/6-discworld-
readin...](https://www.discworldemporium.com/content/6-discworld-reading-
order)

------
radiowave
I don't remember specifically what I was doing, but it was just a few days ago
that _something_ prompted me to recall these passages, describing the products
of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation:

"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the
sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."

"In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of
the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design
flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

------
bitmage
The internet is a kind of Babel fish, letting people from different cultures
easily interact. Douglas' comment on the outcome seems sadly prescient:

"Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to
communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and
bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

~~~
bmmayer1
That's absurd. There have been fewer wars and conflicts and violence in the
age of the internet than at any other time. It's possible the internet makes
information of such tragedies more readily accessible which is why the world
may _seem_ more dangerous, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The
interconnected world has made us less bloody, not more.[1]

[1][https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-
violence/#/title-s...](https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-
violence/#/title-slide)

~~~
mattkevan
WhatsApp being used to orchestrate ethnic cleansing in Mynanmar [0], or
inciting lynchings in India [1] would be two recent examples of tools that
remove barriers to communication having unexpected and tragic side effects.

[0] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xbbqg/facebook-hired-
an-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xbbqg/facebook-hired-an-outside-
group-to-investigate-its-role-in-myanmar-ethnic-cleansing)

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/20/whatsapp-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/20/whatsapp-
to-limit-message-forwarding-after-india-mob-lynchings)

------
carapace
“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three
distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and
Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For
instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?'
the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question
'Where shall we have lunch?”

~~~
frood42
“The history of warfare is similarly subdivided, although here the phases are
Retribution, Anticipation, and Diplomacy. Thus:

 _Retribution_ : I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother.

 _Anticipation_ : I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother.

 _Diplomacy_ : I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext
that your brother did it.”

------
sebastianconcpt
_As Adams noted: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers
exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly
disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”_

~~~
HONEST_ANNIE
I find this theory compelling.

Bob the Hacker was running artificial life simulation where the physics was
classical Newtonian, space Euclidean and only the surface of the Earth was
accurately simulated. When humanity developed better instruments and theories,
Bob had to limit the maximum achievable speed so he invented general and
special relativity. The she invented quantum mechanics to smooth over
aliasing, jitter and other simulation artifacts that humans would eventually
recognize.

Unless he keeps tweaking the simulation humanity will eventually realize that
the Universe is a kludge.

~~~
Japhy_Ryder
> Bob the Hacker

> she

So Bob is a girl?

~~~
HONEST_ANNIE
Bob belongs to a race that turns masculine when called with a name as it
sounds when you read it left to right and feminine when you read it from right
to left.

------
wodenokoto
In "Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency", Douglas Adam describes a
camcorder as a device for watching all the television that humans don't have
time to watch.

~~~
whoopdedo
I've always preferred Dirk Gently to Hitchhiker's, likely because it speaks to
me more personally as a programmer.

    
    
        > "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is
        > to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own
        > mind ... By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that
        > even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about
        > it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"
        > "It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere
        > on the table, "without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy."
    

Adams was clearly inspired by his time working on the computer game. All of
his books have an autobiographical sense to them. Hitchhiker's and Restaurant
had a lot of lying in muddy fields. The books written after he was published
include more eating in fancy Greek bistros.

~~~
kipchak
I think in the forward to my copy of the series he tells a story about lying
in a muddy field stargazing when he comes up with the idea for the
hitchhiker's guide and promptly dozing off and forgetting about it for the
next 10 years.

------
DanGPhoton
I first read these books in high school and loved the zany humor. The deeper
satire took a bit longer for me to appreciate - especially the "Restaurant at
the End of the Universe" where all the rich and famous would gather to watch
the Universe implode as a form of entertainment. DA was a secular prophet.

------
bananicorn
Let me just leave one of my favourite talks given by Douglas adams here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc)

------
Tepix
Elon Musk is also a huge fan of Douglas Adams, as he mentioned again in his
latest interview with Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg)

------
russellbeattie
I'm a little late to this thread, but given Adams is my favorite author and
one who I've thought quite a lot about over the past 40 years, here's some
observations:

The core theme to all his books is infinity. Adams instinctively understood
what an infinite universe would mean, and used it liberally as a plot device
that incorporated deus-ex-machina into the story itself. The original H2G2
story explored the fact that probabilities mean nothing when infinity comes
into play, and his last examined an infinite multiverse in which "luck" is
taken to its logical extreme, where changing the future means manipulating the
various divergent paths of the past so that just the right thing happens at
the right time and place in the present.

His talent was in following ideas to their absurd conclusions. The original
series was supposed to be a bunch of different vignettes in which the Earth
was destroyed at the end of each. But after writing the first, he thought,
"What comes next?", and continued to flesh out the rest of story. This is a
fundamental Adams hallmark, and the part of his writing I love most.

Douglas was incredibly prescient, but not in an Arthur C. Clarke sort of way.
He was a gadget freak without doubt, but he didn't really understand
technology at a deep level. What he did was to take what was already common
knowledge - from quantum mechanics to evolution to computers - and
extrapolated their concepts to their logical conclusions. If you were to have
a computerized "book", then it would need to be such and such a size, and look
and sound like so, and get regular updates over an pervasive wireless network,
etc. It just made sense, and history has born him out. What's amazing is that
he did this with a variety topics including Artificial Intelligence, and it
looks like his thoughts are still incredibly applicable almost 20 years after
his death.

It's sad that as times goes by, Adams work will eventually be shelved and as
irrelevant as Jules Verne. Even today, the Guide is so like a modern
smartphone, it doesn't feel to new readers as if there's anything novel or
futuristic about it (like it was in 1978), which is too bad. But I guess
that's the fate of anyone who writes stories incorporating technology.

------
severine
The audio version is in archive.org:

[https://archive.org/details/1.TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy...](https://archive.org/details/1.TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxyVinylAlbum)

------
rizwank
For those like me who miss Adams - any other writings that blend the same
level of intelligence, wordplay, and whimsy?

“Good Omens” is the closest I’ve found.

~~~
bcbrown
Italo Calvino isn't an exact match, but you might want to try out The
Nonexistent Knight or The Cloven Viscount to see if it's close enough.

------
simonebrunozzi
Obligatory mention of one of his most wonderful talks [0]: "Parrots, the
Universe, and everything"

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc)

------
butterfi
I went to a play the other day that was directed by Mark Wing-Davy and I spent
the entire time wondering if Zaphod was in the house.

------
osullivj
42

~~~
moosterv
101010 in binary... (I owe, I owe, I owe)

~~~
mar77i
Apparently DA didn't think anything of the value of the number and just
determined "42 will do"...

~~~
rusk
I believe it was _”pick a number, any number”_ which was disclosed by Marvin
quite early on, apparently as an easter egg. I read something explaining this
somewhere ... don’t have the link to hand ...

------
radicalbyte
The whole character of Zaphod Beeblebrox must have been inspired by historical
populists. He is Trump, he is Johnson, he is Berlusconi.

~~~
harry8
Reagan was president. This was treated with far more incredulity at the time
than the election of Trump outside the US. It was widely believed at the time
across the political spectrum that Regan was a teleprompt reading puppet. Was
he? Different question. Tory voters and labour-ites in the uk basically
believed it with complete astonishment.

The galactic president is just a decoy, the real man is elsewhere worried
about his cats. This is part of the story and characterisation that needs to
be put into that context. Zaphod had no policies at all. Hardly a populist
bogeyman.

~~~
simonh
I think part of it is that us Brits have a hard time getting our head round
the idea of a president, or elected head of state, on the basis that over here
the role of head of state gets all the pomp and ceremony but behind all that
is really a nothing job of only ceremonial importance. The actual work is done
by a lowly commoner MP that makes all the real decisions.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
The president of the US is roughly a 1770s British monarch, with broadly
similar powers to George III, except with election and limits on length of
service.

Since when, we've neutered the powers of our head of state, the US has
strengthened theirs.

