

What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have? - tomstuart
http://www.douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1546,2

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cobralibre
I like D.A.'s answer, but to be fair, there are certain contexts in which
questions of this sort are not assumed trivial. I'm thinking specifically of
Joyce's _Ulysses_ ; there's every indication that the author thought through
every last detail of his fictional Dublin. The book demands that the reader
negotiate her way through a thicket of of raw _facts_ , and it has produced
mountains of scholarship on seeming trifles, not all of it in the service of
deep profundity, but some it quite startling in its cleverness and insight.

If my experience of growing up with _Star Wars_ and reading about fans'
notions of canonicity is any indicator, I'd expect that readers of SF and
fantasy often have similar expectations of total world-building on the
author's part, for better or for worse. There are thousands of "facts" which
_Star Wars_ fans "know" about the _Star Wars_ universe, though that universe
is not real, and none of those facts appear in the movies. (Sometimes those
"facts" sprang into being to suit Kenner's needs.) Which is to say that,
contra Adams, fictional worlds -- though not _real_ \-- often do have a sort
of reality that extends beyond the author's primary text.

(The difference between my _Star Wars_ example and _Ulysses_ , though, is that
the _Ulysses_ "facts" are literally _in_ the text or are inferred from it.)

~~~
cobralibre
Having said that, D.A.'s answer is clearly in the spirit of his work. One of
the fundamental points of the whole _HHGTTG_ franchise is that asking
questions which plainly have no objective answers will always yield
absurdities.

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RyanMcGreal
A better answer: "What kind of Apple Mac do you imagine that Arthur had when
you read the book? That's the kind he had."

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AndrewDucker
The thing is, some authors _do_ imagine the world in more detail. Some of them
are very visual, and when they're writing about Arthur Dent at his computer
they're imagining it in enough detail that they could tell you the model that
was in their head at the time.

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gaius
It was an SE/30. By sheer coincidence, I have one too!

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mkramlich
He had the Earth computer.

Or perhaps it was the other way around.

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zandorg
Simple. He had a Lisa.

