I met Douglas near the end, at MacWorld SF 2000. He was charming, enormous (though, not in a "fat guy" way, much more in a "way over 6 foot tall" way.) He truly was a monument of a human being. He was vastly more interested in experimenting with a USB microscope camera he'd become associated with than being all "Hey I'm famous," a trait I took to insinuate great humility and confidence. I was almost paralyzed by my inability to say "You, sir, built me from a puddle of bullied goo into a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic." Instead, I think I just talked about the microscope. He was amazing.
>>> "You, sir, built me from a puddle of bullied goo into a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic."
That’s a fantastic eulogy and something for us all to aim for. Thank you for expressing something I did not know had also happened to me
Oddly enough, you also just did that, for me. I did not realise that which happened to you also happened to me, until I saw you thanking this fellow, for same.
(And "bullied goo" what a great concept. Please, write a book!)
My favorite book is Douglas Adams’ Last Chance to See. He talks about it here [0] and IIRC he says it was his favorite book to write. Adams took a dark subject - endangered animals and our role in their extinction - and told a story that’s equally hilarious and hopeful.
It’s absolutely one of my favourite books too. His style of humour was a perfect dichotomy of reverent/irreverent that made him the perfect author for a book like this. Beautiful appreciation of the world meets shake-you-awake, perspective-bending humour.
That was wrenching to read, but it tracks with what I inferred from the books themselves. I am so sorry that Hitchhikers became such a thorn in his side. It was so brilliant and he just didn't want to do any more, and nothing else really worked.
He seemed very unhappy. I'm weirdly glad that the end wasn't a death of despair, just a weird stupid awful freak accident. So I'll choose to believe what the article says.
It's hard to be compassionate and cynical at the same time. Your heart tells you that you want things to work out for the best so badly. You feel a little of all the suffering in the world around you. But you also know the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is going to make record profits this year.
Yes, that is the world we are living in. In theory highly rational and the best of all the possible world with the best possible system. And in reality, it is a world of lies and deception. And there are monsters, but they are not big, but rather set an example of the "Banality of Evil". People casually murdering, by filling out forms in their office desks.
And the heros who rise and claim to fight all that? They are usually even worse, when you look closely.
What part do you think is highly rational in theory? The concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands? The destruction of the renewable natural abundance?
And what's "best possible" supposed to mean? That we have reached the absolute highest form of social organisation? Even if we lived in something much closer to a utopia this would be hard to defend scientifically.
Oof. That hits me a little more personally than you might expect. I suppose that's true of a lot of people.
But yeah I myself am having a lot of trouble balancing compassion with a deep anger that I can't help. The cynicism is my attempt to shield myself and it's not working so great either.
The brazenness - and visibility - of the hypocrisy and callousness of our leaders has eroded public trust. We no longer have any paragons, really. We just have people who we think aren't quite as bad as the alternative. To use the events of today as an example, everyone knows the people running CrowdStrike are going to continue being fabulously rich, and might not even lose their jobs. Even if, by some miracle, CrowdStrike gets sued out of existence, they'll walk away and still be multimillionaries.
And when this seems so universal, so inevitable, in the people running the world (whether that be in business, politics, or whatever else), you start to wonder if it's even possible to do otherwise.
One of the first things I wrote down when I founded my company was, quote, "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern." I don't know what the chances that that doomed my company on day 1 were, but they certainly are not zero. I am genuinely not sure it's possible to succeed in the world as it is without being a lying, cheating bastard to some degree. And I'm not the only one.
Have you ever tried just going down a grocery-store aisle and counting every snake oil claim within your line of sight [1]? It's astounding. I looked on the coffee table my laptop is sitting on right now, and sure enough I've got a box of what are effectively Twizzlers claiming to be a health food because the sugar came from apple juice instead of being distilled first. Every room in my house is full of lies. It's desensitizing.
"Quiet quitting" provides a workplace example of what this does to a culture. In a sense, intentionally not doing the work you're being paid to do is a crappy, somewhat immoral thing to do. It's certainly not a sign of good character, at least in my book. But people do it because they perceive (correctly) that their employer would screw them given the slightest chance. The local incentives of each side to be adversarial have fallen into a defect-defect equilibrium (see [2]) that is detrimental to both parties. Both sides are so used to being exploited that they defensively and preemptively spend tons of energy defending themselves against it and failing to find common ground in the many areas that aren't zero-sum. Worse, they even feel bad about things that are positive-value to themselves but might be used against them! [3]
And once you're in that kind of a culture, it's so hard to argue for anything constructive. How can you believe in anything when the representatives, the would-be paragons, of every moral value you'd like to promote are flaunting ignoring them, when so many values are used as paper-thin excuses to hurt people day in and day out?
That's true almost whatever you believe! Are you big on the traditional family? You're probably voting for the cheated-on-his-wife-with-a-porn-star guy. Did you favor invasive pandemic measures in California? You're probably voting for the guy who had a party while you were staying home. Like organized labor? You're voting for the guy who shut down a strike on critical infrastructure. Like law and order? You're voting for a felon. Almost everyone knows this, and for some years now, we've gone "ugh, but have you seen the other guy?". (This isn't a criticism - I do this too.)
But the optimistic take, to quote MLK for a second, is that we might be climbing out of one local minimum into another:
> [Protest] seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored...there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal...the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
> ...How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer?...We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it.
(MLK is, of course, talking about a different issue here. But the observation is valid to others.)
It's only in this moment where we're all so disgusted, where we're all in a world so "crisis-packed", that we act. For better or worse, the people of Earth are wildly destabilizing their societies, whether that's the right in the US or the left in Latin America or protestors in Shanghai. We're "mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore," and while that's unpredictable, it does at least offer the opportunity for the establishment of new, more legitimate institutions built on the disgust of those who make them.
In a more game-theoretic sense, my mental model is that the public and the elite are playing an iterated Ultimatum Game [4]. The elite holds the cards and makes the decisions, but the public can always flip the table over and screw everyone if they feel they're getting a short enough end of the stick. And it's at moments like this, when the public begins to pose a credible threat, that the elite begin to listen - or get replaced by a new elite that will, which is essentially my goal in life.
> "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern."
I try to effectively add something like: be honest, be open, be compassionate. It seems obvious. But apparently it isn’t, as we get to hear from those we work with, and their experience in other jobs.
I wanted to be more specific than that. A good principle should lay out, clearly, what you will NOT do.
I'm sure I could argue that, say, failing to mention that one of our candidates did poorly on a coding problem could be characterized as "not evil". The company I'm talking to will probably over-weight that observation, they might think themselves out of an otherwise-desirable hire, and the candidate might lose an opportunity! Surely it's right to just tell this one little white lie...
The reason for the phrasing I used is to make it clear that no, we don't do that. And this comes up all the time. I find myself reminding myself of that principle almost daily when those little temptations to just skew things just a little bit pop up.
> The brazenness - and visibility - of the hypocrisy and callousness of our leaders has eroded public trust.
I think this is overly cynical. There are, I think still plenty of politicians who get into politics to make things better for people, I really do. But they are faced with complex, hard-to-fix issues where there is nuance and compromise needed, and people get really pissed off about the nuance and compromise
In a lot of ways, that's worse. If it were just the politicians, we could vote them out.
We can't vote out the people. The people are angry, at each other, in ways disproportionate to the nuance and compromise. It becomes self-reinforcing.
I'll be blunt that I think some people are more at fault than others. But I don't know how to stop that.
I wish it were just the politicians, or even just the media. Then there would be things that I could do. But when the people hate each other -- and I genuinely believe they do -- I can't think of any options.
I think the evidence is that, on the whole (since we’re broadly referring to “people” and obviously there is tremendous diversity contained within), people do not hate each other, they hate the “other” team (whatever that may be). We’re wired for in/out group think to such a high degree that it’s incredibly easy to dial in division and purpose it to some end.
Two individuals in a room are more likely to find common ground than hate until you bring up the right sport they happen to be on opposing teams for.
> There are, I think still plenty of politicians who get into politics to make things better for people, I really do.
Most people aren't ogres in their own story, but that doesn't make them not hypocritical or callous. I've been a jerk many times to people I was in a position of power over in ways that felt justified and correct to me at the time but weren't either of those things in retrospect. The fact that people find justifications that let them sleep at night doesn't mean they're not screwing people over.
> and people get really pissed off about the nuance and compromise
I don't think it's quite so simple as "people don't accept nuance". That is true, especially in the era in which we live, but it isn't the whole story. Because that was true a generation or two ago, too - it might have even been more true then than it is now.
I, and as far as I can tell a large proportion of other people, don't have a problem with nuance and compromise in principle. We're just tired of seeing nuance and compromise used as an excuse exactly when they're convenient and only in ways that favor slowing down or preventing solutions (and not in ways that might ever limit the unlimited pursuit of power and wealth). Selective application of a principle is no principle at all.
As a concrete example, you've probably seen people do this with scientific studies. Study supports their view? Well, obviously it's true! Study supports the opposing point of view? Well, you have to remember it's just one study and bias is possible and there are numerous methodological issues so we shouldn't adjust to much from a small number of data points and hey there's this alternative explanation I just thought of it's probably that and...
Or look at your standard industrial or engineering postmortem. I'm sure whatever developer introduced that CrowdStrike bug is not going to have a job in a week, because pressure from your boss is no excuse to ship something broken, you have to stand up and do what's right! But is the same going to happen to the leadership? Is anyone going to say "being distant from the problem and operating in the fog of war that comes with leadership is no excuse to run a bad ship"? No, they aren't, and everyone knows it. The elite gets to profit off of their lack of concern for building something safe, and be insulated from the consequences when it fails.
That's not being nuanced, that's pretending (perhaps even to yourself) to be nuanced as a rhetorical tool. In isolation, there's no good way to distinguish the two, so once this tactic becomes sufficiently widespread, distrust for nuance is a reasonable response.
I didn't get unhappy from the article, but perhaps artistically unfulfilled. What else compels someone to keep creating their art though? I will say, I considered myself a big fan of Adams as a kid, and still do (I was literally telling a colleague today that he was a wonderful narrator of his audiobooks - something actually a bit unusual amongst authors), but I was too young (most of his work predates me) to follow the ups and downs of his career as it happened, and so this article was enlightening.
When they set about making a new radio series after his death, they used his narration of Agrajag as the voice of the character. It was spooky and beautiful hearing him participate in his radio play after his death.
Or Arthur Conan Doyle who was so fed up with writing Sherlock Holmes stories that he killed the character off (but had to undo that later when it turned out the public wasn't that interested in his non-Holmes stories).
One has the distinct impression that he never could see clearly that he needed a strong business associate in most of his projects. He stumbled into vaguely defined ventures finely appointed with Californian marketing bloviation: "it could be a little hard to figure out what The Digital Village was really supposed to be. [...] 'We’re producing CD-ROMs and other digital and online projects, but we’re also committed to working in traditional forms of media.'”
Unfortunately, evaluating a good business partner is nearly as hard as doing it yourself. As in so many domains, if you're not an expert, you can't tell who actually is. Especially when that domain is genuinely difficult and even skilled people often fail.
I met him briefly at SIGGRAPH after an IRC chat at the Softimage booth (This was the year of the Starship Titanic game). He was surprised and amused that one of the few people who showed up for the chat was actually just downstairs. I have to confess that I could have spread the word about the chat a bit further but it was nice to have a more intimate setting. Anyways I told him that HHGTTG was my new testament and he asked the obvious question to which the answer was the Monty Python TV script book. He laughed at this which meant so much to me because he still makes me laugh every day. <3
I really like this series, too. If you haven't tried them, I'd suggest Glen Cook's
"Garrett, P.I." series. He's a PI in a fantasy world. It's lighter in tone than his "Black Company" books. Kind of a mashup of Adams, Pratchett, and Raymond Chandler.
even 2 books is good. But Tchaikovsky is potentially one of the most prolific writers i've ever come across so I wouldn't worry about that too much. I think he's released 6 books in the last 12-18 months
I am truly not mad at either of those guys. At the end of the day they gotta live their lives the way they see fit. But it is a real bummer that we are unlikely to see the end of either series. And unfortunately for up-and-coming authors, it makes me very leery of picking up any unfinished series again.
I had a working meeting at a Cisco networkers event down the Gold coast. We had a break and somebody said "are you coming to the keynote" and I said "nah, it'll be boring as usual"
They looked at me oddly and went. Then an hour later over lunch I found out who the keynote speaker had been: it wasn't in the working meeting invitation I had...
Adams died the next year. I hope he got to use the honorarium to fund something in conservation, I'm told it was massive.
To be fair, I work in software, so I too am familiar with the whoosh of a deadline as it passes by, unmet.
Although I don’t find it as hard as Douglas did with his writing, but then that level isn’t needed for most software projects.
I was about to say that software, unlike creative writing, can be changed after publishing. But Douglas did that for Hitch Hikers - the radio script, books, and TV show are fairly different stories!
Sometimes I like to imagine the extremely unlikely universe in which Douglas Adams decided to see what would happen if he wrote a Hitch-Hiker's Guide sequel that took place in the same universe, but concerned the humorous misadventures of new characters, who had drives and motivations that were more compatible with actually moving a story forwards than folks like Arthur or Zaphod or Ford who would much rather slouch off to find a nice cup of tea or a party than get involved in saving the world. And then discovered that it was a lot easier, and actually fun, to write stories about characters like that, and went on to write two or three dozen more loosely-connected books of SF-flavored comedy.
Given that every story about the man emphasizes how hard it was to get any writing out of him, this is a universe that could probably only exist as a side-effect of an Infinite Improbability Drive, but it's still fun to imagine. And to wonder if it would have started getting weirdly poignant and serious under the silly surface the way Discworld did about a dozen books after Terry Pratchett gave up trying to find reasons for Rincewind to ever leave his room again.
First, I think this is difficult to pitch from a commercial point of view. At least some subset of your fans are interested in what Arthur Dent is doing, not some other guy who exists in the same universe with his own wacky adventures. Publishers of any creative work are not known for their desire to take risks.
Second, he did branch out and wrote the Dirk Gently books and his travelogue about seeing endangered species. He didn't seem to have much more fun writing those, and they were not as commercially successful, by far.
You have correctly observed that the number of universes that got to experience the joy of a Hitch-Hiker's 4 in which Gimblethrop Tisslwheep put together a crack team of thieves for a heist in the glamorous, newly-built casinos of Squornshellus Zeta, never mind the stunningly thoughtful portrait of Eccentria Gallumbits's later years as a titan of the adult entertainment industry and the incisive, embittered critique of the continuing tragic effects of the British Empire's many sins that made up Hitch-Hiker's 18, is vanishingly small.
But I will note that the idea of an SF/F author having a world to which they return again and again, with a mix of recurring characters and new ones, is pretty common. Asimov had the Foundation and the Robots books, and eventually tied them together. Heinlein had his Future History. Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth absorbed a lot of my pocket money in the eighties. So did Larry Niven's Known Space. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. A new book by a beloved author in another corner of the same setting that their big success came from is an easier sell to that "subset of fans who are interested in what Arthur Dent is doing" than a totally different book by the same author.
I do not think, that would have worked. That is, it would have resulted in an easy to consume, superhero marketable franchise thing. Highly succesful. But not that interesting to me. The whole gimmick of the books is not wanting to save the world. But the world got blown up anyway, so what do you do now?
I've never really understood the problems he had getting the Hitchhiker movie made - all the articles around before it came out talked about having to revise the script to make sense to an American audience (and the eventual movie ended up with a strangely different plot with a villain), but the original radio series is pretty much a road movie, which is almost an American trope.
Adams himself changed the plot in every version of HHGG, from radio play to book to computer game to movie. I think it shows how little he was attached to the details of his fictional universe. Personally, I like the plot of the movie a lot, especially the invention of the point-of-view gun
He wrote and starred in a documentary explaining hypertext which I found interesting: https://vimeo.com/72501076. I found this while reading that htmx book (hypermedia.systems) and getting more curious about the history of hypermedia in general.
Strange how TFA fails to mention The Salmon of Doubt. Published posthumous, it's the earnest testimony of the late Adams and his thoughts on, quite literally, life, the universe and all.
I remember listening to hhgttg on my parent's kitchen radio as a young child. I didnt't get much of the humour but the episodes were still a marvel to me: just bursting and fizzing with ideas and fun.
I bought the book with pocket money in '79 when it came out - I remember the kind of oilslick-pattern cover, and being secretly pleased that no-one I knew had heard of it. I read it until it fell apart. His proof of the non-existence of god was probably my first Mobius loop, at least until I discovered Hofstadter in the library.
Teenage me was unexpectedly charmed by So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and was perhaps a little hopeful of meeting someone like Fenchurch one day.
So, a part of my nerd hustory I guess - albeit not something I've thought about for a while. Thank you Mr Adams.
This was a difficult frustrating read. One feels that he simply needed a good financial planner and he could have lived his life how he wanted and not been forced to be locked in rooms and write mediocre novels he didn’t want to.
This paradox of possessing a remarkable gift while simultaneously loathing its use seems like a cosmic jest, reminding us that the universe operates with a wry smile
Such a badly written and dull piece on what should be a very interesting subject to write about (DNA).
I wonder if ppl who are upvoting this submission actually read the whole, verbose piece before upvoting or whether they're just upvoting on seeing Douglas' name in the submission title ?
There's certainly information in there, I agree, but it's badly delivered.
We're more than 20 years past Douglas' untimely death. People writing new pieces on him now need to be writing much more appealingly or, if they're only going to deliver information without any flair, boil it down to just that, the newer or lesser known information they are presenting without all the detail that most even moderate fans of Adams are already familiar with.
In Hamlet, Polonious declaims that :
“Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief…”
and then goes on and on at pompous length. Adams truly understood that brevity was the soul of wit and showed it in his writing. The author of this blog piece doesn't.
>Adams truly understood that brevity was the soul of wit
Hadn't really twigged that aspect but I think you're correct.
So he combined deep ideas with humour and brevity. He also had to carry his torch post-Hitchhikers, a show which had had creative input from other talented people in addition to his own.
Small wonder he found writing hard. It must have been really really hard.
The writing is rather unwieldy and quite a few awkward uses of grammar that made me wonder if the author spoke English only as a second language.
After a while I stopped reading, it was very wordy, and it felt like they were trying too hard. Long form is fine if you have good reason. I didn't think this was it.
The author is an American with a degree in literary studies. He has written an absolutely massive chronological history of computer games (mostly focused on adventures and other story-driven gaming, but not exclusively).
This piece about Adams is part of that timeline. Over the past 13 years he’s covered 1971 to 1998:
It’s not unfair to say that his pieces could use some editing. But he writes them every week, like clockwork, for decades now. As a long-time reader, I find the Digital Antiquarian’s long-winded digressions to be cozy and essential to why I keep coming back. It’s a bit like sitting down with a friend regularly.
