Author Profile · Science Fiction
Douglas Adams
1952–2001 · British
Who was Douglas Adams?
A very tall Cambridge Footlights alumnus who wrote for Monty Python's fringes, script-edited Doctor Who, and one night in a field in Innsbruck (by his own, possibly improved, account) conceived a guidebook for hitch-hikers to the galaxy. The radio series became novels, towels, computer games and a way of thinking: the universe as a vast bureaucratic joke in which Earth is demolished for a bypass, the answer is 42, and the question is missing. Adams was a famously catastrophic deadline-misser ('I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by'), a pioneering technophile, and a passionate conservationist — Last Chance to See was his own favourite. Dead at forty-nine, mourned like a planet.
Why they matter
The funniest writer the genre has produced and one of the most quoted authors in the language. Hitchhiker's made SF a mass-cultural in-joke, shaped British comic writing for decades, and smuggled real philosophy in under the towels.
Essential books — and where to start
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
1979 · The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, book 1 · Science Fiction · Comic SF, Satirical SF
Arthur Dent's house is demolished for a bypass on the same Thursday the Earth is demolished for a hyperspace bypass — the paperwork was on display in Alpha Centauri for fifty years, no excuse for apathy. Rescued by his friend Ford Prefect (a researcher for the titular electronic guidebook, whose entry for Earth reads 'Mostly harmless'), Arthur falls in with two-headed ex-president Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian, and Marvin, a robot with a brain the size of a planet and clinical depression to match, in pursuit of the legendary planet Magrathea and the Question to which the Answer is 42. Adapted from the 1978 radio series; quotable to the point of public hazard.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
1980 · The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, book 2 · Science Fiction · Comic SF, Satirical SF
The survivors of Earth's demolition dine at Milliways, where the floor show is the heat death of everything and the meat introduces itself before recommending cuts of its own body; Zaphod hunts the man who really rules the universe (a solipsist in a shack, deciding nightly whether his cat exists); and Arthur and Ford are marooned on prehistoric Earth aboard the Golgafrincham B Ark, a ship of telephone sanitisers and marketing consultants whose descendants explain rather a lot about humanity. The Total Perspective Vortex, Disaster Area's stunt ship and the universe's most useful drink recipe complete the menu.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
1987 · Science Fiction · Comic SF, Urban Fantasy, Time Travel
Dirk Gently, exposer of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things (and biller of expenses on that principle: the trip to Bermuda was structurally necessary), investigates a case involving a software millionaire's murder, an Electric Monk that believes things for you, a Cambridge don with a time machine in his rooms, Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', and the salvation-or-not of the entire human race, retroactively. Adams plaits Doctor Who leftovers, quantum mechanics and Romantic poetry into the most ingeniously plotted thing he ever wrote — the jokes conceal a clockwork of genuine elegance.
Series
1954–2013 · British (Scottish)
The writer who revived British space opera virtually single-handed and gave SF its most fully argued utopia.
1913–1987 · American
The proto-New-Wave and proto-cyberpunk in one package: Gibson, Moorcock and Delany all name him as the spark.
1928–1982 · American
The genre's great metaphysician.
