So Long, and Thanks for All the Fun

The world is one living legend shorter, after the great British author Douglas Adams passed away on Friday 11 May 2001. With the world's only trilogy in five parts, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams has entertained, inspired and influenced people all over the world for the past 20 years.

Douglas Adams leaves the world emptier. Few authors have had the wit and fantasy he possessed. The Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, consisting of the five books "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", "Life, the Universe and Everything", "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" , and "Mostly Harmless", opened up a whole new genre in litterature: the totally wacky and really humoristic science fiction. Douglas Adams managed to make fun of almost every phenomenon we have here on Earth, and especially the typically British ones. As he says, "a planet so primitive the inhabitants still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea". The observations he made in the trilogy are probably the most accurate ever made, and they are actually pretty bold. Not many authors could have pulled this kind of chritizism off, but he managed, much thanks to the tone of the book. The events are easily recognized as satire, and overstatements, but the truth is that some of the things are actually pretty accurately described, and not exaggerated.

The works of Douglas Adams are of course not all about chritizising the world. They are also about having a lot of fun. The tone of the books are lovely, and so are the descriptions. I think that you can not be more accurate than Adams, when he writes "the big yellow ships hung motionless in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't". The storyline is confusing, but funny, and that is to be expected. Adams did the Hitchhiker's Guide as a radio theater before he translated it into it's bookform. The legend says he got the idea when he woke up, with a bad hangover, in a park in a middle european capital. The legend goes on to say that he was pretty late on writing the manuscript for the radio show, that he in fact sometimes wrote the script in the studio, and was about one page before the actors reading it live. You may decide for yourself how much of this is true, but behind every legend lies more or less, but at least some, truth.

Douglas Adams wrote a couple of things other than the trilogy, but not too much. His other work, that I have read or seen for myself, and hence are the only titles I know about, is: two books about Dirk Gently, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul" (a title that refers to tha latter part of the Sunday afternoon, first used by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy), and the computer game "Starship Titanic", a ship mentioned in the Hitchhiker's Guide, where it is stated that it was the first starship to have the infinite improbability drive. It was a virtual impossibility that the ship could go wrong. Since the sideeffect of the infinite improbabilitydrive is that such things actually occur, the ship was almost immediately destroyed. Terry Jones, who did some of the voices in the game, also wrote a book based on it, called "Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic". These books and game, although not nearly as successful or splendid as the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, have the tone and wit that were Douglas Adams' trademark.

For me, his death is a great loss. The world has lost a grand artist, and I have lost my biggest idol and role model, the one person that I really looked up to. Just a couple of weeks ago, he was the menthor of the week in the sunday edition of the Swedish evening paper Expressen, and he amused and inspired by the things he said there. It all seems so pointless, just like the Swedish comedian Stellan Sundal, the American comedian Andy Kauffman, and many more, taken before their time by heartattacks or other illnesses. I still hope that I can one day inspire and entertain people like Douglas Adams, and I have from his death been more inspired to continue on my recently begun book. I will try to get it published in a couple of years time, the actual date depends on how much time I will have free to write while I am doing my military service, and of course whether any publishing company here or on Ursa Minor Beta wants it, but I will give you the chance to read the doreword to it right now, unfortunately in Swedish only, but just follow this link, and enjoy your reading.
I salute the greatest author of all time, the aouthor of the most important wotk ever to emerge from the grand printing presses of Ursa Minor Beta, a legend and a grand person. I will honour his memory in a way I think he would have enjoyed: A silent line of text.

-silent-

So long, Douglas Adams, and thanks for all the great fun and inspiration.
Now you may perhaps finally find out what the grand Question, about life, the universe and everything is, the Question to which the answer, as you with the help of Deep Thought so magnificently calculated, is "42".