Guardian Review

'I remember the early 1980s, a Betamax recording of the BBC series that my grandparents had taped," writes CMK, a blogger, born in 1979. "I would watch it almost every day." "I sat in the car in the driveway, getting cold, listening to Vogon poetry" - thus Neil Gaiman (b 1960), who before American Gods , before The Sandman , wrote a gushy fan-book called Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1988). "I was happy; perfectly, unutterably happy." Among psychologists, no one is sure whether "flashbulb memories" - in which you see everything as it was, but heightened, as if your mind had lit up and snapped it - really happen or if people just think they do. It's agreed, though, that the phenomenon has to do with shock - a death, a disaster, something that leaves everything catastrophically changed. How curious, then, that this is so often the way fans talk about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galax y. Is this only because it's so funny, or is it because it's a story that begins with the total destruction of planet Earth? For readers who need it, here is a brief recap. H2G2 - as Gaiman was the first to call the show - started life as a BBC radio sitcom in 1978; it went out with little publicity, but right away became a hit. The story begins with a man called Arthur Dent, described in the 1979 novelisation as "about 30 . . . tall, dark-haired, and never quite at ease with himself", who discovers one day that his house, somewhere in the west of England, is about to be demolished in order to make way for a motorway bypass; shortly after, he also discovers that the very world he lives on, "an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet . . . far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy", is about to be demolished too. Luckily for Arthur, though, his drinking pal, Ford Prefect, hitches them both a lift on a spaceship under the command of Zaphod Beeblebrox, a two-headed pan-galactic renegade. The adventures that follow involve Vogons ("one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy - not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous"); a great deal of faff about the number 42; and the discovery that humans are descended not from apes, but from hairdressers and management consultants. They also feature a "manically depressed" robot called Marvin the Paranoid Android, whose funny voice came second only to that of Daleks among playground comedians of 1980s Britain: "Life. Loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." "Life. Don't talk to me about life." The story's author, Douglas Adams, was, apparently, tall and dark and awkward-looking too. Born in Cambridge in 1952 - he was proud of his initials, DNA - he studied English at Cambridge University because he wanted to be in Footlights, then found himself, by the late 1970s, a comedy sketchwriter in need of an idea. Suddenly, he remembered a drunken reverie he'd had, staring at the stars one evening, while hitchhiking round Europe. The first Radio 4 series led quickly to an LP, a stage version, a second Radio 4 series, a BBC television sitcom. The first novel led, over the next 12 years, to four sequels - you can buy them packaged together, as "a trilogy in five parts". Adams himself went on to begin another series of comic novels - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987), The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (1988) - but increasingly it was newer media that absorbed him. He worked for 20 years, off and on, trying to get a Hitchhiker's movie off the ground, and in 1994 launched the Digital Village, an internet startup of which he was the self-appointed "chief fantasist". He died suddenly, of a heart attack, in 2001, mid-workout at a private gym in Santa Barbara, southern California, where he had relocated with his family a couple of years before. The movie appeared at last, in 2005, starring Martin Freeman - Tim from The Office - as Arthur Dent and Mos Def, the American hip-hop artist, as Ford Prefect. The Digital Village failed in the great dotcom shakeup, but parts of it survive on h2g2, an interactive resource currently billeted towards the unfashionable end of the BBC website, a bit like Wikipedia except not half so good. Adams's really big idea, though - what used to get called his killer app - was the one he'd got on that drunken night of dreaming. What if, instead of a Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe , you carried in your backpack a handbook to the stars? And so, as well as being the story of "a terrible, stupid catastrophe", the original Hitchhiker's pre sented itself as "the story of a book". We are told that this book - or rather, in fanspeak, "the Book" - is "the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor"; it's "an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing universe". The Hitchhiker's Guide , in other words, was not simply a comic space opera, but also participated in two other, albeit converging, literary traditions: the postmodern interest in metafiction and the ancient narrative device of the book within a book. It doesn't seem to be recorded anywhere how interested Adams was in Calvino, or Borges, or Swift, or Lovecraft, or Flann O'Brien's magisterial de Selby. But he was evidently familiar with "the great Encyclopaedia Galactica ", as invented by Isaac Asimov for his Foundation stories in the 1950s - The Hitchhiker's Guide , we are told, has "already supplanted" it, being "slightly cheaper". And once Adams got the imaginary-book thing going, the ways he turned it amount to a typology of the form. Sometimes, the imaginary book is used pragmatically, to shovel off boring lumps of background and exposition. Sometimes it's used sceptically, to upset the linear surface of the story, and sometimes it's completely bogus, generating phoney mystery and depth. The book-within-a-book trick, in short, allowed Adams to develop a story that was both unified and modular, tight yet flexible, compact yet potentially infinite. Within this handy framework, the Hitchhiker stories make up a sort of folk-art depiction, like on a tribal carpet, of the late-1970s English middle-class cosmic order. So there he is, the hapless Arthur Dent, in the middle, his maths insufficient to grasp even the first thing about his current position, in a county in a country, on a continent on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, and so on. (Even now, the only way I can get the hierarchy right is by referring to the products of Mars Inc.) Except that the universe, 1979-style, would have seemed different from the one we know, and don't know, today, with space travel, in the years between the Moon landings and the Challenger disaster, both current and glamorous-feeling in a way it certainly isn't now. Tomorrow's World went out on the BBC every Thursday; Carl Sagan's Cosmos went out in 1980; cool space-junk was everywhere, Star Wars and Close Encounters , Bowie and P-Funk and the Only Ones. Relativity and the space-time continuum, wormholes and the multiverse featured everywhere in science fact and fiction, and were easily bent and twisted into the sort of paradox at which Adams's mind excelled - the armada of spaceships diving screaming towards Earth, "where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog"; the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where you can pay for dinner by putting 1p in a present-day savings account, meaning that "when you arrive at the End of Time . . . the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for". Except that the Guide wasn't just a literary device, a concept. It really was a "Book", a thing of plastic, an actual piece of tech. It looked, we are told, "rather like a largish electronic calculator" - as such a device would have had to look in the 1970s, before iPhones, Kindle, Ernie Wise's Vodafone. On it, "any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice" - what, only a million?, 21st-century readers object. The Book was brilliantly brought to life in the 1981 television series, in two-dimensional line graphics, moving along behind a cursor, like on the primitive arcade games and home computers of the time. They looked - they still look - cooler, funnier, more techy, than the more GUIesque anima tions in the 2005 movie, although Rod Lord's design had nothing digital about it; images were drawn on acetate and filmed with a rostrum camera in the traditional cartoonists' way. Literature, of course, is full of proleptic descriptions of imaginary IT - EM Forster did it in "The Machine Stops" (1909) and William Gibson would shortly start colonising cyberspace in Burning Chrome (1982). Adams, though, went beyond prophecy not to dystopia - lots of writers do that - but to small-scale obsolescence and disappointment. The babel fish, for example, is apparently a "small, yellow and leechlike" organism that you stick in your ear, whereupon it feeds on other people's brainwaves, excreting them, simultaneously translated, into yours; neat, but none the less silly and pathetic, in the way only sticking a fish in your ear can be. The infinite improbability drive is "a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances" which runs on the energy released from ridiculous coincidences; in an explosion of surrealist mournfulness, it transforms a nu clear missile into a fully sentient sperm whale. The method is a bit like steampunk, in that it proceeds counterfactually, but with careful logic; or like steampunk, only without the steam. But there's a definite tea theme, and a lot of Englishness, and a distinctive note of piscine melancholy: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish ; The Salmon of Doubt . If Adams's books were a domestic appliance, they'd be a Sinclair ZX80, wired to a Teasmade, screeching machine code through quadraphonic speakers, and there'd probably be a haddock in there somewhere, non-compatible and obsolete. On 12 October, the first Hitchhiker's novel will be exactly 30 years old. That apparently is why the Adams estate has chosen the date for what it's calling "a publishing event of electro proportions": Eoin Colfer, the author of the Artemis Fowl books, has written an authorised sequel, to be called And Another Thing (Penguin). An orchestrated explosion of high-end promodrivel is planned to celebrate it: a "Hitchcon" at the Southbank Centre in London will be attended by fans in their dressing-gowns; an Irish design firm plans to issue 42 custom-pimped Arne Jacobsen chairs. Colfer was chosen, apparently, because Adams's daughter likes his other books. Jane Belson, Adams's widow, has given the project her support. Coming back, after all this time, to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , I found myself completely floored. It was like when you've had a dream that you can't make head nor tail of, until you start telling someone about it, at which point it all becomes suddenly, embarrassingly obvious: "As our story begins, Arthur Dent is no more aware of his destiny than a tealeaf is aware of the East India Company . . ." Whether or not its author ever noticed, the story is just one massive post-colonial metaphor, in which the nice-but-dim English gentleman is dethroned, diminished, lost in space - caught, not exactly with his pants down, but dressed only in his pyjamas; his house, his planet, flattened by aliens; his anthropocentrism about to be exploded, and so on. Or, as Zaphod Beeblebrox puts it, why not replace Arthur's brain with an electronic one? "You'd just have to programme it to say What? and I don't understand and Where's the tea? Who'd know the difference?" Thirty years later, and it also seems obvious that the whole tellyverse around the story, whether or not its author was aware of it, was on the point of sliding off one plane of reality and on to something else. In politics, the so-called postwar consensus was being taken apart by Mrs Thatcher; the BBC itself was one of her many targets, under pressure to abandon its old-style Reithian body politic and sell off bits of itself for scrap. Unlike John Lloyd, his friend and occasional collaborator, Adams was not interested in the courte duree of topical satire ( Not the Nine O'Clock News , Spitting Image ) that gives memories of the early 1980s so much of their fizzingly bitter flavour. Adams's mind worked better on deeper, odder resonances - the "digital watches" considered to be "a pretty neat idea" by the "amazingly primitive . . . ape-descended life-forms", who shortly will never know what hit them; the convergence of cosmological science towards a generalised theory of everything - had Hitchhiker's not popularised the notion of an "ultimate question", the science writer Michael Hanlon has suggested, Stephen Hawking might not have sold quite so many copies of a book purporting to answer it ( A Brief History of Time , 1988). Above all, Adams's books give voice to a sense of dismay and uprootedness, of being oneself out of date and unfit for purpose and somehow not in on the joke: "All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was," as Arthur complains to Slartibartfast. In Britain, in the early 80s, such unease found a shape, often, in anti-Thatcher activity of one sort or another, and, what with Ronald Reagan in power across the water, a furious anti-Americanism; in post-punk indie music in particular, the fashion was for using small, cheap, home-made bits of technology, as if against what was perceived as a big, dumb and incoming American demolition squad. And although Adams was not into post-punk music - his taste, I'm sorry to say, was for Pink Floyd and prog in general, and even the delightful Hitchhiker's theme-tune turns out to be by the Eagles - it's obvious that there is a continuity, of some sort, between the universe as he saw it and the "defiance", as the critic Mark Greif calls it, of certain post-punk musicians, "the insistence on finding ways to retain the thoughts and feelings that a larger power should have extinguished". This perhaps is one reason Radiohead some years later found themselves doing an album called OK Computer (1997) - the title echoes something Zaphod Beeblebrox often says - with a song on it called, of course, "Paranoid Android": "When I am king, you will be first against the wall / With your opinion which is of no consequence at all . . ." "At its best," Greif writes in a brilliant 2005 essay in n+1, "Radiohead's music . . . can abet an impersonal defiance . . . It might be the one thing we can manage, and better than sinking beneath the waves." So there I was, the other day, watching a DVD of the 1981 Hitchhiker's sitcom with my sci-fi-crazy six-year-old son. First the good news. Eagles or no Eagles, that theme tune is still terrific, gleeful and wistful and full of space. So are the animated Book extracts. And so is Magrathea, filmed in the pre-Eden Project clay-pits, and so is Zaphod Beeblebrox's waggling spare head. The 1981-ness of it all is overwhelming. Both my son and I agreed that the show still really rocks. The weird news, though, is that it's also oddly backward-looking. Simon Jones plays Arthur Dent as though he's a squire with a servant problem, his dressing-gown tweedy, his face a cipher of well-bred exasperation - do none of you damned aliens even know who I am? (Apparently the part was written with Jones in mind from the beginning - Adams knew him from Cambridge.) Jones's accent is old-fashioned posh, like Prince Charles's. Hearing it, I suddenly realised, after 30 years of not getting it, why it's meant to be funny that the computer is called Deep Thought - it's not a joke that works in commoner British accents. Straight after Hitchhiker's , Jones went on to play Bridey in the ITV Brideshead Revisited (1981), the defining TV show of the early 80s Tory ascendancy. Not that the poshness is attributable to him alone: Ford Prefect sports a Footlights-friendly boating blazer. As the Vogons are attacking London, shots are cut in of chaps in Python -sketch-like bowler hats. In the 2005 film, on the other hand, Martin Freeman's dressing-gown is made of terry-towelling; Ford Prefect is played by an African-American (being an alien, ho ho). Yet it gradually dawns on you that there's something disturbingly kitsch about the voice of the Book itself, as it tells you not to panic, not to forget your towel, and so on - something creepy and fantasy-English, like those 40s-throwback Keep Calm and Carry On mugs. It is, in fact, intolerably smug and self-adoring, the voice of the British light-entertainment panel-show pantheon. It is, in short, the voice of Stephen Fry. My son was disappointed with the 80s Marvin, mainly because he looks as if someone on Blue Peter made him out of cornflake packets. And I didn't like watching Marvin either - he made me feel obscurely angry, uncomfortable and ashamed, and as I went on watching I realised why. Like an entire generation, I probably came across the word "paranoid" for the first time via Adams's writing (if not, it was via that of Ozzy Osbourne). It took me years to realise that Adams had chosen it not because it clarified the agonies to which his creation gives voice, but only because it rhymed. It's the same with the phrase "manically depressed", used more than once as a description of whatever it is that Marvin is. Psychiatrically speaking, it's nonsense, and in any case, it's lazy, ignorant, unkind: "I didn't ask to be made: no one consulted me or considered my feelings in the matter. I don't think it even occurred to them that I might have feelings," as Marvin says. Marvin appears very little in Hitchhiker's , and is known only by a few lines and phrases, yet his situation, surely, makes perfect sense. "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction ? Because I don't." "What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don't bother to answer that, I'm 50,000 times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level." The word "robot", the OED reminds us, came into English from the Czech "robota", forced labour; Marvin, basically, is a chippy, whining support-desk worker, a highly skilled, profoundly bored and accordingly resentful IT boffin. Last year Zadie Smith published an essay about how in her family, television sitcoms "served as . . . a vital link between us when, classwise, and in every other wise, each year placed us farther apart"; and really, I wonder if it's possible for anyone ever to talk about British sitcoms without immediately talking about class, family, the British body politic as well. Ask CMK, with his grandparents and their Betamax recorder. Ask Neil Gaiman, in the family car in the drive. Early in its history, the Hitchhiker's storyline started diverging into variant versions, depending on whether you were listening to the radio, or reading the novels. Changes were made for copyright reasons, for artistic reasons, for both; quickly, the story ceased to be a mere story and became a franchise, a brand. For the novels, in particular, Adams had to keep finding new ways of starting successive sequels; and so, like many a sci- fiwriter before him, he turned increasingly to time travel and parallel realities and the like. Bent and bent back again, erased and re-recorded, the characters fade into a general crackle; there is something Sisyphean about their movements, pushing and pushing towards resolution, only to be dropped right back to a new beginning, to push and push again. At the end of the final novel, Mostly Harmless (1992), the Vogons came back and destroyed Earth properly this time, killing off absolutely everyone; except in the later radio adaptation, in which there was instead a cheery reunion at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Marvin the Paranoid Android, though, died earlier, in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1985). "Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape was heaving itself wretchedly along the ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half limping, half crawling. It was moving so slowly that before too long they caught the creature up and could see that it was made of worn, scarred metal . . ." Arthur lifts Marvin up, so he can read God's Final Message to his Creation; "I think I feel good about it," Marvin murmurs, "from deep within his corroding, rattling thorax." "We must imagine Sisyphus happy," as Camus once put it; and so, in at least one dimension of the tellyverse, that is surely how he's best left. Caption: article-hitchhikers.1 'I remember the early 1980s, a Betamax recording of the BBC series that my grandparents had taped," writes CMK, a blogger, born in 1979. "I would watch it almost every day." "I sat in the car in the driveway, getting cold, listening to Vogon poetry" - thus Neil Gaiman (b 1960), who before American Gods , before The Sandman , wrote a gushy fan-book called Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1988). "I was happy; perfectly, unutterably happy." Among psychologists, no one is sure whether "flashbulb memories" - in which you see everything as it was, but heightened, as if your mind had lit up and snapped it - really happen or if people just think they do. It's agreed, though, that the phenomenon has to do with shock - a death, a disaster, something that leaves everything catastrophically changed. How curious, then, that this is so often the way fans talk about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galax y. Is this only because it's so funny, or is it because it's a story that begins with the total destruction of planet Earth? [Douglas Adams]'s really big idea, though - what used to get called his killer app - was the one he'd got on that drunken night of dreaming. What if, instead of a Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe , you carried in your backpack a handbook to the stars? And so, as well as being the story of "a terrible, stupid catastrophe", the original Hitchhiker's pre sented itself as "the story of a book". We are told that this book - or rather, in fanspeak, "the Book" - is "the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor"; it's "an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing universe". The Hitchhiker's Guide , in other words, was not simply a comic space opera, but also participated in two other, albeit converging, literary traditions: the postmodern interest in metafiction and the ancient narrative device of the book within a book. [Marvin] appears very little in Hitchhiker's , and is known only by a few lines and phrases, yet his situation, surely, makes perfect sense. "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction ? Because I don't." "What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don't bother to answer that, I'm 50,000 times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level." The word "robot", the OED reminds us, came into English from the Czech "robota", forced labour; Marvin, basically, is a chippy, whining support-desk worker, a highly skilled, profoundly bored and accordingly resentful IT boffin. Last year Zadie Smith published an essay about how in her family, television sitcoms "served as . . . a vital link between us when, classwise, and in every other wise, each year placed us farther apart"; and really, I wonder if it's possible for anyone ever to talk about British sitcoms without immediately talking about class, family, the British body politic as well. Ask CMK, with his grandparents and their Betamax recorder. Ask Neil Gaiman, in the family car in the drive. - Jenny Turner.