In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of the science fiction television series Doctor Who and served as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and co-author credits on two Liff books and Last Chance to See, itself based on a radio series. Adams also originated the idea for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was realized by a company that Adams co-founded, and adapted into a novel by Terry Jones. A posthumous collection of essays and other material, including an incomplete novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.
His fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist, a self-described "radical atheist", and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Macintosh computer, and other "techno gizmos." Acclaimed biologist Richard Dawkins dedicated his book. Douglas was a keen technologist, writing about such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known.
Since his death at the age of 49, he is still widely revered in science fiction and fantasy fandom circles.
Early life
Douglas Adams was born to Janet Adams and Christopher Douglas Adams in Cambridge, England. His parents had one other child together, Susan, who was born in March 1955. His parents separated and divorced in 1957, and Douglas, Susan, and Janet moved in with Janet's parents, the Donovans, in Brentwood, Essex. Douglas's grandmother kept her house as an official RSPCA refuge for hurt animals, which "exacerbated young Douglas's hayfever and asthma."
Adams first attended Primrose Hill Primary School in Brentwood. He took the exams and interviewed for Brentwood School at age six, and attended the preparatory school from 1959 to 1964, then the main school until 1970. He was in the top stream, and specialised in the arts in the sixth form, after which he stayed an extra term in a special seventh form class, customary in the school for those preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams. While at the prep school, his English teacher, Frank Halford, reportedly awarded Adams the only ten out of ten of his entire teaching career for a creative writing exercise. Adams remembered this for the rest of his life, especially when facing writer's block.
On the strength of a bravura essay on religious poetry that discussed the Beatles along with William Blake, he was awarded a place at St John's College, Cambridge to read English, entering in 1971. Adams attempted early on to get into the Footlights Dramatic Club, with which several other names in British comedy had been affiliated. He was, however, turned down, and started to write and perform in revues with Will Adams and Martin Smith, forming a group called "Adams-Smith-Adams." Later, on another attempt to join Footlights, Adams was encouraged by Simon Jones and found himself working with Rhys Jones, among others. In 1974, Adams graduated with a B.A. in English literature.
After graduation he spent several years contributing material to radio and television shows as well as writing, performing, and sometimes directing stage revues in London, Cambridge and at the Edinburgh Fringe. He has also worked at various times as a hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, bodyguard, radio producer and script editor of Doctor Who.
After the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide became successful, Adams was made a BBC radio producer, working on Week Ending and a pantomime called Black Cinderella Two Goes East. He left the position after six months to become the script editor for Doctor Who.
Music
Adams played the guitar left-handed and had a collection of twenty-four left-handed guitars when he died in 2001 (having received his first guitar in 1964). He also studied piano in the 1960s with the same teacher as Paul Wickens, the pianist who later played in Paul McCartney's band (and composed the music for the 2004–2005 editions of the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series). The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Procol Harum all had great influence on Adams' work.
Computer games and projects
Douglas Adams created an interactive fiction version of HHGG together with Steve Meretzky from Infocom in 1984. In 1986 he participated in a weeklong brainstorming session with the Lucasfilm Games team for the game Labyrinth. Later he was also involved in creating Bureaucracy (also by Infocom, but not based on any book). Adams was also responsible for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was published in 1999 by Simon and Schuster. Terry Jones wrote the accompanying book, entitled Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, since Adams was too busy with the computer game to do both. In April 1999, Adams initiated the h2g2 collaborative writing project, an experimental attempt at making The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a reality.
In 1990, Adams wrote and presented a television documentary programme Hyperland which featured Tom Baker as a "software agent" (similar to the "Assistants" used in several versions of Microsoft Office, derived from their failed "Bob" program), and interviews with Ted Nelson, which was essentially about the use of hypertext. Although Adams did not invent hypertext, he was an early adopter and advocate of it. This was the same year that Tim Berners-Lee used the idea of hypertext in his HTML.
In between Adams' first trip to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine in 1985, and their series of travels that formed the basis for the radio series and non-fiction book Last Chance to See, Adams wrote two other novels with a new cast of characters. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was first published in 1987, and was described by its author as "a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics." It received many rave reviews from American newspapers upon its publication in the USA. Adams borrowed a few ideas from two Doctor Who stories he had worked on: City of Death and Shada.
A sequel novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was published a year later. This was an entirely original work, Adams' first since So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Reviewers, however, were not as generous with praise for the second volume as they had been for the first. After the obligatory book tours, Adams was off on his round-the-world excursion which supplied him with the material for Last Chance to See.
Environmental activism
Adams was also an environmental activist who campaigned on behalf of a number of endangered species. This activism included the production of the non-fiction radio series Last Chance to See, in which he and naturalist Mark Carwardine visited rare species such as the Kakapo, and the publication of a tie-in book of the same name. In 1992, this was made into a CD-ROM combination of audio book, e-book and picture slide show years before such things became fashionable.
Adams and Mark Carwardine contributed the 'Meeting a Gorilla' passage from Last Chance to See to the book The Great Ape Project. This book, edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer launched a wider-scale project in 1993, which calls for the extension of moral equality to include all great apes, human or nonhuman.
In 1994 he participated in a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro while wearing a rhino suit for the British charity organization Save the Rhino. Many different people participated in the same climb and took turns wearing rhino suit; Adams wore the suit while traveling to the mountain before the climb proper began. About £100,000 were raised through that event, benefiting schools in Kenya and a Black Rhinoceros preservation programme in Tanzania. Adams was also an active supporter of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
Since 2003, Save the Rhino has held an annual Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture around the time of his birthday to raise money for environmental campaigns. The lectures in the series are:
• 2003 Richard Dawkins — Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness of science
• 2004 Robert Swan — on walking across Antarctica and his environmental work there
• 2005 Mark Carwardine — Last Chance to See… Just a bit more
• 2006 Robert Winston — Is the Human an Endangered Species?
• 2007 Richard Leakey — Wildlife Management in East Africa – Is there a future?
• 2008 Steven Pinker — The Stuff of Thought, Language as a Window into Human Nature
Technology
Adams was a serious fan of technology. Though he did not buy his first word processor until 1982, he had considered one as early as 1979. He was quoted as saying that until 1982, he had difficulties with "the impenetrable barrier of jargon. Words were flying backwards and forwards without concepts riding on their backs." In 1982, his first purchase was a 'Nexus'. In 1983, when he and Jane Belson went out to Los Angeles, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England, Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 1000. In Last Chance to See Adams mentions his Cambridge Z88, which he had taken to Zaire on a quest to find the Northern White Rhinoceros.
Adams' posthumously published work, The Salmon of Doubt, features multiple articles written by Douglas on the subject of technology, including reprints of articles that originally ran in MacUser magazine, and in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. In these, Adams claims that one of the first computers he ever saw was a Commodore PET, and that his love affair with the Apple Macintosh first began after seeing one at Infocom's headquarters in Massachusetts in 1983 (though that was actually very likely an Apple Lisa).
Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out in 1984 until his death in 2001. He was the second person to buy a Mac in the UK (the first being Stephen Fry - though some accounts differ on this, saying Adams bought the first two, and Fry bought the third). Adams was also an "Apple Master," one of several celebrities whom Apple made into spokespeople for its products (other Apple Masters included John Cleese and Gregory Hines). Adams' contributions included a rock video that he created using the first version of iMovie with footage featuring his daughter Polly. The video can still be seen on Adams' .Mac homepage. Adams even installed and started using the first release of Mac OS X in the weeks leading up to his death. His very last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. Adams can also be seen in the Omnibus tribute included with the Region One/NTSC DVD release of the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide using Mac OS X (version 10.0.x) on his PowerBook G3.
Adams used e-mail extensively from the technology's infancy, adopting a very early version of e-mail to correspond with Steve Meretzky during the pair's collaboration on Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While living in New Mexico in 1993 he set up another e-mail address and began posting to his own USENET newsgroup, alt.fan.douglas-adams, and occasionally, when his computer was acting up, to the comp.sys.mac hierarchy.[36] Many of his posts are now archived through Google. Challenges to the authenticity of his messages later led Adams to set up a message forum on his own website to avoid the issue.
Personal life
In the early 1980s, Adams had an affair with married novelist Sally Emerson, to whom he dedicated his book Life, the Universe and Everything. In 1981 Emerson returned to her husband, Peter Stothard, a contemporary of Adams at Brentwood School. Adams was soon afterward introduced by friends to Jane Belson, with whom he later became romantically involved. Belson was the "lady barrister" mentioned in the jacket-flap biography printed in his books during the mid-1980s ("He [Adams] lives in Islington with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh"). The two lived in Los Angeles together during 1983 while Adams worked on an early screenplay adaptation of Hitchhiker's. When the deal fell through, they moved to London, and after several separations ("He is currently not certain where he lives, or with whom") and an aborted engagement, they were married on 25 November 1991. Adams and Belson had one daughter together, Polly Jane Rocket Adams, born on 22 June 1994, in the year that Adams turned 42. In 1999, the family moved from London to Santa Barbara, California, where they lived until Adams' death. Following his funeral, Jane Belson and Polly Adams returned to London, where they currently reside.
Death
Adams died of a heart attack at the age of 49 on Friday 11 May 2001, while working out at a private gym in Montecito, California. He suffered a narrowing of the coronary arteries which led to a myocardial infarction and a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. Adams had been due to deliver the commencement address at Harvey Mudd College on 13 May. His funeral was held on 16 May 2001 in Santa Barbara, California. Several friends and people he had worked with were in attendance. His ashes were placed in Highgate Cemetery in north London that June.
A memorial service was held on 17 September 2001 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, Trafalgar Square, London. This became the first church service of any kind broadcast live on the web by the BBC. Video clips of the service are still available on the BBC's website for download.
In May 2002, The Salmon of Doubt was published, containing many short stories, essays, and letters, as well as eulogies from Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry (in the UK edition), Christopher Cerf (in the U.S. edition), and Terry Jones (in the U.S. paperback edition). It also includes eleven chapters of his long-awaited but unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, which was likely to become a new Dirk Gently novel.
Other events after Adams' death included the completion of Shada, radio dr
Works
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on audio and video: The original 12 radio episodes (from 1978 and 1980) are available in CD sets from BBC Audio (as The Primary & Secondary Phases), as well as on a single MP3-CD. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was the first radio series released on Compact Disc and on MP3-CD, respectively, by the then BBC Radio Collection. The three additional phases adapted from the last three books in the series are available from BBC Audio. The Tertiary Phase was broadcast on BBC Radio 21 September to 26 October 2004, whilst The Quandary Phase was broadcast 3 May to 24 May 2005, and The Quintessential Phase followed immediately afterward, from 31 May through 21 June 2005. A script book for the original 12 episodes has been published, and a new script book for the final 14 episodes was published in July 2005. BBC Audio released a CD boxset containing all 26 episodes in October 2005. A DVD release of each of the three 2004–2005 series, featuring mixes in 5.1 surround sound, are also planned for release in 2006, starting in October, per Dirk Maggs. However, as of December 2006, only the Tertiary Phase has been released on DVD. While the first disc is not a DVD-Audio, as was originally announced, it still marks the first release of any radio series in a 5.1 mix on DVD by BBC Audio. The six-episode TV adaptation is also available from the BBC (or its distributors, e.g. Warner Home Video in the USA and Canada) on VHS and DVD.
Novels in the Hitchhiker series
• 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
• Mostly Harmless
The Dirk Gently series
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
• The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
• The Salmon of Doubt (incomplete)
Other books
• The Meaning of Liff
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts
• The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book
o Young Zaphod Plays it Safe
o The Private Life of Genghis Khan
o A Christmas Fairly Story
o A "Supplement to The Meaning of Liff"
• The Deeper Meaning of Liff
• Last Chance to See
• The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic
• The Salmon of Doubt (2002), unfinished novel manuscript (11 chapters), short stories, essays, and interviews
Other works
• Monty Python's Flying Circus Episode 45, Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Liberal Party (1972)
• The Pirate Planet - a Doctor Who serial
• City of Death - a Doctor Who serial, cowritten with Graham Williams
• Shada - a Doctor Who serial
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (computer game) (1984, with Steve Meretzky)
• Bureaucracy (computer game)
• Hyperland (TV documentary)
• Starship Titanic (computer game)
• The Internet: The Last Battleground of the 20th century (radio series)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future (radio series)
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