Thursday, February 22, 2018

Douglas Adams' Geeky Galactic Gags

Science fiction is no laughing matter. Be it a Wells or a Verne, an Asimov or a Bradbury, doomsday looms over many a Sci-Fi story.

However, along came Douglas Adams. His best selling The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made a sizeable dent on that mindset.


I assume you have heard of the movie version. There are movies of, at least, two of his novels:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) Trailer


Another filmed version that might be as entertaining: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Episode 1

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency | official trailer (2016)

Read the books? You simply must. Here are two of the most popular:




The Way the Cookie Crumbles

Kooky humour is signature Douglas Adam. And a cookie anecdote doing the rounds is based, claim the sites, on something that really happened to him. 

Now, the odd thing is that there is a Jeffrey Archer, Broken Routine, that sort of does the same thing. You'll find it in the short story collection below.
What does this tell us? Or rather, what should it tell us?

One might answer, off the top of the head, the 'moral of the tale' is that one or the other of them is doing something iffy. There’s a tragedy in that kind of response. It shows a rawness of mind. Such a person would be shocked to find out that nothing of Shakespeare, for example, is really ‘new under the sun’. In the Bard’s own words:

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd,
Which labouring for invention bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child.

Effectively, though rather simplistically, nothing in the Universe is really created or destroyed. The endless permutations and combinations are what fill the natural world with wonder. In the same way, even the mightiest stories are nothing but tapestries of pre-existing themes. There is infinite art in that.

It’s not really a question of who was first. Great writers are not so much about inventing new stories as they are about taking eternal themes and motifs to make new interpretations. It is the quality of attention to minuscule details which makes these eternally excellent. 


As for the way this cookie crumbles, it's not so much the way as that there's loads of delicious crumble. This gentleman has tried his hand, like all great masters, at all kinds of convolutions of the imagination. Including a vocabulary.

Our man Douglas has stimulated more than our yearning for quick chuckles. There are many who engage in studying him and his works. See, for example, the video below:

The confusing timeline of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy adaptations - The Dom Reviews

His output is respectably voluminous and he has a fan following to reckon with. I, personally, am more of a Robert Sheckley groupie. 

By the way, Douglas Adams' initials are DNA - his middle name is Noel. How else could it when he's the cat's whiskers for the geek.

Resources:
The Hitchhiker's Guide Project

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