The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy grew from there, and in a completely haphazard way. First, the intergalactic traveller and researcher Ford Prefect was added, to serve as a linking factor for all six episodes. Adams quickly warmed to the idea of making the whole series one continuous plot, and created Arthur Dent as way of humanising its more absurd elements and giving the audience someone to empathise with – “Somebody to whom things happened,” to use Adams’ own description.
“The story grew in the most convoluted way,” he wrote in an introduction to a 1986 reprinting of the first four novels. “When I finished one episode I had no idea about what the next one would contain. When, in the twists and turns of the plot, some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things that had gone before, I was as surprised as everyone else.”
Adams was intent on making the show as distinctive as possible. The mixture of hard science-fiction ideas and Python-esque comedy was a fine place to start, of course, but he often found himself reverting to more clichéd territory. “In the very first episode, while I was writing it, I kept thinking, ‘There ought to be a joke in here, because I’ve gone three pages without a joke’,” he said to Penthouse. “I knew I was trying to do something different, but you keep looking for the odd thing you recognise.”
The series debuted on Radio 4 in 1978, and found a devoted audience almost immediately. By that time Star Wars was a global phenomenon, and the British public’s love for Monty Python was as strong as ever; Hitchhiker’s found success by occupying the fertile ground in between. Later that year, Adams was approached by Pan Books with an offer to turn the first series into a novel. “I’ve always wanted to write a novel because, well, everyone wants to write a novel,” he said, and with no faith that he would ever do so without a metaphorical gun being held to his head, he quickly agreed.
“The book was a substantially expanded version of the first four episodes of the radio series,” he recalled, “in which some of the characters behaved in entirely different ways, and others behaved in exactly the same ways but for entirely different reasons, which amounts to the same thing but saves rewriting the dialogue… After a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed to get two thirds of it done. At this point [Pan Books] said, very pleasantly and politely, that I had already passed ten deadlines, so would I please just finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.”
That’s the most remarkable thing about The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Something so intricate and densely stuffed with ideas should be a product of careful planning and execution, but so many of its ingenious leaps and tricks were the product of Adams’ struggle to write anything at all.
“Tennessee Williams would get up in the morning and sit by his pool all day, armed with two bottles of Old Grandad, marinating in the sun until 11pm, when he’d suddenly write furiously for 25 minutes,” Adams explained to Penthouse in 1979. “He said his whole life was dedicated to doing anything he could to get rid of those 12 hours a day when he didn’t do anything at all. I understand that. I find the business of getting up in the morning and going to the typewriter absolutely awful.”
Yet the product of his strained labour stands as one of the most unique works in the history of science-fiction literature. The book, so much more than a mere novelisation of a popular BBC radio series, would make Adams famous all over the world, spawning a trilogy that would eventually grow into an unprecedented five parts. A final proof of what Adams suspected all along, and what the broadcasters and publishers of the Seventies very nearly missed altogether.
“People always make this totally artificial distinction between what is commercial and what is good,” Adams said to Penthouse in 1979, just before the first Hitchhiker’s novel was due to be published. “They quote that maxim, ‘Nobody ever lost money underestimating the public’s taste,’ and I think that’s very wrong-headed… People don’t like to have their intelligence insulted. If the book makes money, I shall enjoy that. But what I’ll enjoy most is having proved that you don’t have to underestimate people.”
Twenty years and more than ten million copy sales later, we’d call that a mission very much accomplished.
This article originally appeared in the print edition of SciFiNow, issue 32 by Matthew Handrahan. To buy a copy of the magazine or subscribe, go to www.imagineshop.com, or call our subscriptions hotline on +44 (0) 844 844 0245.
