Dont Panic Read online

  Scanned and corrected by Dirk Gently- as usual. If you have some interesting books to be scanned (Finnish and Estonian preferred!), and they'd interest me as well, you can contact me. Don't forget the three letters: i-R-C! Sorry, no Email addy is possible. I had lots of probs scanning/editing this text, so it'd be great (if you are a DNA fan) if you sent me some greets in demoz/diskmags of yours, if you appreciate my effort to make this book available for you.

  I recommend you keeping the file's Word format coz I've edited the text with Bold and Italic characters as well.

  There were some TIFFs as well in the archive. COVER.TIF was the TrueColor TIFF of the cover. The other TIFFs were:

  6.tif: the name (and the text) speaks for itself :) (600 dpi, BW 256, 20%)

  APP1_1... APP1_4.tif: Appendix 1's 4 pages (900 dpi, BW 256, 20%)

  Anyway, to make life easier, I've also typed in the contents of the

  mentioned TIFs so you won't need to get the TIFFs.

  *************************COVER***********************

  'IT'S ALL

  ABSOLUTELY

  DEVASTATINGLY

  TRUE -

  EXCEPT THE BITS

  THAT ARE LIES'

  This is the story of an ape-descended human called

  Douglas adams who, in a field in Innsbruck, in 1971,

  had an idea.

  It us also the story of a book called, at a very high level

  of improbality, The Hith Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy;

  of the radio series that started it all; the five book

  trilogy it comprises; and the computer game, towel

  and television series that it, in its turn, has spawned.

  'DESERVES AS MUCH CULT

  SUCCESS AS THE HITCH HIKER'S

  BOOKS THEMSELVES'

  Time Out

  REVISED & UPDATED

  ************************************************

  ********************************************************************

  `Hilarious fun... a source of much delightful trivia'

  - Publisbers Weekly

  `Fanciful and irreverent... adds much extra information'

  - Forecast

  `Droll and informative... indispensable'

  - American Library Association

  `Indispensable... a treasure trove of quotes and anecdotes'

  - Locus

  Full of fun... and much more information than most books

  of this type'

  - Science Fiction Chronicle

  `An excellent insight into the creative process'

  - Vector

  BOOKS BY DOUGLAS ADAMS

  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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts

  The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief

  Christmas Book (Editor)

  The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd)

  Thc Decper Mcaning of Liff (with John Lloyd)

  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts

  Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

  Thc Long Dark Tca-Timc of thc Soul

  Last Chance to See (with Mark Carwardine)

  OTHER BOOKS BY NEIL GAIMAN

  Black Orchid

  Thc Books of Magic

  Ghastly Beyond Belief

  Sandman: Thc Doll's House

  Sandman: Dream Country

  Sandman: A Game of You

  Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes

  Sandman: Season of Mists

  Violent Cases

  DON'T PANIC - DOUGLAS ADAMS & THE

  HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

  ISBN 185286 411 7

  Published by

  Titan Books Ltd

  19 Valentine Place

  London SE1 8QH

  First edition published as `Don't Panic: The Official

  Hitehhiker's Guide to tbe Galaxy Companion' January 1988

  Second revised edition July 1993

  1098765432

  Copyright (C) Neil Gaiman 1987,1993

  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all extracts from

  the works of Douglas Adams are copyright Douglas

  Adams 1987-1993 and used by permission of William

  Heinemann Ltd

  Cover illustration `Swarm Fish' (C) 1993 Britstock-IFA Ltd

  used with permission.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue

  record for this book is available from thc British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by

  way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or

  otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in

  any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

  published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox and Wyman Ltd,

  Reading, Berhshire

  Because she's threatened me with consequences too dreadful

  to consider if I don't dedicate a book to her...

  And because she's taken to starting every transatlantic

  conversation with "Have you dedicated a book to me yet?"...

  I would like to dedicate this book to intelligent life forms

  everywhere.

  And to my sister, Claire.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword ix

  0 The Hitchhiker's Gvide to Europe 1

  1 DNA 3

  2 Cambridge and Other Recurrent Phenonema 9

  3 The Wilderness Years 14

  4 Gherkin Swallowing, Walking

  Backwards and All That 19

  5 When Yov Hitch Upon a Star 23

  6 Radio, Radio 31

  1 A Slightly Unreliable Producer 43

  8 Have Tardis, Will Travel 47

  9 H2 G2 53

  10 All the Galaxy's a Stage 62

  11 "Childish, Pointless, Codswalloping Drivel..." 68

  12 level 42 72

  13 Of Mice, ond Men, ond Tired TV Producers 76

  14 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 101

  15 Invasion USA 105

  16 Life, the Universe, ond Everything 111

  11 Making Movies 119

  18 Liff, and Other Places 125

  19 SLATFAT fish 131

  20 Do You Know Where Your Towel Is? 146

  21 Games with Computers 148

  22 Letters to Douglas Adams 157

  23 Dirk Gently and Time for Tea 167

  24 Saving the World at No Extra Charge 174

  25 Douglas and Other Animals 179

  26 Anything That Happens, Happens 185

  Appendix I: Hitchhiker's - the Original Sypnosis 191

  Appendix II: The Variant Texts of Hitchhiker's-

  What Happens Where and Why 195

  Appendix III: Who's Who in the Galaxy-

  Some Comments by Douglas Adams 201

  Appendix IV: The Definitive How to Leave the Planet 210

  Appendix V: Dr Who and the Krikkitmen-

  an Excerpt from the film Treatment by Douglas Adams 214

  Foreword

  THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY is the most

  remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out

  of the great publishing companies of Ursa Minor. It is about the

  size of a paperback book, but looks more like a large pocket

  calculator, having upon its face over a hundred flat press-buttons

>   and a screen about four inches square, upon which any one of

  over six million pages can be summoned almost instantly. It

  comes in a durable plastic cover, upon which the words

  DON'T PANIC!

  are printed in large, friendly letters.

  There are no known copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the

  Galaxy on this planet at this time.

  This is not its story.

  It is, however, the story of a book also called, at a very high

  level of improbability, The HitchHiker's Guide to tbe Galaxy; of

  the radio series that started it all; the five-book trilogy it

  comprises; the computer game, towel, and television series that it,

  in its turn, has spawned.

  To tell the story of the book - and the radio series, and the

  towel - it is best to tell the story of some of the minds behind it.

  Foremost among these is an ape-descended human from the

  planet Earth, although at the time our story starts he no more

  knows his destiny (which will include international travel,

  computers, an almost infinite number of lunches, and becoming

  mindbogglingly rich) than an olive knows how to mix a Pan

  Galactic Gargle Blaster.

  His name is Douglas Adams, he is six foot five inches tall,

  and he is about to have an idea.

  0

  The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe

  THE IDEA IN QUESTION bubbled into Douglas Adams's mind

  quite spontaneously, in a field in Innsbruck. He no longer has

  any personal memory of it having happened. But it's the story he

  tells, and, if there can be such a thing, it's the beginning. If you

  have to take a flag reading THE STORY STARTS HERE and

  stick it into the story, then there is no other place to put it.

  It was 1971, and the eighteen-year-old Douglas Adams was

  hitchhiking his way across Europe with a copy of The

  Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe that he had stolen (he hadn't

  bothered `borrowing' a copy of Europe on $5 a Day; he didn't

  have that kind of money).

  He was drunk. He was poverty-stricken. He was too poor to

  afford a room at a youth hostel (the entire story is told at length

  in his introduction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A

  Trilogy in Four Parts in England, and The Hitchhiker's Trilogy in

  the US) and he wound up, at the end of a harrowing day, flat on

  his back in a field in Innsbruck, staring up at the stars.

  "Somebody," he thought, "somebody really ought to write a

  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

  He forgot about the idea shortly thereafter.

  Five years later, while he was struggling to think of a

  legitimate reason for an alien to visit Earth, the phrase returned to him. The rest is history, and will be told in this book.

  The field in Innsbruck has since been transformed into an

  unremarkable section of autobahn.

  ***************************************************************

  "When you're a student or whatever, and you can't afford a car,

  or a plane fare, or even a train fare, all you can do is hope that

  someone will stop and pick you up.

  "At the moment we can't afford to go to other planets. We

  don't have the ships to take us there. There may be other people

  out there (I don't have any opinions about Life Out There,I just

  don't know) but it's nice to think that one could, even here and

  now, be whisked away just by hitchhiking."

  - Douglas Adams,1984.

  ***************************************************************

  1

  DNA

  DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID, commonly known as DNA, is the

  fundamental genetic building block for all living creatures. The

  structure of DNA was discovered and unravelled, along with its

  significance, in Cambridge, England, in 1952, and announced to

  the world in March 1953.

  This was not the first DNA to appear in Cambridge,

  however. A year earlier, on the 11 th March 1952, Douglas Noel

  Adams was born in a former Victorian workhouse in Cambridge.

  His mother was a nurse, his father a postgraduate theology

  student who was training for holy orders, but gave it up when his

  friends managed to persuade him it was a terrible idea.

  His parents moved from Cambridge when he was six months

  old, and divorced when he was five. At that time, Douglas was

  considered a little strange, possibly even retarded. He had only

  just learned to talk and, "I was the only kid who anybody I knew

  has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide

  open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on

  inside, because there sure as hell didn't seem to be anything going

  on on the outside!"

  Douglas was a solitary child; he had few close friends, and

  one sister, Susan, three years younger than he was.

  In September 1959 he started at Brentwood School in Essex,

  where he stayed until 1970. He says of the school, "We tended to

  produce a lot of media trendies. Me, Griff Rhys Jones, Noel

  Edmunds, Simon Bell (who wrote the novelisation for Griff and

  Mel Smith's famous non-award winning movie, Morons from

  Outer Space; he's not a megastar yet, but he gives great parties). A

  lot of the people who designed the Amstrad Computer were at

  Brentwood, as well. But we had a very major lack of archbishops,

  prime ministers and generals."

  He was not particularly happy at school, most of his

  memories having to do with "basically trying to get off games".

  Although he was quite good at cricket and swimming he was

  terrible at football and "diabolically bad at rugby - the first time

  I ever played it, I broke my own nose on my knee. It's quite a

  trick, especially standing up.

  "They could never work out at school whether I was terribly

  clever or terribly stupid. I always had to understand everything

  fully before I was prepared to say anything."

  He was a tall and gawky child, self-conscious of his height:

  "My last year at prep school we had to wear short trousers, and I

  was so absurdly lanky, and looked so ridiculous, that my mother

  applied for special permission for me to wear long trousers. And

  they said no, pointing out I was just about to go into the main

  school. I went to the main school and was allowed to wear long

  trousers, at which point we discovered they didn't have any long

  enough for me. So for the first term I still had to go to school in

  short trousers."

  His ambitions at that time had more to do with the sciences

  than the arts: "At the age when most kids wanted to be firemen, I

  wanted to be a nuclear physicist. I never made it because my

  arithmetic was too bad - I was good at maths conceptually, but

  lousy at arithmetic, so I didn't specialise in the sciences. If I had known what they were, I would have liked to be a software

  engineer... but they didn't have them then."

  His hobbies revolved around making model aeroplanes ("I had

  a big display on top of a chest of drawers at home. There was a large

  old mirror that stood behind them, and one day the mirror fell

  forward and crushed the lot of them. I never made a model plane

  after that,
I was upset, distraught for days. It was this mindless blow

  that fate had dealt me..."), playing the guitar, and reading.

  "I didn't read as much as, looking back, I wish I had done.

  And not the right things, either. (When I have children I'll do as

  much to encourage them to read as possible. You know, like hit

  them if they don't.) I read Biggles, and Captain W. E. Johns's

  famous science fiction series -I particularly remember a book

  called Quest for the Perfect Planet, a major influence, that was.

  There was an author called Eric Leyland, who nobody else ever

  seems to have heard of: he had a hero called David Flame, who

  was the James Bond of the ten-year-olds. But when I should have

  been packing in the old Dickens, I was reading Eric Leyland

  instead. But there you go - you can' tell kids, can you?"

  Douglas was also an avid reader of Eagle, at that time

  Britain's top children's comic, and home of Dan Dare. `Dan

  Dare', drawn by artist Frank Hampson, was a science fiction strip

  detailing the banle between jut-jawed space pilot Dare, his comic

  sidekick Digby, and the evil green Mekon. It was in Eagle that

  Douglas first saw print. He had two letters published there at the

  age of eleven, and was paid the (then) enormous sum of ten

  shillings each for them. The short story shows a certain

  precocious talent (see page 6).

  Of Alice in Wonderland, often cited as an influence, he says I

  read - or rather, had read to me - Alice in Wonderland as a child

  and I hated it. It really frightened me. Some months ago, I tried to

  go back to it and read a few pages, and I thought, `This is jolly

  good stuff, but still...' If it wasn't for that slightly nightmarish

  quality that I remember as a kid I'd've enjoyed it, but I couldn't

  shake that feeling. So although people like to suggest that Carroll

  was a big influence - using the number 42 and all that - he really