Historical Impact of Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's guide the galaxy"

Musings about the author, Douglas Adams...

I read the "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" last night. I was able to get through the first half before bedtime, and the second half before three am, after waking up in the wee hours of the morning.

This was a very formative piece of literature I read in my early adolescence and late childhood.

It is very interesting that this book is so central to what has happened to our society since. This, and the monty python skits and films.

Google is mentioned in there... "A googleplex computer which can sort through all this information."

SecondLife is described in there - in fact the whole plotline describes a secondlife type world.

The electronic book at the heart of the story is a prediction of what the internet would be - and also this plot element predicts the rise of wikipedia.

Hackers are described in there.. Impish kids who break into secret places and are rewarded with all the toys and candy they want, and eventually get a nice trip home.

The project to make mars habitable was in there - this is still a conceptual thing... but... apparently it's scientifically possible.

In fact, given one of the central premises of the book was to predict the internet... you can see in the first few chapters, when Douglas Adams was still giving a bit of thought to his work - that he was predicting how computer hobbyists would create technology. The prediction was, of course, that they would draw on the skills of a thousand writers who would together create this handbook for doing whatever was fun... this handbook would be much more popular and more wellread and more informal than current day encyclopedias.

Of course, most of Adams' book consists of drunken ramblings... and from the look of the types of fantasies he's having, I would say probably Mr. Adams was doing mushrooms.

I remember reading this book and liking it a lot. I read the sequels too. I also remember being extremely disillusioned when the "Heart of gold" scene occurred - because that marked the end of the well written part of the book.

I can see how this novelist - one of my idols from my early adolescence, wrote his book... The first part of the book was very well written - Arthur Dent and his house and the ascent to the vogon spacecraft...

And you can see that there is a map of things which he is trying to teach. He has insights into various areas of life. And he lays them very deftly out - spacing them across the first few pages. And then he fills in the gaps with improvisation. Definitely drunken improvisation.

So, the confused english teacher stereotype, who daydreamed too much on her summer vacations, was indeed the hallmark of the writers of the 1970s and 1980s.

Writers did, in that day and age, do a lot of daydreaming - looking for what they thought of as "inspiration." I imagine that if you trace it back - their own icon was Timothy Leary and all the psychiatrists who were trying to "research" with lsd in the 1950s.

The centralized media - the bbc - took Douglas Adams' stuff and made it into a radio program. Thus, his voice got heard, and no doubt, the voices of a thousand other better writers of children's and youth literature got drowned out.

Now... the root of the problem is severalfold. The biggest difficulty is the same problem which happened hundreds of years ago - governments want to control ideas. Why was there this big move at media consolidation under the republican party in the first half of the first decade? Because it has been standard practice in past decades and centuries.

Therefore... somehow no one has ever made or successfully sold small printing presses/bindery equipment where writers could make and automate the creation of books to sell their own work as a cottage industry (until recently).

Therefore, this government colludes with newspapers, cable television, and other types of mainstream media and also colludes with the wealthy of the land, to make certain that advertising dollars pay for programming. And in their minds - it's a nice charity event... and that's cool. But in reality, it prevents the marketplace itself from selecting for the best authors' works.

As a kid, I couldn't find good books to read. I still can't today. Now what's the reason for this really? Writers don't keep each other to standards. If they did, they would know which books to encourage you to read. They would be able to found high quality publishing shops which would only print good literature. But no... and why don't writers keep each other to standards...? Instead, they encouraged Douglas Adams to put down all his drunken ravings as if it was inspired literature. The reason is poverty. There is no money in writing, or in cable television programming, or in newspaper writing. These industries all subsist on shoestring budgets. Writers live hand to mouth.

I really have steered clear of the writers' internet bulletin boards over the past several years, as I've honed my skills. Mostly, I have seen them as places full of bad advice. One thing I saw some time ago, is a yearly celebration they have "NaNoWriMo "- "National write a novel in a month". Obviously, this is a brash move to try to encourage poor quality in literature. It's also a brash move to try to get food for their fellow writers' children.

The problem is that we just create more and more of a sea of literature which is of poor quality. And particularly, the children suffer without a guild which has it's act together enough to tutor them and help them along the way. The most prescient children today are put under stigmas of being ADD, or having Aspergers. Their parents have no idea of how to deal with their child's exuberance for critical thought and flamboyant, detailed ideas.