Book Review: 42 - The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, edited by Kevin Jon Davies

I can remember hearing The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Universe on the car radio while on holiday with my parents. We all tuned in as the car meandered on through the countryside, enchanted by the offbeat story and the crazy characters, (Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin the Paranoid Android, Ford Prefect); the imaginative concepts (The Infinite Improbability Drive; The Total Perspective Vortex), but best of all the clever narrative and dialogue. And all read by the inimitable Peter Jones, who my parents already loved from Just a Minute, another radio show which was full of puns and wordy humour.      

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
“Why, what did she tell you?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

The radio show came out in Britain in 1978, and a year later, Douglas adapted it as a book of the same name, with several more books to come. There was a TV series not long after that and a movie in 2005. My family has all the books at home and they are well-thumbed and reread often, with quotes preserved to memory to be flung about at random across the dinner table.

“Listen, three eyes,” he said, “don’t you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”

So I thought I knew all about Hitch Hiker’s Guide fandom. But when I came across the newly published 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, I was impressed. This book is fandom taken to a whole new level.

42 is really a look inside the mind of an imaginative genius. Apparently when Adams died in 2001, he left a ton of papers – notebooks, letters and other bits and pieces. You can tell Kevin Jon Davies has made a huge effort to cull and glean, picking out the best examples for the book. Davies begins by taking the reader back to Douglas Adams’s school days – there are images showing school reports (A’s for Chemistry, Music and Art; C’s for Maths, French and Physics, in case you’re interested), then through university life at Cambridge and what looks like an essay on Troilus and Cressida, as well as student union debates and student theatre.

There follow chapters on The Guide and the Holistic Detective books, fandom and other collaborations. The book is a weighty tome, illustrated with snaps from holidays and theatre productions, images of notes, handwritten and typed, as well as scripts and letters. I wish Adams had tidier handwriting for there’s a lot of it, but it’s certainly intriguing to see how his mind worked.

42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams is interesting to flick through, with its blending of biography with images of selected memorabilia. It’s an impressive project and comes together nicely for a diverting read - probably more for your serious fan than the casual Douglas Adams reader or someone new to his work. If you haven’t discovered the joy of Douglas Adams, start with The Hitch-Hiker's Guide series, which you can find at the library. Catalogue info below:

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Universe: a trilogy in five parts
The Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe
Life, the Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless
Also: And Another Thing, penned by Eoin Colfer

 Posted by JAM

16 February 2024

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