Douglas Adams: 1952-2001
by James Norton
Douglas Adams taught me the importance of tea.
There is a long passage in the sequel to his best-known book, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where Englishman-in-exile Arthur Dent works with great earnestness and diligence to teach a spaceship's master computer how to brew a really good cup of tea. He feeds the computer so many inputs and variables that it eventually shuts down, just as the ship is attacked by a batch of particularly nasty aliens.
The chapter is hilarious, a little poignant and tremendously entertaining to think about, as is most of what Adams has written. Douglas Adams was an enormously talented and imaginative man.
He died of a heart attack this weekend, at the age of 49.
First and foremost amongst his creative endeavors, Adams leaves behind a series of novels and stories, including five books in the Hitchhiker's Guide series. The Guide books are probably science-fiction, technically, but his writing transcends the genre's traditional limits with its breadth and maturity.
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When I first read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" as a middle-school student, I was transformed. Adams told a different kind of story. The narrative was chopped up. There were page-long asides as witty and bizarre as they were seemingly random. Adams wrote a book that scampered and danced like the world does: multiple trains of thought accelerating, colliding and trying to sort themselves back out.
I loved the Guide because it was what every great book for a young person must be: an exhilarating gateway to a larger world. It made me feel sophisticated; although he'd written the Guide for adults, it was written in clear prose, and there were parts of it that I understood. The rest was still fascinating as hell.
Adams' books make readers ponder what the hell the universe is about. They make us laugh at the very ridiculousness of the question while slipping philosophy, sociology and psychology into their various comic asides. The "Hitchhiker's Guide" series is a stack of grandly amusing meditations on the way things are put together.
Adams also made us into Anglophiles — his gentle, biting wit and remarkably cozy grasp of the English language was seductive and soothing. My parents raised me on Adams, Monty Python, Paddington Bear and Tolkien, and I'll always be grateful for that — Adams especially distinguished himself with a gracious humanity that infused even the funniest and most acidic of his stories.
He liked people. It showed.
I am a writer in large part thanks to the words of Douglas Adams. Whenever I anthropomorphize a squirrel, or meditate on how Heaven hires its interns, or make imaginary mice fly through wind tunnels, I remember what Adams did first.
Douglas Adams touched thousands of people with his warmth, creativity and philosophical wit. May his books continue to do so for eons to come.
E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.
