The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Del Rey Books (Verlag)
978-0-345-45374-7 (ISBN)
What Was He Like,Douglas Adams?He was tall, very tall. He had an air of cheerful diffidence. Hecombined a razor-sharp intellect and understanding of whathe was doing with the puzzled look of someone who hadbacked into a profession that surprised him in a world thatperplexed him. And he gave the impression that, all in all, he was ratherenjoying it.He was a genius, of course. It's a word that gets tossed around a lotthese days, and it's used to mean pretty much anything. But Douglas wasa genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, hecould communicate the world he saw. Also, once you'd seen it his wayyou could never go back.Douglas Noel Adams was born in 1952 in Cambridge, England (shortlybefore the announcement of an even more influential DNA, deoxyribonucleicacid). He was a self-described "strange child" who did not learnto speak until he was four. He wanted to be a nuclear physicist ("I nevermade it because my arithmetic was so bad"), then went to Cambridge tostudy English, with ambitions that involved becoming part of the traditionof British writer/performers (of which the members of Monty Python'sFlying Circus are the best-known example).When he was eighteen, drunk in a field in Innsbruck, hitchhiking acrossEurope, he looked up at the sky filled with stars and thought, "Somebodyought to write the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Then he went tosleep and almost, but not quite, forgot all about it.He left Cambridge in 1975 and went to London where his many writ-ingand performing projects tended, in the main, not to happen. Heworked with former Python Graham Chapman writing scripts and sketchesfor abortive projects (among them a show for Ringo Starr which containedthe germ of Starship Titanic) and with writer-producer John Lloyd(they pitched a series called Snow Seven and the White Dwarfs, a comedyabout two astronomers in "an observatory on Mt. Everest-"The ideafor that was minimum casting, minimum set, and we'd just try to sell theseries on cheapness").He liked science fiction, although he was never a fan. He supportedhimself through this period with a variety of odd jobs: he was, for example,a hired bodyguard for an oil-rich Arabian family, a job that entailedwearing a suit and sitting in hotel corridors through the night listening tothe ding of passing elevators.In 1977 BBC radio producer (and well-known mystery author) SimonBrett commissioned him to write a science fiction comedy for BBC RadioFour. Douglas originally imagined a series of six half-hour comediescalled The Ends of the Earth-funny stories which at the end of each, theworld would end. In the first episode, for example, the Earth would bedestroyed to make way for a cosmic freeway.But, Douglas soon realized, if you are going to destroy the Earth, youneed someone to whom it matters. Someone like a reporter for, yes, theHitchchiker's Guide to the Galaxy . And someone else . . . a man who wascalled Alaric B in Douglas's original proposal. At the last moment Douglascrossed out Alaric B and wrote above it Arthur Dent. A normal namefor a normal man.For those people listening to BBC Radio 4 in 1978 the show came as arevelation. It was funny-genuinely witty, surreal, and smart. The serieswas produced by Geoffrey Perkins, and the last two episodes of the firstseries were co-written with John Lloyd.(I was a kid who discovered the series-accidentally, as most listenersdid-with the second episode. I sat in the car in the driveway, gettingcold, listening to Vogon poetry, and then the ideal radio line "Ford,you're turning into an infinite number of penguins," and I was happy;perfectly, unutterably happy.)By now, Douglas had a real job. He was the script editor for th
| Reihe/Serie | Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis ; Vol.1-5 | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ; Vol.1-5 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | New York |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 160 x 232 mm |
| Gewicht | 771 g |
| Einbandart | kartoniert |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction |
| Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen | |
| Schlagworte | Englisch; Science Fiction |
| ISBN-10 | 0-345-45374-3 / 0345453743 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-345-45374-7 / 9780345453747 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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