42 Reasons To Miss Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams is releasing a new book this month – not bad going for a dead bloke. To be pedantic, the Douglas Adams Franchise is doing the releasing, under the cultish Hitchhiker banner, but that’s still a fair effort for a soul long gone and dearly missed.
Not that Adams believed in souls. Life, he wrote, is wasted on the living. An atheist until his death eight years ago, the comic giant was widely cherished for the nimble wordplay and mind-warp of his dozen books, five of which followed the galactic traipsing of Arthur Dent.
Seriously, you can forget the movie if that’s your sense of what Adams accomplished in his 49 years. Only when you ride the Hitchhiker prose will you discover how the man’s early exit has left a black hole in the sky.
The same hole the Franchise is aiming to fill next week, or insulate at least, by making the Hithchiker Trilogy an even greater misnomer with Book Number Six in the series, And Another Thing. The author is Eoin Colfer, the Irish creator of Artemis Fowl. Literary sleuths in nearby columns will duly explain how this new instalment came to be, but if Colfer can reach half the heights of his trailblazer, I’m sure fans will enjoy the trip.
Yet that’s not the weirdest Adams news I learnt this week. The other was a scoop spilt by a software designer, William Tunstall-Pedoe, a name suggestive of an Adams character, but in real life the inventor of Anagram Genius.
For those who don’t juggle words for a living, Anagram Genius was its own trailblazer back in 1994, being the first anagram engine to reach the marketplace. This nifty piece of software allowed you to wangle President Boris Yeltsin into ‘tipsiness done terribly’, among a slew of other marvels. Instead of pen and paper, your fingertips could now enter ‘Swimmer Stephanie Rice’ into the engine, and discover ‘she wins prime-time race’. Arthur Dent? A truth nerd.
Since Genius hit our screens 15 years ago, there have been countless rivals, but Genius was the package, I learnt, that Adams purchased just prior to his death. His plan, says Tunstall-Pedoe on his site, was to use the toy to help write a future project: a series of eccentric kids books inspired by his own anagram, LOUD MAD SAGAS.
As both a wordsmith and a fan, I’m somewhat underjoyed by this latest news, the black hole deepening if that’s possible. In fact I’m trying to figure out – locked in a true Adamsian paradox – wondering which is worse: reviving a dead man’s name by extending his finite series or discovering a suite of anagram-wild books that don’t exist.
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:51 pm
The man wrote beautifully crafted sentences, hard enough to do when one’s not trying to be funny. He made it look so effortless. Vale DA (him, not you).