The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began on a Wednesday night at 10:30 pm in 1978, when a low-key BBC Radio 4 broadcast went out to what its makers could hardly have expected would become a global audience. The show received good reviews and a reaction that, by radio standards, was tremendous. What had started as a simple comedy science fiction sitcom would expand over the following decades into novels, television, theatre, film, comic books, video games, and collector's towels. Douglas Adams, the man behind all of it, traced the idea back to a night in 1971 when he lay drunk in a field near Innsbruck, looking up at the stars with a copy of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe in his hands, and thought someone should write a version for the galaxy. The question the story kept asking was deceptively simple: what happens to an ordinary man when everything familiar is destroyed? The answer, it turned out, was both absurd and profound. By 2005, the first novel alone had sold over 14 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. And the number at the heart of it all, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, was 42.

• 2. From Field to Radio

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  Adams's original proposal was called "The Ends of the Earth": six self-contained radio episodes, each ending with the Earth being destroyed in a different way. While writing the first episode, he realized he needed an alien on the planet to provide context, someone with a reason to be there. He settled on making that alien a roving researcher for a book he called "a wholly remarkable book", The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As the writing progressed, the Guide moved from background detail to the centre of the whole story, and the repeated destruction of Earth became a single event rather than six.

  The radio series labeled its episodes "Fits", borrowing the term from the sections of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark". Peter Jones, cast after a three-month search and after at least three actors including Michael Palin had turned down the role, narrated as the voice of the Guide. Adams wanted the production to match the quality of a modern rock album, and much of the budget went to sound effects. The work was split between Paddy Kingsland at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who handled the pilot and the second series, and Dick Mills and Harry Parker, who covered episodes two through six of the first series. The series was the first comedy programme produced in stereo.

  For the theme, Adams chose "Journey of the Sorcerer", an instrumental piece composed by Bernie Leadon and recorded by the Eagles on their 1975 album One of These Nights. The choice came down to the song's futuristic quality, but also, as producer Geoffrey Perkins recalled, because it had a banjo in it, which Adams felt gave the show an "on the road, hitch-hiking feel". The first series was repeated twice in 1978 alone, and a second series of five episodes followed in 1980, bringing the total to twelve.

• 3. The Novel That Outsold Its Origin

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  BBC Publishing turned down the chance to publish a novelisation of the first radio series, a decision they would later regret. Pan Books took on the first book instead, releasing it in 1979 initially in paperback. It reached number one on the book charts in only its second week and sold over 250,000 copies within three months. A hardback edition appeared in the United States in October 1980 through Harmony Books, a division of Random House. The 1981 US paperback edition was promoted by giving away 3,000 free copies in Rolling Stone magazine to build word of mouth.

  The five novels Adams wrote were described as "a trilogy in five parts", a joke that evolved with each new book. The US edition of the fifth book carried the legend "The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" on its cover. Adams himself considered The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second novel, to be his best of the five. He described the fifth, Mostly Harmless, as "a very bleak book" and said he would love to finish the series on a more upbeat note. Before his death from a heart attack on the 11th of May 2001, he was considering a sixth novel, drawing on ideas from an abandoned Dirk Gently project titled The Salmon of Doubt. He had suggested he wanted to start with all the characters together in the same place.

  Eoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl, was eventually commissioned to write that sixth book. It was announced in September 2008 with the support of Jane Belson, Adams's widow, and published by Penguin Books in the UK and Hyperion in the US in October 2009 under the title And Another Thing. Colfer used Adams's idea of gathering the characters together but drew none of the plot from The Salmon of Doubt.

• 4. Screen and Stage

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  The television series that followed the radio hit was directed and produced by Alan J. W. Bell and first aired on BBC 2 in January and February 1981. A second television series was planned, built around Adams's abandoned Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen project, but disputes with the BBC over budget, scripts, and production decisions stopped it from being made. The ideas from that project eventually fed into the third novel, Life, the Universe and Everything.

  The first professional stage adaptation ran at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London between the 1st and the 19th of May 1979. It was directed by Ken Campbell and starred Chris Langham as Arthur Dent. The audience was limited to eighty people per night, seated in a hovercar described as a fraction of an inch above the floor. This was the first version of the story to represent Zaphod Beeblebrox by putting two actors inside one large costume.

  A third stage production, held at the Rainbow Theatre in London in July 1980, ran for more than three hours and was widely panned, closing three or four weeks early after losing a significant sum of money. Despite its failure, two performers from that production, Michael Cule and David Learner, went on to appear in the television adaptation.

  The feature film took a quarter of a century from the first book's publication to reach cinemas. Filming began on the 19th of April 2004, and the film premiered in London on the 20th of April 2005. It starred Martin Freeman as Arthur, Yasiin Bey as Ford, Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin, and Stephen Fry as the voice of the Guide. Commercially it was a modest success, taking $21 million in its opening weekend in the United States and nearly £3.3 million in its opening weekend in the United Kingdom. A unique element Adams created specifically for the film was a device called the Point-of-View Gun, which appeared in no other version of the story.

• 5. The Number 42

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  Deep Thought, a supercomputer built to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, delivers its answer after eons of calculation: 42. The joke worked because the answer was so absurdly plain after such elaborate effort. It became one of the most recognisable cultural references the series produced, appearing in Doctor Who, Lost, Star Trek, and The X-Files, among other works.

  The influence spread beyond fiction. Two asteroids discovered shortly after Adams's death in 2001 were named 18610 Arthurdent and 25924 Douglasadams. A fish species and a moth species were both named Bidenichthys beeblebroxi and Erechthias beeblebroxi respectively, after Zaphod Beeblebrox. Radiohead's singer Thom Yorke named the band's song "Paranoid Android" after Marvin, and the album it appeared on, OK Computer, took its name from how Zaphod addressed the starship Heart of Gold's onboard computer Eddie. The band had been listening to the radio plays while on tour.

  Towel Day, celebrated each year on the 25th of May, is a fan-created event that began in 2001, two weeks after Adams's death. Fans carry a towel throughout the day in reference to the importance towels hold for a galactic hitchhiker as described in the series. The 42nd anniversary of the Guide's appearance on Radio 4 fell in 2020, when Demon Records also released the original radio episodes on vinyl in three colour variants: Translucent Vogon Green, Translucent Magrathean Blue, and Translucent Pan-Galactic Purple.

• 6. The Guide as Prophecy

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  The fictional Guide itself, described in the books as a small book-sized object holding a vast volume of information, predated laptop computers and bears a clear resemblance to modern tablet computers. Adams included a Babel Fish in the story, a creature that provided instant translation between any language when placed in the ear. Software products capable of near-real-time translation have since made that function a practical reality. Voice, touch, and gesture control of computers, also described in the series, became standard features of everyday devices.

  Adams was not trying to predict the future. His writing used these concepts to poke fun at scientific advancement and the artificial personalities that might be built into technology. That the jokes later described real products is itself a kind of tribute to how clearly he understood the direction things were heading. The radio scripts he co-authored with producer Geoffrey Perkins were first published in book form in 1985, then reissued in a tenth-anniversary edition in 1995 and a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition in 2003. In 2018, on the 40th anniversary of the very first broadcast, a sixth radio series, the Hexagonal Phase, opened with the late Professor Stephen Hawking introducing himself as the voice of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mk II by saying: "I have been quite popular in my time. Some even read my books."