Hitchhiker Leaves for Another Galaxy--Douglas Adams

Although his first and most memorable book, which began as a BBC radio serial, is usually classified as science fiction, most of his fans know that Douglas Adams's work defied genre classification--just like its author. They were still eagerly awaiting the release of his next book, which started out as a new entry in his Dirk Gently series but somehow (as books are wont to do) changed course mid-write, when the news went out Sunday morning, May 13, that Douglas Adams was gone

According to newswire reports, the 49-year-old Adams collapsed while working out in his home gym and died shortly after at his home in Santa Barbara, CA. Cause of death is reported as a heart attack. His friends and family say they had no warning, no clue that death was lurking so close.

"He was not ill," his friend Elizabeth Gibson told the Associated Press. "This was completely unexpected."

He was born in Cambridge, England, in 1952, the son of a post-grad theology student and nurse, and graduated from Cambridge in 1974. It was a decade that spawned a lot of funny people--Dudley Moore, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Graham Chapman. Adams fit right in.

He was exploring Europe on semester break when the idea for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy first popped into his head. He tucked it away to ferment while he completed university and moved to London to try writing for television. Among his early work are several episodes of Dr. Who. Two years later, broke and short on work, he took a job as a bodyguard for Arabian royalty. Other non-writing-related moments included a stint cleaning chicken sheds and a gig playing guitar with Pink Floyd.

He also started writing Hitchhiker's Guide, first as a series of radio scripts that were so popular after they aired in 1978 they were broadcast four times and eventually evolved into a television series, two records, a stage show and an interactive game. Published as a novel, this tale of the last survivor of an Earth destroyed to make way for an intergalactic bypass has sold 14 million copies worldwide and become an integral part of modern culture. There are very few SF fans--and more than a few non-SF fans--who know for a fact that the answer to the ultimate question of live, the universe and everything is the number of Fox Mulder's apartment--42.

Adams quickly followed his first hit with a steady string of sequels--The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Live, the Universe and Everything and So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish. In 1987, he introduced Dirk Gently, the first "holistic detective," in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, followed by The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul the next year. In 1984, he co-wrote The Meaning of Liff with John Lloyd. Not surprisingly, it, too, was so popular a sequel was called for, so Adams and Lloyd produced The Deeper Meaning of Liff in 1990. His last book was a worldwide travelogue of his efforts to find rare and endangered species, Last Chance to See which he wrote with the help of zoologist Mark Carwardine, also in 1990.

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