NOTES ON DOUGLAS ADAMS or THE MAKING OF AN EX-NERD By Harry Cheadle 1. The first lines of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which, when I read them as a twelve-year-old sitting in a large green chair in my grandparents' house, forced me to read the next hundred pages in one sitting: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting that at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time." 2. Time it took me, after reading the first volume of that five-part "trilogy," to purchase the sequel: about six months. 3. Time it took, after reading the second one, to get the other three: about five months. 4. The reason for my delay from the first book to the second: ignorance. At the time, I wasn't aware that the book in my hands was a beloved cult classic based on a BBC radio program that had since spawned another radio series, a computer game, a TV show and, notably, a beach towel. (After Adams's death, the feature film version was released, a movie whose faults I will discuss later, in detail.) In fact, despite an inside cover exhorting me to "look for these hilarious Hitchhiker books by Douglas Adams!" I didn't even fully realize that there was a sequel until I spotted The Restaurant at the End of the Universe at a bookstore and bought it immediately. 5. My excuse for my ignorance: at the time, I was just beginning my descent into the world of science fiction, a genre that pulled me in and kept me in its clutches from sixth grade until the last year of high school. The problem was, I had no one to initiate me into this world, no older relative or friend who could advise me on what to read and what to avoid. Sci-fi is a genre with a few well-known masters, a number of quirky, unpopular geniuses, and universe upon universe of more or less interchangeable hacks and imitators. A guru could have steered me towards Phillip K. Dick (who I never picked up), told me which of Asimov's and Clarke's books were really worth reading, and would have guided me away from Piers Anthony's twee, interminable Xanth series. Alas, the closest I ever came to an advisor was a middle-school friend who turned me on to a number of epic fantasy series that featured fully imagined worlds, complex rules regarding the use of magic, and a great many graphic battle sequences and sex scenes. 6. Number of sex scenes in the five Guide books: one. It is a memorable one, however, as the couple is flying through the sky at the time of consummation and nearly run into a Boeing 747. 7. The plot of the series: after the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial bypass, a boring and easily frightened Englishman named Arthur Dent escapes thanks to his friend, Ford Prefect, who is human in appearance but actually from Betelgeuse. Ford is a researcher for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a field guide to the universe that is a cross between Zagat's and Wikipedia. The pair bum around the universe with Zaphod Beeblebrox, an insane two-headed former galactic president, and Trillian, an Earth woman Zaphod had picked up at a costume party on Earth some years before. Most of the time, they concern themselves with not getting killed, getting a bite to eat, finding a good party, and in Arthur's case, finding a world that is not entirely unlike Earth and settling down. 8. The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, as revealed to the characters: 42. The Question is never discovered. 9. The end to the concluding book, Mostly Harmless: the characters manage to end up back on Earth, which has reappeared, but their adventures end abruptly when they are all killed when the planet gets demolished again. 10. The reason for the depressing end, according to an interview with Adams: "I was having a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book against that background. And guess what, it was a rather bleak book!" 11. Number of times I've read the Guide, over the years: At least five or six. Maybe more like ten. At this point, I don't read every word, just skim through the pages, looking for any good bits I might have forgotten, not unlike a Star Wars fan who watches the films even though he knows all the lines already. 12. Some passages from the books, selected more or less at random: "How do you feel?" Ford asked. "Like a military academy,'" said Arthur, "'bits of me keep passing out." When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidentally change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off your stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his. Virtually everything in his life was, to a greater or lesser extent, odd. It was just that this was odd in a slightly different way than he was used to things being odd, which was, well, strange. He couldn't quite get it into focus immediately. Zaphod grinned two manic grins, sauntered over to the bar and bought most of it. 13. A particularly famous line, considered to be on par with the Five Precepts of Zen Buddhism by some of Adams's more ardent fans: "A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." 14. The date of Towel Day, when fans worldwide carry a towel to commemorate Adams's untimely death in 2001: May 25th 15. The reason I've never participated in Towel Day: quite frankly, the "cult" status of the Guide unnerves me. The books have a real following, and I've never wanted to be part of a following. In a way, this feeling is purely narcissistic - the books meant something to me, how could they mean so much to other people? My taste, especially in books, is not public property, nor do I want to put it on display. 16. The other reason: I have an intense aversion to belonging to groups, especially groups of "fans," those convention-attending unfortunates walking around in elaborate costumes getting into heated arguments with strangers about the relative merits of Star Trek episodes. Their behavior strikes me as almost unbearably sad - the fan's need for escape is so obvious, his emotional scars so clearly on display. Has this world failed these people so much that they seek refuge in someone else's fictional one? 17. The time of life in which most sci-fi readers become sci-fi readers: before high school, very often in elementary school. To be fair, there are many sci-fi fans who are middle-aged or older, but only rarely do they discover the genre later in life. 18. The reason for this: whatever sci-fi's intentions, the genre seems tailor-made for a certain sort of maladjusted youth. Usually male, this genus of adolescent is smart and intrigued by odd bits of knowledge: the anatomy of bugs, the rules to complex role-playing games, the inner workings of computers, the intricacies of calculus. He doesn't tend to care about the things that his peers do, and that phase of life being the cruel social environment it is, he usually ends up being cut off from ordinary interaction with the other newly-minted teenagers. 19. The worst part of this condition: these castoffs are smart enough to be fully aware of their awkwardness. They know no one their age wants to hear about computer programming, they know they don't have whatever it is the "popular" kids do. They consider the people who ignore or taunt them idiots at the same time they envy them for there social confidence. 20. Why they like sci-fi: in classical science fiction, the hero is always knowledge. Ideas - not some muscle-bound, oafish jock - can save the universe. This is readily apparent in Isaac Asimov's famous Foundation series, in which the decline of the galaxy is slowed by a scientist who creates a way of predicting the future through sociological math, but it is everywhere. Sci-fi protagonists are frequently scientists, and their discoveries are always massively important and immediately useful, to the point of saving Earth from the tyranny of the space-elephants or whatever. This type of outcast we are discussing reads the books and imagines, subconsciously, that all that "useless" knowledge of computers and bugs will one day be important enough to alter the course of history. 21. Why their daydreams aren't far from the truth: as has been amply demonstrated by Bill Gates, Paul Allen, et al, a lot of this knowledge ends up not only altering the course of history, it also can make some of these sci-fi outcasts grotesquely wealthy. 22. Why I hate the word "nerd": like many overused words, it has lost all of its meaning. There was recently a wave of newspaper-lifestyle-section articles about how "Geeky is the new cool," which started a trend that culminated in a number of network sitcoms in which the main characters were "nerds," which meant they wore pocket protectors and could do superhuman things with computers - the stereotypical, cartoonish version of nerddom. In reality, the true "nerds" of the world are frequently lonely, used to disappointment, and unsure of themselves to the point of neurosis. "Nerd" is too cute of a word to encompass the pain that lies at the bottom of every nerd's heart. 23. My method for buying books, back when I was a nerd: I would troll the sci-fi shelves of the used bookstores in Seattle's U District, hoping for familiar authors or simply titles that stood out to me. That was one way. Another was my yearly pilgrimage to the Library Book Festival, the Public Library's annual unloading of its unwanted books. Paperbacks were fifty cents, hardcovers a dollar. The stacks of books, not organized according to any principle at all, were set on folding tables in the immense hanger of an abandoned naval base, and I would spend an entire afternoon scanning the sea of dreck for possible gems. 24. My rule for buying books at the Festival: if I saw at least two titles belonging to the same series, I would buy all I could find. 25. The mostly-forgotten series I ended up reading as a result of this rule: Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords, which probably deserved to disappear from print George R. R. Martin's Wildcards, which absolutely did not deserve to. Jerry Pournelle's Warworld, which, unusually, got less technological as the series progressed, to the point where everyone was fighting with swords and spears. The Early Asimov, which had an introduction that said, essentially, "I'm showing this to you young sci-fi writers out there to reassure you that I was once a horrible writer too." Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, which I stopped reading after the hero raped someone early in the first book. Piers Anthony's Xanth, which was mostly concerned with overly-moralistic characters and punning. Enough said. 26. An obscure series I read religiously without ever encountering it at the Book Sale: the Battletech novels. Written by a collection of mostly obscure authors and based off of the popular Mechwarrior video games, these were truly awful. The science and logic of the semi-feudal universe was flimsy at best, as was the existence of the giant mechanical exoskeletons that formed the center of the series. The battle scenes were dry technical accounts of what missile hit which arm of which exoskeleton, and they frequently managed the difficult task of making a futuristic battle between superweapons the most boring part of the books. 27. The difference between the Guide and all the books listed above: Adams's wit. He was funny in a way that literally no other sci-fi author is. Humor in science fiction is usually limited to recycled jokes or short stories with exceedingly lame punchlines. Brian Herbert, the son of the infinitely-more-well-regarded Frank Herbert, tried to write funny sci-fi novels and they come off as jumbled, trippy, and mildly pornographic - but not funny. Adams, on the other hand, is sharp, biting, and has the knack for creating sentences with self-contained setups and punchlines. His is the only sci-fi I've ever laughed out loud at. 28. The other difference between Adams and the rest of science fiction: his characters are not out to save the universe. Many protagonists take it upon themselves to thwart evil - not so Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. All they want, respectively, is a cup of real tea and a wild party. 29. An indicative exchange, between the earnest would-be hero Slartibartfast and Ford Prefect from Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book: "We must got there to retrieve it before the Krikkit robots find it, or who knows what may happen." "No," said Ford firmly, "we must go to the party in order to drink a lot and dance with girls." 30. The message of The Lord of the Rings, which my dad read to me at the very dawn of my sci-fi phase: even the smallest person can make a difference. 31. The message of the Guide: no one can make a difference. And you'll probably have a bad time if you try, too. 32. Adjectives used to describe the Guide sequels on their back covers: "Whimsical," "Silly," and, in a quote from the LA Herald-Examiner, "Wacky, loony and zany!" 33. How I would describe the Guide: comparable to Candide, but slightly funnier. 34. The price my sci-fi collection fetched when I sold it back to the same used bookstores a great deal of it had come from: about a hundred bucks. 35. The reason I sold it: during my last years of high school, I was exposed to more "literary" authors. Once I read Gore Vidal, Ken Kesey, J.D. Salinger and Hunter S. Thompson, I began to understand what writing could do and I simply couldn't go back to my old favorites without thinking, "You know what? This is kind of bad, actually. It's not doing it for me anymore." I sold almost all of them without a hint of regret, especially the Xanth novels. 36. The reason I kept the Guide: it was still "doing it for me" as a reader, despite my change in taste. I had grown out of the phase where I wished I was a hero scientist, but still felt quite a bit like Arthur Dent. 37. The justification for the above Candide comparison: Like Candide, Arthur Dent is an innocent thrust into a world (or galaxy) he doesn't understand. Both travelers only want to recover what they already had - for Candide, Cunegonde; for Arthur, Earth - but are foiled again and again by events they have no control over. People keep telling them everything is fine and to relax (Ford often plays the Pangloss role) and they find themselves happiest when engaged in simple pleasures: Candide cultivating his garden and Arthur serving as "sandwich maker" for a tribe of people even more primitive than Earthlings. 38. The problem I have with the Guide movie, which actually wasn't bad: at the end, Arthur frees himself from the hands of his antagonists, and even starts dating the perpetual love interest Trillian. 39. Why this is such a problem: in the books, Arthur is saved only by Slartibartfast's chance intervention and Trillian never looks his way. The whole point is Arthur is a pathetic loser who is never in control of his own life. Having him dictate the action was the ultimate betrayal - as if in a Peanuts movie, Charlie Brown had kicked the football. 40. Why I no longer read science fiction: in all its investigation of other worlds, the genre almost never aims at the inner world of its characters, which is a goal I've come to value in fiction. Put simply, I hardly ever find myself reading a line in a sci-fi novel that is true the same way much of Salinger, for instance, is. 41. Why Adams is still the exception to that rule: after all this time, I still find that opening line, "...most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time," to be true. At least, true for all the people living on the planet I know. 42. The reason I carry a towel with me on every trip: it really is good advice. If you take nothing else out of the Guide, that's probably the most important bit.