Blair Armeau

Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams – A brilliant man.

Please check out his personal website at www.douglasadams.com

Biography

Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge in March 1952, educated at Brentwood School, Essex and St John’s College, Cambridge where, in 1974 he gained a BA (and later an MA) in English literature.He was creator of all the various manifestations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which started life as a BBC Radio 4 series. Since its first airing in March 1978 it has been transformed into a series of best-selling novels, a TV series, a record album, a computer game and several stage adaptations.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘s phenomenal success sent the book straight to Number One in the UK Bestseller List and in 1984 Douglas Adams became the youngest author to be awarded a Golden Pan. He won a further two (a rare feat), and was nominated – though not selected – for the first Best of Young British Novelists awards.

He followed this success with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980); Life, The Universe and Everything (1982); So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984); and Mostly Harmless (1992). The first two books in the Hitchhiker series were adapted into a 6 part television series, which was an immediate success when first aired in 1982. Other publications include Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul (1988). In 1984 Douglas teamed up with John Lloyd and wrote The Meaning of Liff and after a huge success The Deeper Meaning of Liff followed this in 1990). One of Douglas’s all-time personal favourites was written in 1990 when he teamed up with zoologist Mark Carwardine and wrote Last Chance to See – an account of a world-wide search for rare and endangered species of animals.

He sold over 15 million books in the UK, the US and Australia and was also a best seller in German, Swedish and many other languages.

Douglas was a founding director of h2g2, formerly The Digital Village, a digital media and Internet company with which he created the 1998 CD-ROM Starship Titanic, a Codie Award-winning (1999) and BAFTA-nominated (1998) adventure game.

Douglas died unexpectedly in May 2001 of a sudden heart attack. He was 49. He had been living in Santa Barbara, California with his wife and daughter, and at the time of his death he was working on the screenplay for a feature film version of Hitchhiker.

	The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy One Thursday lunchtime the Earth is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and the galaxy is a very strange and startling place. hhgg1
	The Restaurant at the End of the Universe Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons is a curious time to have a cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his curious comrades in arms as they hurtle through space powered by pure improbability – and desperately in search of a place to eat. hhgg2
	Life, The Universe and Everything The unhappy inhabitants of the planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky above their heads – so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals stand between the killer robots of Krikkit and their goals of annihilation… hhgg3
	So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish Left at the end of LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING with the address for God’s Final Message To His Creation, Arthur Dent let this crucial information slip his mind. hhgg4
	Young Zaphod Plays it Safe A quirky chapter which doesn’t really belong in the other books. However, it is included in this list for the sake of completion. hhgg5
	Mostly Harmless It’s easy to become disheartened when your planet has been demolished for an unnecessary hyperspacial express route, the woman you love has vanished in a misunderstanding about the nature of space/time, the spaceship in which you are travelling crashed in flames on a remote and Bob-fearing planet, and all you have to fall back on are a few sandwich-making skills. hhgg6