I'm a little late to this thread, but given Adams is my favorite author and one who I've thought quite a lot about over the past 40 years, here's some observati

I'm a little late to this thread, but given Adams is my favorite author and one who I've thought quite a lot about over the past 40 years, here's some observations: The core theme to all his books is infinity. Adams instinctively understood what an infinite universe would mean, and used it liberally as a plot device that incorporated deus-ex-machina into the story itself. The original H2G2 story explored the fact that probabilities mean nothing when infinity comes into play, and his last examined an infinite multiverse in which "luck" is taken to its logical extreme, where changing the future means manipulating the various divergent paths of the past so that just the right thing happens at the right time and place in the present. His talent was in following ideas to their absurd conclusions. The original series was supposed to be a bunch of different vignettes in which the Earth was destroyed at the end of each. But after writing the first, he thought, "What comes next?", and continued to flesh out the rest of story. This is a fundamental Adams hallmark, and the part of his writing I love most. Douglas was incredibly prescient, but not in an Arthur C. Clarke sort of way. He was a gadget freak without doubt, but he didn't really understand technology at a deep level. What he did was to take what was already common knowledge - from quantum mechanics to evolution to computers - and extrapolated their concepts to their logical conclusions. If you were to have a computerized "book", then it would need to be such and such a size, and look and sound like so, and get regular updates over an pervasive wireless network, etc. It just made sense, and history has born him out. What's amazing is that he did this with a variety topics including Artificial Intelligence, and it looks like his thoughts are still incredibly applicable almost 20 years after his death. It's sad that as times goes by, Adams work will eventually be shelved and as irrelevant as Jules Verne. Even today, the Guide is so like a modern smartphone, it doesn't feel to new readers as if there's anything novel or futuristic about it (like it was in 1978), which is too bad. But I guess that's the fate of anyone who writes stories incorporating technology.