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Dirk Gently had a reference to the Macintosh II. Perhaps not a specific model, but enough to date the book. I think the truth is he was an enthusiast and simply

by II2II 5y ago

Dirk Gently had a reference to the Macintosh II. Perhaps not a specific model, but enough to date the book. I think the truth is he was an enthusiast and simply dropped in references on whim. Besides, he never really struck me as a world builder since the stories seemed to craft the world rather than the other way around. You are right about technology references being jarring. I nearly died laughing while reading the Wrath of Khan about a decade after its release. The size of a game mentioned in the book was dwarfed by games at the time I was reading it by over an order of magnitude.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Adams also often made jokes about the Macintosh Portable. In particular about how non-portable it was (it came with a huge lead-gel battery)
throwanem 5y ago
Adams says as much as that he's not a "world builder" in the linked article, yeah. I get it. I've done extensive worldbuilding for a couple of stories, and it can be a lot of fun! You find yourself researching everything from the geological and climatological history of Earth to the detailed mechanics of gravitational slingshots. And then most of that ends up not really mattering all that much to the story, because for the most part what matters in a story is the characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding mainly goes to determining what situations and circumstances can feasibly arise. And then you probably end up throwing out or reworking a bunch of it anyway, when you have a compelling scene that the research says can't happen, and the scene does more for the story than all the worldbuilding in the world. Worldbuilding is best done with caution and in moderation - it's useful to an extent, but it can also easily become a rabbit hole at the cost of the story it's meant to support. You'll rarely err by spending less time in research and more with the characters whose stories you are after all trying to tell. (Granted, given Adams' prior experience as a Doctor Who scriptwriter that gave rise to his most famous series, and also his legendary work-shyness, I don't really credit him with having thought the whole thing far enough through to identify the general case. But who cares? His most famous series is famous for a reason, and I've never really felt the lack of a concordance describing the complete history of the Vogon bureaucracy or a Wikipedia page about Milliways.)
- bradknowles 5y ago
  I’ve had discussions with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle on this subject, and they’ve pointed me to other writings on the matter. For those authors who do a lot of world-building, the reader never sees 90-99% of the world that is built. The purpose of doing that world building is to have a scaffold on which the story can be hung, and which will help keep the story self-consistent. As a reader, you don’t need to know why a character had a particular relationship with their parents in a certain way, or what the nature of that relationship was. However, the nature of that relationship might drive a number of critical choices that the character would make, and therefore drive the story in a particular direction. I know that for my own characters I’ve created for role-playing games, I can get quite creative in their backstory, and write many pages on the subject. Most of that will never, ever show up in any game that I play, but I can also guarantee that all of it will inform choices that the character makes as we go through the campaign.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    Well, yeah, absolutely. Not that I imagine myself in a league anywhere even near that of Niven and Pournelle, but nobody sees most of the work I did in figuring out what would be plausible on the Earth of 170mya, either. But I've also encountered, and I suspect you probably have too, stories in which the work of worldbuilding was far too obvious, to the detriment of the story. That's really all I'm speaking against here, although I grant I didn't do a very good job making that clear in my prior comment.
    - bradknowles 5y ago
      Worldbuilding AS the story definitely does not work. If you’re going to do worldbuilding at all, then you have to have a story and a plot that will hang on that worldbuilding as the surface visible material over the structure provided — or the skin over the bones. And that skin still requires some flesh that occurs between those two extremes. IMO, the Silmarillion made for good worldbuilding. But not so good as an actual story.
matthewdgreen 5y ago
The Macintosh II was released in 1987, the same year that Dirk Gently was published. Specific models (like the IIx) weren’t released until the following year. Despite his reticence in TFA it’s obvious that Adams knew exactly which computers his characters were working with, because they were exactly the same computers that Adams worked with and loved.

by II2II 5y ago

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Adams also often made jokes about the Macintosh Portable. In particular about how non-portable it was (it came with a huge lead-gel battery)

throwanem 5y ago

Adams says as much as that he's not a "world builder" in the linked article, yeah. I get it. I've done extensive worldbuilding for a couple of stories, and it can be a lot of fun! You find yourself researching everything from the geological and climatological history of Earth to the detailed mechanics of gravitational slingshots. And then most of that ends up not really mattering all that much to the story, because for the most part what matters in a story is the characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding mainly goes to determining what situations and circumstances can feasibly arise. And then you probably end up throwing out or reworking a bunch of it anyway, when you have a compelling scene that the research says can't happen, and the scene does more for the story than all the worldbuilding in the world. Worldbuilding is best done with caution and in moderation - it's useful to an extent, but it can also easily become a rabbit hole at the cost of the story it's meant to support. You'll rarely err by spending less time in research and more with the characters whose stories you are after all trying to tell. (Granted, given Adams' prior experience as a Doctor Who scriptwriter that gave rise to his most famous series, and also his legendary work-shyness, I don't really credit him with having thought the whole thing far enough through to identify the general case. But who cares? His most famous series is famous for a reason, and I've never really felt the lack of a concordance describing the complete history of the Vogon bureaucracy or a Wikipedia page about Milliways.)

bradknowles 5y ago
I’ve had discussions with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle on this subject, and they’ve pointed me to other writings on the matter. For those authors who do a lot of world-building, the reader never sees 90-99% of the world that is built. The purpose of doing that world building is to have a scaffold on which the story can be hung, and which will help keep the story self-consistent. As a reader, you don’t need to know why a character had a particular relationship with their parents in a certain way, or what the nature of that relationship was. However, the nature of that relationship might drive a number of critical choices that the character would make, and therefore drive the story in a particular direction. I know that for my own characters I’ve created for role-playing games, I can get quite creative in their backstory, and write many pages on the subject. Most of that will never, ever show up in any game that I play, but I can also guarantee that all of it will inform choices that the character makes as we go through the campaign.
- throwanem 5y ago
  Well, yeah, absolutely. Not that I imagine myself in a league anywhere even near that of Niven and Pournelle, but nobody sees most of the work I did in figuring out what would be plausible on the Earth of 170mya, either. But I've also encountered, and I suspect you probably have too, stories in which the work of worldbuilding was far too obvious, to the detriment of the story. That's really all I'm speaking against here, although I grant I didn't do a very good job making that clear in my prior comment.
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    Worldbuilding AS the story definitely does not work. If you’re going to do worldbuilding at all, then you have to have a story and a plot that will hang on that worldbuilding as the surface visible material over the structure provided — or the skin over the bones. And that skin still requires some flesh that occurs between those two extremes. IMO, the Silmarillion made for good worldbuilding. But not so good as an actual story.

matthewdgreen 5y ago

The Macintosh II was released in 1987, the same year that Dirk Gently was published. Specific models (like the IIx) weren’t released until the following year. Despite his reticence in TFA it’s obvious that Adams knew exactly which computers his characters were working with, because they were exactly the same computers that Adams worked with and loved.