7 ms·

The Later Years of Douglas Adams

225 points by doppp 2y ago

jfengel 2y ago
That was wrenching to read, but it tracks with what I inferred from the books themselves. I am so sorry that Hitchhikers became such a thorn in his side. It was so brilliant and he just didn't want to do any more, and nothing else really worked. He seemed very unhappy. I'm weirdly glad that the end wasn't a death of despair, just a weird stupid awful freak accident. So I'll choose to believe what the article says.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  It's hard to be compassionate and cynical at the same time. Your heart tells you that you want things to work out for the best so badly. You feel a little of all the suffering in the world around you. But you also know the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is going to make record profits this year.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    Oof. That hits me a little more personally than you might expect. I suppose that's true of a lot of people. But yeah I myself am having a lot of trouble balancing compassion with a deep anger that I can't help. The cynicism is my attempt to shield myself and it's not working so great either.
    - rachofsunshine 2y ago
      It's the defining challenge of our era! The brazenness - and visibility - of the hypocrisy and callousness of our leaders has eroded public trust. We no longer have any paragons, really. We just have people who we think aren't quite as bad as the alternative. To use the events of today as an example, everyone knows the people running CrowdStrike are going to continue being fabulously rich, and might not even lose their jobs. Even if, by some miracle, CrowdStrike gets sued out of existence, they'll walk away and still be multimillionaries. And when this seems so universal, so inevitable, in the people running the world (whether that be in business, politics, or whatever else), you start to wonder if it's even possible to do otherwise. One of the first things I wrote down when I founded my company was, quote, "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern." I don't know what the chances that that doomed my company on day 1 were, but they certainly are not zero. I am genuinely not sure it's possible to succeed in the world as it is without being a lying, cheating bastard to some degree. And I'm not the only one. Have you ever tried just going down a grocery-store aisle and counting every snake oil claim within your line of sight [1]? It's astounding. I looked on the coffee table my laptop is sitting on right now, and sure enough I've got a box of what are effectively Twizzlers claiming to be a health food because the sugar came from apple juice instead of being distilled first. Every room in my house is full of lies. It's desensitizing. "Quiet quitting" provides a workplace example of what this does to a culture. In a sense, intentionally not doing the work you're being paid to do is a crappy, somewhat immoral thing to do. It's certainly not a sign of good character, at least in my book. But people do it because they perceive (correctly) that their employer would screw them given the slightest chance. The local incentives of each side to be adversarial have fallen into a defect-defect equilibrium (see [2]) that is detrimental to both parties. Both sides are so used to being exploited that they defensively and preemptively spend tons of energy defending themselves against it and failing to find common ground in the many areas that aren't zero-sum. Worse, they even feel bad about things that are positive-value to themselves but might be used against them! [3] And once you're in that kind of a culture, it's so hard to argue for anything constructive. How can you believe in anything when the representatives, the would-be paragons, of every moral value you'd like to promote are flaunting ignoring them, when so many values are used as paper-thin excuses to hurt people day in and day out? That's true almost whatever you believe! Are you big on the traditional family? You're probably voting for the cheated-on-his-wife-with-a-porn-star guy. Did you favor invasive pandemic measures in California? You're probably voting for the guy who had a party while you were staying home. Like organized labor? You're voting for the guy who shut down a strike on critical infrastructure. Like law and order? You're voting for a felon. Almost everyone knows this, and for some years now, we've gone "ugh, but have you seen the other guy?". (This isn't a criticism - I do this too.) But the optimistic take, to quote MLK for a second, is that we might be climbing out of one local minimum into another: > [Protest] seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored...there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal...the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. > ...How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer?...We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it. (MLK is, of course, talking about a different issue here. But the observation is valid to others.) It's only in this moment where we're all so disgusted, where we're all in a world so "crisis-packed", that we act. For better or worse, the people of Earth are wildly destabilizing their societies, whether that's the right in the US or the left in Latin America or protestors in Shanghai. We're "mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore," and while that's unpredictable, it does at least offer the opportunity for the establishment of new, more legitimate institutions built on the disgust of those who make them. In a more game-theoretic sense, my mental model is that the public and the elite are playing an iterated Ultimatum Game [4]. The elite holds the cards and makes the decisions, but the public can always flip the table over and screw everyone if they feel they're getting a short enough end of the stick. And it's at moments like this, when the public begins to pose a credible threat, that the elite begin to listen - or get replaced by a new elite that will, which is essentially my goal in life. ----- [1] https://xkcd.com/641/ https://xkcd.com/641/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011173 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346311 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
      - bjelkeman-again 2y ago
        I like you principles: > "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern." I try to effectively add something like: be honest, be open, be compassionate. It seems obvious. But apparently it isn’t, as we get to hear from those we work with, and their experience in other jobs.
        homarp 2y ago
        remind me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil worked out well for them
        hardlianotion 2y ago
        That's hard to scale and they got too big.
        nehal3m 2y ago
        That’s a cynical take but I have to agree. If your principles don’t scale, don’t scale.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        I'm not sure it's about scale. Their current structure demands evilness, and they (or their investors) choose that structure.
        rachofsunshine 2y ago
        I wanted to be more specific than that. A good principle should lay out, clearly, what you will NOT do. I'm sure I could argue that, say, failing to mention that one of our candidates did poorly on a coding problem could be characterized as "not evil". The company I'm talking to will probably over-weight that observation, they might think themselves out of an otherwise-desirable hire, and the candidate might lose an opportunity! Surely it's right to just tell this one little white lie... The reason for the phrasing I used is to make it clear that no, we don't do that. And this comes up all the time. I find myself reminding myself of that principle almost daily when those little temptations to just skew things just a little bit pop up.
  - lukan 2y ago
    Yes, that is the world we are living in. In theory highly rational and the best of all the possible world with the best possible system. And in reality, it is a world of lies and deception. And there are monsters, but they are not big, but rather set an example of the "Banality of Evil". People casually murdering, by filling out forms in their office desks. And the heros who rise and claim to fight all that? They are usually even worse, when you look closely.
    - heresie-dabord 2y ago
      From a related article, same site: "The project, having been begun to some extent under duress, soon became a veritable albatross"
    - ilkke 2y ago
      What part do you think is highly rational in theory? The concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands? The destruction of the renewable natural abundance? And what's "best possible" supposed to mean? That we have reached the absolute highest form of social organisation? Even if we lived in something much closer to a utopia this would be hard to defend scientifically.
      - lukan 2y ago
        "What part do you think is highly rational in theory?" Well, I think this is the official version. Not what I think.
- flyinghamster 2y ago
  It kind of makes me think of Steve Martin and the "Wild and Crazy Guy" character - which he clearly wanted to get away from.
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    Or Arthur Conan Doyle who was so fed up with writing Sherlock Holmes stories that he killed the character off (but had to undo that later when it turned out the public wasn't that interested in his non-Holmes stories).
- silverquiet 2y ago
  I didn't get unhappy from the article, but perhaps artistically unfulfilled. What else compels someone to keep creating their art though? I will say, I considered myself a big fan of Adams as a kid, and still do (I was literally telling a colleague today that he was a wonderful narrator of his audiobooks - something actually a bit unusual amongst authors), but I was too young (most of his work predates me) to follow the ups and downs of his career as it happened, and so this article was enlightening.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    A weird bit of trivia on his audiobooks: When they set about making a new radio series after his death, they used his narration of Agrajag as the voice of the character. It was spooky and beautiful hearing him participate in his radio play after his death.
  - raffraffraff 2y ago
    His reading of Dirk Gently is absolutely the best way to experience it.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  One has the distinct impression that he never could see clearly that he needed a strong business associate in most of his projects. He stumbled into vaguely defined ventures finely appointed with Californian marketing bloviation: "it could be a little hard to figure out what The Digital Village was really supposed to be. [...] 'We’re producing CD-ROMs and other digital and online projects, but we’re also committed to working in traditional forms of media.'”
  - jfengel 2y ago
    Unfortunately, evaluating a good business partner is nearly as hard as doing it yourself. As in so many domains, if you're not an expert, you can't tell who actually is. Especially when that domain is genuinely difficult and even skilled people often fail.
dtgriscom 2y ago
I liked the Dirk Gently series a lot; it's a shame there weren't more.
- lc9er 2y ago
  I really like this series, too. If you haven't tried them, I'd suggest Glen Cook's "Garrett, P.I." series. He's a PI in a fantasy world. It's lighter in tone than his "Black Company" books. Kind of a mashup of Adams, Pratchett, and Raymond Chandler.
  - romanows 2y ago
    I picked up the first one, thanks for the recommendation.
  - shawn_w 2y ago
    Oh, there's a lot of darkness in the Garrett books too.
  - motogpjimbo 2y ago
    I've just ordered the first three, thanks.
- robbiep 2y ago
  They were fantastic books! Check out the Tyrant Philosophers by Adrian Tchaikovsky - a brilliant absurdist fantasy series (2/3 published so far). First one is tough going for a while, then quite fun. Second one is brilliant in my opinion!
  - generic92034 2y ago
    Or rather wait for the completion of the series before buying any? We have been burnt before. ;)
    - ulkis 2y ago
      How to say Rothfuss without saying Rothfuss. :)
VonGuard 2y ago
I met Douglas near the end, at MacWorld SF 2000. He was charming, enormous (though, not in a "fat guy" way, much more in a "way over 6 foot tall" way.) He truly was a monument of a human being. He was vastly more interested in experimenting with a USB microscope camera he'd become associated with than being all "Hey I'm famous," a trait I took to insinuate great humility and confidence. I was almost paralyzed by my inability to say "You, sir, built me from a puddle of bullied goo into a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic." Instead, I think I just talked about the microscope. He was amazing.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 2y ago
  > a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic I've been the same, ever since I learned to always keep a good towel around.
- lifeisstillgood 2y ago
  >>> "You, sir, built me from a puddle of bullied goo into a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic." That’s a fantastic eulogy and something for us all to aim for. Thank you for expressing something I did not know had also happened to me
  - baruz 2y ago
    I think it’s an Adamsesque joke: you’ve made me a confident man, and yet I cannot get the nerve up to express myself in exactly that way.
  - robxorb 2y ago
    Oddly enough, you also just did that, for me. I did not realise that which happened to you also happened to me, until I saw you thanking this fellow, for same. (And "bullied goo" what a great concept. Please, write a book!)
- keybored 2y ago
  When a tower of a man meets an enormous man.
craz8 2y ago
To be fair, I work in software, so I too am familiar with the whoosh of a deadline as it passes by, unmet. Although I don’t find it as hard as Douglas did with his writing, but then that level isn’t needed for most software projects. I was about to say that software, unlike creative writing, can be changed after publishing. But Douglas did that for Hitch Hikers - the radio script, books, and TV show are fairly different stories!
Keegs 2y ago
My favorite book is Douglas Adams’ Last Chance to See. He talks about it here [0] and IIRC he says it was his favorite book to write. Adams took a dark subject - endangered animals and our role in their extinction - and told a story that’s equally hilarious and hopeful. [0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc
- rigmarole 2y ago
  It’s absolutely one of my favourite books too. His style of humour was a perfect dichotomy of reverent/irreverent that made him the perfect author for a book like this. Beautiful appreciation of the world meets shake-you-awake, perspective-bending humour.
ggm 2y ago
I had a working meeting at a Cisco networkers event down the Gold coast. We had a break and somebody said "are you coming to the keynote" and I said "nah, it'll be boring as usual" They looked at me oddly and went. Then an hour later over lunch I found out who the keynote speaker had been: it wasn't in the working meeting invitation I had... Adams died the next year. I hope he got to use the honorarium to fund something in conservation, I'm told it was massive.
egypturnash 2y ago
Sometimes I like to imagine the extremely unlikely universe in which Douglas Adams decided to see what would happen if he wrote a Hitch-Hiker's Guide sequel that took place in the same universe, but concerned the humorous misadventures of new characters, who had drives and motivations that were more compatible with actually moving a story forwards than folks like Arthur or Zaphod or Ford who would much rather slouch off to find a nice cup of tea or a party than get involved in saving the world. And then discovered that it was a lot easier, and actually fun, to write stories about characters like that, and went on to write two or three dozen more loosely-connected books of SF-flavored comedy. Given that every story about the man emphasizes how hard it was to get any writing out of him, this is a universe that could probably only exist as a side-effect of an Infinite Improbability Drive, but it's still fun to imagine. And to wonder if it would have started getting weirdly poignant and serious under the silly surface the way Discworld did about a dozen books after Terry Pratchett gave up trying to find reasons for Rincewind to ever leave his room again.
- lukan 2y ago
  I do not think, that would have worked. That is, it would have resulted in an easy to consume, superhero marketable franchise thing. Highly succesful. But not that interesting to me. The whole gimmick of the books is not wanting to save the world. But the world got blown up anyway, so what do you do now?
- cool_dude85 2y ago
  First, I think this is difficult to pitch from a commercial point of view. At least some subset of your fans are interested in what Arthur Dent is doing, not some other guy who exists in the same universe with his own wacky adventures. Publishers of any creative work are not known for their desire to take risks. Second, he did branch out and wrote the Dirk Gently books and his travelogue about seeing endangered species. He didn't seem to have much more fun writing those, and they were not as commercially successful, by far.
  - egypturnash 2y ago
    You have correctly observed that the number of universes that got to experience the joy of a Hitch-Hiker's 4 in which Gimblethrop Tisslwheep put together a crack team of thieves for a heist in the glamorous, newly-built casinos of Squornshellus Zeta, never mind the stunningly thoughtful portrait of Eccentria Gallumbits's later years as a titan of the adult entertainment industry and the incisive, embittered critique of the continuing tragic effects of the British Empire's many sins that made up Hitch-Hiker's 18, is vanishingly small. But I will note that the idea of an SF/F author having a world to which they return again and again, with a mix of recurring characters and new ones, is pretty common. Asimov had the Foundation and the Robots books, and eventually tied them together. Heinlein had his Future History. Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth absorbed a lot of my pocket money in the eighties. So did Larry Niven's Known Space. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. A new book by a beloved author in another corner of the same setting that their big success came from is an easier sell to that "subset of fans who are interested in what Arthur Dent is doing" than a totally different book by the same author.
wbillingsley 2y ago
I've never really understood the problems he had getting the Hitchhiker movie made - all the articles around before it came out talked about having to revise the script to make sense to an American audience (and the eventual movie ended up with a strangely different plot with a villain), but the original radio series is pretty much a road movie, which is almost an American trope.
- munchler 2y ago
  Adams himself changed the plot in every version of HHGG, from radio play to book to computer game to movie. I think it shows how little he was attached to the details of his fictional universe. Personally, I like the plot of the movie a lot, especially the invention of the point-of-view gun
- tim333 2y ago
  I think the special effects were a problem at the time - Zaphod's heads never really looked good.
sdsd 2y ago
He wrote and starred in a documentary explaining hypertext which I found interesting: https://vimeo.com/72501076 https://vimeo.com/72501076. I found this while reading that htmx book (hypermedia.systems) and getting more curious about the history of hypermedia in general.
- machine_coffee 2y ago
  Ah Tom Baker, also a gem. Was also interested to hear one of the background clips mentioning how the greenhouse effect was 'really starting to bite', and this was in 1990.
thanatos519 2y ago
I met him briefly at SIGGRAPH after an IRC chat at the Softimage booth (This was the year of the Starship Titanic game). He was surprised and amused that one of the few people who showed up for the chat was actually just downstairs. I have to confess that I could have spread the word about the chat a bit further but it was nice to have a more intimate setting. Anyways I told him that HHGTTG was my new testament and he asked the obvious question to which the answer was the Monty Python TV script book. He laughed at this which meant so much to me because he still makes me laugh every day. <3
oska 2y ago
Such a badly written and dull piece on what should be a very interesting subject to write about (DNA). I wonder if ppl who are upvoting this submission actually read the whole, verbose piece before upvoting or whether they're just upvoting on seeing Douglas' name in the submission title ?
- hardlianotion 2y ago
  If people are like me, there is a lot of interesting information about Douglas's life and character that they were previously only dimly aware of. And I disagree about the badly written bit, that seems a little much.
  - oska 2y ago
    There's certainly information in there, I agree, but it's badly delivered. We're more than 20 years past Douglas' untimely death. People writing new pieces on him now need to be writing much more appealingly or, if they're only going to deliver information without any flair, boil it down to just that, the newer or lesser known information they are presenting without all the detail that most even moderate fans of Adams are already familiar with. In Hamlet, Polonious declaims that : “Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief…” and then goes on and on at pompous length. Adams truly understood that brevity was the soul of wit and showed it in his writing. The author of this blog piece doesn't.
    - karkaflax 2y ago
      >Adams truly understood that brevity was the soul of wit Hadn't really twigged that aspect but I think you're correct. So he combined deep ideas with humour and brevity. He also had to carry his torch post-Hitchhikers, a show which had had creative input from other talented people in addition to his own. Small wonder he found writing hard. It must have been really really hard.
  - siliconpotato 2y ago
    The writing is rather unwieldy and quite a few awkward uses of grammar that made me wonder if the author spoke English only as a second language. After a while I stopped reading, it was very wordy, and it felt like they were trying too hard. Long form is fine if you have good reason. I didn't think this was it.
andyjohnson0 2y ago
I remember listening to hhgttg on my parent's kitchen radio as a young child. I didnt't get much of the humour but the episodes were still a marvel to me: just bursting and fizzing with ideas and fun. I bought the book with pocket money in '79 when it came out - I remember the kind of oilslick-pattern cover, and being secretly pleased that no-one I knew had heard of it. I read it until it fell apart. His proof of the non-existence of god was probably my first Mobius loop, at least until I discovered Hofstadter in the library. Teenage me was unexpectedly charmed by So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and was perhaps a little hopeful of meeting someone like Fenchurch one day. So, a part of my nerd hustory I guess - albeit not something I've thought about for a while. Thank you Mr Adams.
Mistletoe 2y ago
This was a difficult frustrating read. One feels that he simply needed a good financial planner and he could have lived his life how he wanted and not been forced to be locked in rooms and write mediocre novels he didn’t want to.
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teo_zero 2y ago
Strange how TFA fails to mention The Salmon of Doubt. Published posthumous, it's the earnest testimony of the late Adams and his thoughts on, quite literally, life, the universe and all.
space_oddity 2y ago
This paradox of possessing a remarkable gift while simultaneously loathing its use seems like a cosmic jest, reminding us that the universe operates with a wry smile

225 points by doppp 2y ago

That was wrenching to read, but it tracks with what I inferred from the books themselves. I am so sorry that Hitchhikers became such a thorn in his side. It was so brilliant and he just didn't want to do any more, and nothing else really worked. He seemed very unhappy. I'm weirdly glad that the end wasn't a death of despair, just a weird stupid awful freak accident. So I'll choose to believe what the article says.

rachofsunshine 2y ago
It's hard to be compassionate and cynical at the same time. Your heart tells you that you want things to work out for the best so badly. You feel a little of all the suffering in the world around you. But you also know the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is going to make record profits this year.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Oof. That hits me a little more personally than you might expect. I suppose that's true of a lot of people. But yeah I myself am having a lot of trouble balancing compassion with a deep anger that I can't help. The cynicism is my attempt to shield myself and it's not working so great either.
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    It's the defining challenge of our era! The brazenness - and visibility - of the hypocrisy and callousness of our leaders has eroded public trust. We no longer have any paragons, really. We just have people who we think aren't quite as bad as the alternative. To use the events of today as an example, everyone knows the people running CrowdStrike are going to continue being fabulously rich, and might not even lose their jobs. Even if, by some miracle, CrowdStrike gets sued out of existence, they'll walk away and still be multimillionaries. And when this seems so universal, so inevitable, in the people running the world (whether that be in business, politics, or whatever else), you start to wonder if it's even possible to do otherwise. One of the first things I wrote down when I founded my company was, quote, "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern." I don't know what the chances that that doomed my company on day 1 were, but they certainly are not zero. I am genuinely not sure it's possible to succeed in the world as it is without being a lying, cheating bastard to some degree. And I'm not the only one. Have you ever tried just going down a grocery-store aisle and counting every snake oil claim within your line of sight [1]? It's astounding. I looked on the coffee table my laptop is sitting on right now, and sure enough I've got a box of what are effectively Twizzlers claiming to be a health food because the sugar came from apple juice instead of being distilled first. Every room in my house is full of lies. It's desensitizing. "Quiet quitting" provides a workplace example of what this does to a culture. In a sense, intentionally not doing the work you're being paid to do is a crappy, somewhat immoral thing to do. It's certainly not a sign of good character, at least in my book. But people do it because they perceive (correctly) that their employer would screw them given the slightest chance. The local incentives of each side to be adversarial have fallen into a defect-defect equilibrium (see [2]) that is detrimental to both parties. Both sides are so used to being exploited that they defensively and preemptively spend tons of energy defending themselves against it and failing to find common ground in the many areas that aren't zero-sum. Worse, they even feel bad about things that are positive-value to themselves but might be used against them! [3] And once you're in that kind of a culture, it's so hard to argue for anything constructive. How can you believe in anything when the representatives, the would-be paragons, of every moral value you'd like to promote are flaunting ignoring them, when so many values are used as paper-thin excuses to hurt people day in and day out? That's true almost whatever you believe! Are you big on the traditional family? You're probably voting for the cheated-on-his-wife-with-a-porn-star guy. Did you favor invasive pandemic measures in California? You're probably voting for the guy who had a party while you were staying home. Like organized labor? You're voting for the guy who shut down a strike on critical infrastructure. Like law and order? You're voting for a felon. Almost everyone knows this, and for some years now, we've gone "ugh, but have you seen the other guy?". (This isn't a criticism - I do this too.) But the optimistic take, to quote MLK for a second, is that we might be climbing out of one local minimum into another: > [Protest] seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored...there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal...the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. > ...How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer?...We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it. (MLK is, of course, talking about a different issue here. But the observation is valid to others.) It's only in this moment where we're all so disgusted, where we're all in a world so "crisis-packed", that we act. For better or worse, the people of Earth are wildly destabilizing their societies, whether that's the right in the US or the left in Latin America or protestors in Shanghai. We're "mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore," and while that's unpredictable, it does at least offer the opportunity for the establishment of new, more legitimate institutions built on the disgust of those who make them. In a more game-theoretic sense, my mental model is that the public and the elite are playing an iterated Ultimatum Game [4]. The elite holds the cards and makes the decisions, but the public can always flip the table over and screw everyone if they feel they're getting a short enough end of the stick. And it's at moments like this, when the public begins to pose a credible threat, that the elite begin to listen - or get replaced by a new elite that will, which is essentially my goal in life. ----- [1] https://xkcd.com/641/ https://xkcd.com/641/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011173 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346311 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
    - bjelkeman-again 2y ago
      I like you principles: > "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern." I try to effectively add something like: be honest, be open, be compassionate. It seems obvious. But apparently it isn’t, as we get to hear from those we work with, and their experience in other jobs.
      - homarp 2y ago
        remind me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil worked out well for them
        hardlianotion 2y ago
        That's hard to scale and they got too big.
        nehal3m 2y ago
        That’s a cynical take but I have to agree. If your principles don’t scale, don’t scale.
        marcosdumay 2y ago
        I'm not sure it's about scale. Their current structure demands evilness, and they (or their investors) choose that structure.
        rachofsunshine 2y ago
        I wanted to be more specific than that. A good principle should lay out, clearly, what you will NOT do. I'm sure I could argue that, say, failing to mention that one of our candidates did poorly on a coding problem could be characterized as "not evil". The company I'm talking to will probably over-weight that observation, they might think themselves out of an otherwise-desirable hire, and the candidate might lose an opportunity! Surely it's right to just tell this one little white lie... The reason for the phrasing I used is to make it clear that no, we don't do that. And this comes up all the time. I find myself reminding myself of that principle almost daily when those little temptations to just skew things just a little bit pop up.
- lukan 2y ago
  Yes, that is the world we are living in. In theory highly rational and the best of all the possible world with the best possible system. And in reality, it is a world of lies and deception. And there are monsters, but they are not big, but rather set an example of the "Banality of Evil". People casually murdering, by filling out forms in their office desks. And the heros who rise and claim to fight all that? They are usually even worse, when you look closely.
  - heresie-dabord 2y ago
    From a related article, same site: "The project, having been begun to some extent under duress, soon became a veritable albatross"
  - ilkke 2y ago
    What part do you think is highly rational in theory? The concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands? The destruction of the renewable natural abundance? And what's "best possible" supposed to mean? That we have reached the absolute highest form of social organisation? Even if we lived in something much closer to a utopia this would be hard to defend scientifically.
    - lukan 2y ago
      "What part do you think is highly rational in theory?" Well, I think this is the official version. Not what I think.
flyinghamster 2y ago
It kind of makes me think of Steve Martin and the "Wild and Crazy Guy" character - which he clearly wanted to get away from.
- jhbadger 2y ago
  Or Arthur Conan Doyle who was so fed up with writing Sherlock Holmes stories that he killed the character off (but had to undo that later when it turned out the public wasn't that interested in his non-Holmes stories).
silverquiet 2y ago
I didn't get unhappy from the article, but perhaps artistically unfulfilled. What else compels someone to keep creating their art though? I will say, I considered myself a big fan of Adams as a kid, and still do (I was literally telling a colleague today that he was a wonderful narrator of his audiobooks - something actually a bit unusual amongst authors), but I was too young (most of his work predates me) to follow the ups and downs of his career as it happened, and so this article was enlightening.
- jfengel 2y ago
  A weird bit of trivia on his audiobooks: When they set about making a new radio series after his death, they used his narration of Agrajag as the voice of the character. It was spooky and beautiful hearing him participate in his radio play after his death.
- raffraffraff 2y ago
  His reading of Dirk Gently is absolutely the best way to experience it.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
One has the distinct impression that he never could see clearly that he needed a strong business associate in most of his projects. He stumbled into vaguely defined ventures finely appointed with Californian marketing bloviation: "it could be a little hard to figure out what The Digital Village was really supposed to be. [...] 'We’re producing CD-ROMs and other digital and online projects, but we’re also committed to working in traditional forms of media.'”
- jfengel 2y ago
  Unfortunately, evaluating a good business partner is nearly as hard as doing it yourself. As in so many domains, if you're not an expert, you can't tell who actually is. Especially when that domain is genuinely difficult and even skilled people often fail.

dtgriscom 2y ago

I liked the Dirk Gently series a lot; it's a shame there weren't more.

lc9er 2y ago
I really like this series, too. If you haven't tried them, I'd suggest Glen Cook's "Garrett, P.I." series. He's a PI in a fantasy world. It's lighter in tone than his "Black Company" books. Kind of a mashup of Adams, Pratchett, and Raymond Chandler.
- romanows 2y ago
  I picked up the first one, thanks for the recommendation.
- shawn_w 2y ago
  Oh, there's a lot of darkness in the Garrett books too.
- motogpjimbo 2y ago
  I've just ordered the first three, thanks.
robbiep 2y ago
They were fantastic books! Check out the Tyrant Philosophers by Adrian Tchaikovsky - a brilliant absurdist fantasy series (2/3 published so far). First one is tough going for a while, then quite fun. Second one is brilliant in my opinion!
- generic92034 2y ago
  Or rather wait for the completion of the series before buying any? We have been burnt before. ;)
  - ulkis 2y ago
    How to say Rothfuss without saying Rothfuss. :)

VonGuard 2y ago

I met Douglas near the end, at MacWorld SF 2000. He was charming, enormous (though, not in a "fat guy" way, much more in a "way over 6 foot tall" way.) He truly was a monument of a human being. He was vastly more interested in experimenting with a USB microscope camera he'd become associated with than being all "Hey I'm famous," a trait I took to insinuate great humility and confidence. I was almost paralyzed by my inability to say "You, sir, built me from a puddle of bullied goo into a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic." Instead, I think I just talked about the microscope. He was amazing.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 2y ago
> a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic I've been the same, ever since I learned to always keep a good towel around.
lifeisstillgood 2y ago
>>> "You, sir, built me from a puddle of bullied goo into a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic." That’s a fantastic eulogy and something for us all to aim for. Thank you for expressing something I did not know had also happened to me
- baruz 2y ago
  I think it’s an Adamsesque joke: you’ve made me a confident man, and yet I cannot get the nerve up to express myself in exactly that way.
- robxorb 2y ago
  Oddly enough, you also just did that, for me. I did not realise that which happened to you also happened to me, until I saw you thanking this fellow, for same. (And "bullied goo" what a great concept. Please, write a book!)
keybored 2y ago
When a tower of a man meets an enormous man.

craz8 2y ago

To be fair, I work in software, so I too am familiar with the whoosh of a deadline as it passes by, unmet. Although I don’t find it as hard as Douglas did with his writing, but then that level isn’t needed for most software projects. I was about to say that software, unlike creative writing, can be changed after publishing. But Douglas did that for Hitch Hikers - the radio script, books, and TV show are fairly different stories!

Keegs 2y ago

My favorite book is Douglas Adams’ Last Chance to See. He talks about it here [0] and IIRC he says it was his favorite book to write. Adams took a dark subject - endangered animals and our role in their extinction - and told a story that’s equally hilarious and hopeful. [0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc

rigmarole 2y ago
It’s absolutely one of my favourite books too. His style of humour was a perfect dichotomy of reverent/irreverent that made him the perfect author for a book like this. Beautiful appreciation of the world meets shake-you-awake, perspective-bending humour.

ggm 2y ago

I had a working meeting at a Cisco networkers event down the Gold coast. We had a break and somebody said "are you coming to the keynote" and I said "nah, it'll be boring as usual" They looked at me oddly and went. Then an hour later over lunch I found out who the keynote speaker had been: it wasn't in the working meeting invitation I had... Adams died the next year. I hope he got to use the honorarium to fund something in conservation, I'm told it was massive.

egypturnash 2y ago

Sometimes I like to imagine the extremely unlikely universe in which Douglas Adams decided to see what would happen if he wrote a Hitch-Hiker's Guide sequel that took place in the same universe, but concerned the humorous misadventures of new characters, who had drives and motivations that were more compatible with actually moving a story forwards than folks like Arthur or Zaphod or Ford who would much rather slouch off to find a nice cup of tea or a party than get involved in saving the world. And then discovered that it was a lot easier, and actually fun, to write stories about characters like that, and went on to write two or three dozen more loosely-connected books of SF-flavored comedy. Given that every story about the man emphasizes how hard it was to get any writing out of him, this is a universe that could probably only exist as a side-effect of an Infinite Improbability Drive, but it's still fun to imagine. And to wonder if it would have started getting weirdly poignant and serious under the silly surface the way Discworld did about a dozen books after Terry Pratchett gave up trying to find reasons for Rincewind to ever leave his room again.

lukan 2y ago
I do not think, that would have worked. That is, it would have resulted in an easy to consume, superhero marketable franchise thing. Highly succesful. But not that interesting to me. The whole gimmick of the books is not wanting to save the world. But the world got blown up anyway, so what do you do now?
cool_dude85 2y ago
First, I think this is difficult to pitch from a commercial point of view. At least some subset of your fans are interested in what Arthur Dent is doing, not some other guy who exists in the same universe with his own wacky adventures. Publishers of any creative work are not known for their desire to take risks. Second, he did branch out and wrote the Dirk Gently books and his travelogue about seeing endangered species. He didn't seem to have much more fun writing those, and they were not as commercially successful, by far.
- egypturnash 2y ago
  You have correctly observed that the number of universes that got to experience the joy of a Hitch-Hiker's 4 in which Gimblethrop Tisslwheep put together a crack team of thieves for a heist in the glamorous, newly-built casinos of Squornshellus Zeta, never mind the stunningly thoughtful portrait of Eccentria Gallumbits's later years as a titan of the adult entertainment industry and the incisive, embittered critique of the continuing tragic effects of the British Empire's many sins that made up Hitch-Hiker's 18, is vanishingly small. But I will note that the idea of an SF/F author having a world to which they return again and again, with a mix of recurring characters and new ones, is pretty common. Asimov had the Foundation and the Robots books, and eventually tied them together. Heinlein had his Future History. Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth absorbed a lot of my pocket money in the eighties. So did Larry Niven's Known Space. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. A new book by a beloved author in another corner of the same setting that their big success came from is an easier sell to that "subset of fans who are interested in what Arthur Dent is doing" than a totally different book by the same author.

wbillingsley 2y ago

I've never really understood the problems he had getting the Hitchhiker movie made - all the articles around before it came out talked about having to revise the script to make sense to an American audience (and the eventual movie ended up with a strangely different plot with a villain), but the original radio series is pretty much a road movie, which is almost an American trope.

munchler 2y ago
Adams himself changed the plot in every version of HHGG, from radio play to book to computer game to movie. I think it shows how little he was attached to the details of his fictional universe. Personally, I like the plot of the movie a lot, especially the invention of the point-of-view gun
tim333 2y ago
I think the special effects were a problem at the time - Zaphod's heads never really looked good.

sdsd 2y ago

He wrote and starred in a documentary explaining hypertext which I found interesting: https://vimeo.com/72501076 https://vimeo.com/72501076. I found this while reading that htmx book (hypermedia.systems) and getting more curious about the history of hypermedia in general.

machine_coffee 2y ago
Ah Tom Baker, also a gem. Was also interested to hear one of the background clips mentioning how the greenhouse effect was 'really starting to bite', and this was in 1990.

thanatos519 2y ago

I met him briefly at SIGGRAPH after an IRC chat at the Softimage booth (This was the year of the Starship Titanic game). He was surprised and amused that one of the few people who showed up for the chat was actually just downstairs. I have to confess that I could have spread the word about the chat a bit further but it was nice to have a more intimate setting. Anyways I told him that HHGTTG was my new testament and he asked the obvious question to which the answer was the Monty Python TV script book. He laughed at this which meant so much to me because he still makes me laugh every day. <3

oska 2y ago

Such a badly written and dull piece on what should be a very interesting subject to write about (DNA). I wonder if ppl who are upvoting this submission actually read the whole, verbose piece before upvoting or whether they're just upvoting on seeing Douglas' name in the submission title ?

hardlianotion 2y ago
If people are like me, there is a lot of interesting information about Douglas's life and character that they were previously only dimly aware of. And I disagree about the badly written bit, that seems a little much.
- oska 2y ago
  There's certainly information in there, I agree, but it's badly delivered. We're more than 20 years past Douglas' untimely death. People writing new pieces on him now need to be writing much more appealingly or, if they're only going to deliver information without any flair, boil it down to just that, the newer or lesser known information they are presenting without all the detail that most even moderate fans of Adams are already familiar with. In Hamlet, Polonious declaims that : “Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief…” and then goes on and on at pompous length. Adams truly understood that brevity was the soul of wit and showed it in his writing. The author of this blog piece doesn't.
  - karkaflax 2y ago
    >Adams truly understood that brevity was the soul of wit Hadn't really twigged that aspect but I think you're correct. So he combined deep ideas with humour and brevity. He also had to carry his torch post-Hitchhikers, a show which had had creative input from other talented people in addition to his own. Small wonder he found writing hard. It must have been really really hard.
- siliconpotato 2y ago
  The writing is rather unwieldy and quite a few awkward uses of grammar that made me wonder if the author spoke English only as a second language. After a while I stopped reading, it was very wordy, and it felt like they were trying too hard. Long form is fine if you have good reason. I didn't think this was it.

andyjohnson0 2y ago

I remember listening to hhgttg on my parent's kitchen radio as a young child. I didnt't get much of the humour but the episodes were still a marvel to me: just bursting and fizzing with ideas and fun. I bought the book with pocket money in '79 when it came out - I remember the kind of oilslick-pattern cover, and being secretly pleased that no-one I knew had heard of it. I read it until it fell apart. His proof of the non-existence of god was probably my first Mobius loop, at least until I discovered Hofstadter in the library. Teenage me was unexpectedly charmed by So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and was perhaps a little hopeful of meeting someone like Fenchurch one day. So, a part of my nerd hustory I guess - albeit not something I've thought about for a while. Thank you Mr Adams.

Mistletoe 2y ago

This was a difficult frustrating read. One feels that he simply needed a good financial planner and he could have lived his life how he wanted and not been forced to be locked in rooms and write mediocre novels he didn’t want to.

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teo_zero 2y ago

Strange how TFA fails to mention The Salmon of Doubt. Published posthumous, it's the earnest testimony of the late Adams and his thoughts on, quite literally, life, the universe and all.

space_oddity 2y ago

This paradox of possessing a remarkable gift while simultaneously loathing its use seems like a cosmic jest, reminding us that the universe operates with a wry smile