Douglas Adams -- an Appreciation

It was a little strange, in a way that Douglas Adams might have appreciated, how I discovered that there were other Adams's fanatics in the world. It was during a perfectly normal workday, probably a Thursday, a day of the week which neither I nor Adams's character Arthur Dent have ever been able to quite get the hang of.

Anyway, on this particular Thursday my boss used quotations from Adams's five or six book 'trilogy,' the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy," to illustrate some grammatical or other errors, I think, that we ought not to make. (I write for a living though not in the way that Adams did.) For a long time I had felt as alone (in my love for Adams's work) as Dent or Ford Prefect when they were stranded on prehistoric earth. But that Thursday, long before Al Gore invented the Internet, I learned that there was other Adams freaks in the universe.

Then, more recently, I looked at the Internet and realized just how un-alone I really was. Adams freaks everywhere!

But why such mass appeal? After all, he was simply injecting satire and humor into science fiction, and plenty of others have done that. Aren't there all kinds of Star Trek parodies? Even serious writers like Isaac Asimov injected enough humor into their works to make you wonder just how seriously they took themselves.

But now, as we are about to celebrate another Towel Day in honor of Adams's death, its time for a serious critical appraisal of his work. What makes his books stand out? Certainly not his knowledge of science of technology, since what little actual science he knew now seems dated. (Even a devoted fan like me got tired of him going on and on about digital watches.)

No, it was his way of dealing with those existential and human problems we all face, problems so huge and daunting that only his great sense of humor could make his discussions of them bearable, in a book of fiction, at least. Like H.P. Lovecraft, he seems to have had a sense of the terrifying hugeness of the universe, but reacted to it with humor instead of terror.