Reflections on Douglas Adams' Books and How They Predicted Cutting Edge Publishing

A Guide to the Future?

When The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxywas first transmitted on BBC radio in 1977, it's odd to consider that Douglas Adams (the man behind the stories of intergalactic travel, sulking robots and computers which could calculate the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything) actually typed everything up on a good old-fashioned typewriter. Despite the scifi theme (or perhaps because of it), the whole first two series gives a definite air of an author who's not terribly keen on technology, or the progress it makes. From the world being destroyed to make way for a new hyperspatial bypass, to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, who aggressively develop gadgets that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all". Anyone who's owned an iPhone will probably feel a certain affinity with this.

It's even odder that, in later life, Adams' view on technology became very different, and he became a huge proponent for gadgets of all kinds, particularly those made by Apple. He was the first person in the UK to buy an Apple Macintosh. He was one of the first authors to collaborate with a software company to produce videogames (both the Hitchhiker's Guide and Bureaucracy text adventures by Infocom were devised between himself and Steve Meretzky). He was also in the vanguard in terms of online involvement; his above dealings with Infocom were mostly through a very early version of email, and was a regular contributor to the USENET groups alt.fan.douglas-adams and comp.sys.mac.*.

Perhaps it's fair to say that while his books (and radio shows, and television series, and films, and towels...) concentrated on the humorous aspects of modern technology and how it lets us down, Adams had a pretty good idea of how it should work. And to me, nothing epitomises this better that the titular book of his series, which cast a shadow decades long, and suggested methods of communication and collaboration that are only recently becoming realised.