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The History of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is now so complicated that every time I tell it I contradict myself, and whenever I do get it right I'm misquoted. So the publication of this omnibus edition seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight–or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong here is, as far as I'm concerned, wrong for good.
The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gossers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitch hiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.
I was travelling with a copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to Europe by Ken Walsh, a very battered copy that I had borrowed from someone. In fact, since this was 1971 and I still have the book, it must count as stolen by now. I don't have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day (as it was then) because I wasn't in that financial league.
Night was beginning to fall on my field as it spun lazily underneath me. I was wondering where I could go that was cheaper than Innsbruck, revolved less and didn't do the sort of things to me that Innsbruck had done to me that afternoon.
What had happened was this. I had been walking through the town trying to find a particular address, and being thoroughly lost I stopped to ask for directions from a man in the street. I knew this mightn't be easy because I don't speak German, but I was surprised to discover just how much difficulty I was having communicating with this particular man. Gradually the truth dawned on me as we struggled in vain to understand each other that of all the people in Innsbruck I could have stopped to ask, the one I had picked did not speak English, did not speak French and was also deaf and dumb. With a series of sincerely apologetic hand movements, I disentangled myself, and a few minutes later, on another street, I stopped and asked another man who also turned out to be deaf and dumb, which was when I bought the beers.
I ventured back on to the street. I tried again.
When the third man I spoke to turned out to be deaf and dumb and also blind I began to feel a terrible weight settling on my shoulders; wherever I looked the trees and buildings took on dark and menacing aspects. I pulled my coat tightly around me and hurried lurching down the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind. I bumped into someone and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to understand me. The sky loured. The pavement seemed to tip and spin. If I hadn't happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel where a convention for the deaf and dumb was being held, there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely and I would have spent the rest of my life writing the sort of books which Kafka became famous for and dribbling.
As it is I went to lie in a field, along with my Hitch Hiker's Guide to Europe , and when the stars came out it occurred to me that if only someone would write a Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well, then I for one would be off like a shot. Having had this thought I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for six years.
I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths–and a degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike. Later I became a writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful but in fact just failed to see the light of day. Other writers will know what I mean.
My pet project was to write something that would combine comedy and science fiction, and it was this obsession that drove me into deep debt and despair. No one was interested, except finally one man: a BBC radio producer named Simon Brett who had the same idea, comedy and science fiction. Although Simon only produced the first episode before leaving the BBC to concentrate on his own writing (he is the author of the Charles Paris detective novels), I owe him an immense debt of gratitude for simply getting the thing to happen in the first place. He was succeeded by the legendary Geoffrey.
In its original form the show was going to be rather different. I was feeling a little disgruntled with the world at the time and had put together about six different plots, each of which ended with the destruction of the world in a different way, and for a different reason. It was to be called‘The End of the Earth'.
While I was filling in the details of the first plot–in which the Earth was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace express route–I realized that I needed to have someone from a different planet around to tell the reader what was going on, to give the story the context it needed. So I had to work out who he was and what he was doing on the Earth.
I decided to call him Ford Prefect. (This was a joke that missed American audiences entirely of course, since they had never heard of the rather oddly named car, and many thought it was a typing error for Perfect.) I explained in the text that the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led him to think that this name would be‘nicely inconspicuous'. He had simply mistaken the dominant life form. So how would such a mistake arise? I remembered when I used to hitch-hike through Europe and would often find the information or advice that came my way was out of date or misleading in some way. Most of it, of course, just came from stories of other people's travel experiences.
At that point the title Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy suddenly popped back into my mind from wherever it had been hiding all this time. Ford, I decided, would be a researcher who collected data for the Guide . As soon as I started to develop this particular notion, it moved inexorably to the centre of the story, and the rest, as the creator of the original Ford Prefect would say, is bunk.
The story grew in the most convoluted way, as many people will be surprised to learn. Writing episodically meant that when I finished one episode I had no idea about what the next one would contain. When, in the twists and turns of the plot, some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things that had gone before, I was as surprised as anyone else.
I think that the BBC's attitude towards the show while it was in production was very similar to that which Macbeth had towards murdering people–initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight. Reports that Geoffrey and I and the sound engineers were buried in a subterranean studio for weeks on end, taking as long to produce a single sound effect as other people took to produce an entire series (and stealing everybody's else's studio time in which to do so), were all vigorously denied and absolutely true.
The budget of the series escalated to the point that it could have practically paid for a few seconds of Dallas . If the show hadn't worked…
The first episode went out on BBC Radio 4 at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 8 March 1978, in a huge blaze of no publicity at all. Bats heard it. The odd dog barked. After a couple of weeks a letter or two trickled in. So–someone out there had listened. People I talked to seemed to like Marvin the Paranoid Android, whom I had written in as a one-scene joke, and had only developed further at Geoffrey's insistence.
Then some publishers became interested, and I was commissioned by Pan Books to write up the series in book form. After a lot of procrastination and hiding and inventing excuses and having baths, I managed to get about two-thirds of it done. At this point they said, very pleasantly and politely, that I had already passed ten deadlines, so would I please just finish the page I was on and let them have the damn thing.
Meanwhile, I was busy trying to write another series and was also writing and script-editing Dr Who , because while it was all very pleasant to have your own radio series, especially one that somebody had written in to say they had heard it, it didn't exactly buy you lunch.
So that was more or less the situation when the book The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published in September 1979 and appeared on the Sunday Times best-seller list at number one and just stayed there. Clearly, somebody had been listening.
This is where things start getting complicated, and this is what I was asked, in writing this Introduction, to explain. The Guide has appeared in so many forms–books, radio, a television series, records and soon to be a major motion picture–each time with a different story line that even its most acute followers have become baffled at times.
Here then is a breakdown of the different versions–not including the various stage versions, which only complicate the matter further.
The radio series began in March 1978. The first series consisted of six programmes, or‘fits'as they were called. Fits 1 to 6. Easy. Later that year, one more episode was recorded and broadcast, commonly known as the Christmas episode. It contained no reference of any kind to Christmas. It was called the Christmas episode because it was first broadcast on 24 December, which is not Christmas Day. After this, things began to get increasingly complicated.
In the autumn of 1979, the first Hitch Hiker book was published, called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy . It was a substantially expanded version of the first four episodes of the radio series, in which some of the characters behaved in entirely different ways and others behaved in exactly the same ways but for entirely different reasons, which amounts to the same thing but saves rewriting the dialogue.
At roughly the same time a double record album was released, which was, by contrast, a slightly contracted version of the first four episodes of the radio series.
These were not the recordings that were originally broadcast but wholly new recordings of substantially the same scripts. This was done because we had used music off gramophone records as incidental music for the series, which is fine on radio, but makes commercial release impossible.
In January 1980, five new episodes of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy were broadcast all in one week, bringing the total number to twelve episodes. In the autumn of 1980, the second Hitch Hiker book was published in Britain around the same time that Harmony Books published the first book in the United States. It was a very substantially reworked, re-edited and contracted version of episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 5 and 6 (in that order) of the radio series The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy . In case that seemed too straightforward, the book was called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe , because it included the material from radio episode 5 of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy which was set in a restaurant called Milliways, otherwise known as the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
At roughly the same time, a second record album was made featuring a heavily rewritten and expanded version of episodes 5 and 6 of the radio series. This record album was called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe .
Meanwhile, a series of six television episodes of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was made by the BBC and broadcast in January 1981. This was based, more or less, on the first six episodes of the radio series. In other words, it incorporated most of the book The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the second half of the book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe . Therefore, though it followed the basic structure of the radio series, it incorporated revisions from the books, which didn't.
In January 1982 Harmony Books published The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in the United States.
In the summer of 1982, a third Hitch Hiker book was published simultaneously in Britain and the United States, called Life, the Universe and Everything .
This was not based on anything that has already been heard or seen on radio or television. In fact it flatly contradicted episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the radio series. These episodes of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy , you will remember, had already been incorporated in revised form in the book called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe .
At this point I went to America to write a film screenplay which was completely inconsistent with most of what had gone on so far, and since that film was then delayed in the making (a rumour currently has it that filming will start shortly before the Last Trump), I wrote one fourth and last book in the trilogy, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish . This was published in Britain and in the USA in the autumn of 1984 and it effectively contradicted everything to date, up to and including itself.
People often ask me how under these circumstances they can best leave the planet, so I have prepared some brief notes.
Douglas Adams
Los Angeles 1983 and London 1985