Imaginary Worlds - The Hitchhiker's Guide to Douglas Adams

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

When Arvind Ethan David was a student, he decided to adapt the Douglas Adams novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency into a play. Arvind didn’t imagine that Adams would show up to see the play (which he did), nor that Arvind would grow up to become a caretaker of Adams’ legacy. Arvind just released an audiobook called Douglas Adams: The Ends of The Earth, produced by Pushkin Industries. It features unheard archival audio of Douglas Adams and interviews with friends and colleagues of the late author who ponder what Adams was trying to tell us, and whether the great humorist always meant what he said. I talk with Arvind about the origin of the audiobook, and we hear an excerpt on why Adams publicly rejected the label of being a science fiction author -- even though he had created a sci-fi cultural phenomenon with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Don't panic. So long and thanks for all the fish. 42. If you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you know what I just said was funny or at least it's funny in the context of those books.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began in 1978 as a radio show written by Douglas Adams. It was so popular, Adams turned it into a novel that he wrote a bunch of sequels. The main character is an Englishman named Arthur Dent. He is one of the few survivors, after an alien race of bureaucrats called the Vogons, blow up the earth to make way for an interstellar highway. Discovering the books of Douglas Adams has become a rite of passage for kids and teenagers around the world. Arvin Ethan David was one of those kids.

Today he is co-writing and producing a theatrical version of The Hitchhiker's Guide that will debut in London in the fall. He co-produced a Netflix series starring Elijah Wood that was based on another Douglas Adams novel called Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. And Arvin just released an audiobook called Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth. The style of the audiobook sounds like a podcast or a radio documentary. And he explores what Douglas Adams was trying to tell us and whether he always meant what he said. Douglas Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49. I never read Douglas Adams when I was younger, which was probably a little unusual for a

nerdy kid like me. But discovering his work as an adult was just as rewarding. His humor and satire work on all levels. Although he's not the kind of author that I felt like I knew personally through his work. So I was curious to talk with Arvind Ethan David about his new audio book because he knew Douglas Adams personally. In fact, meeting Adams changed his life and it happened when Arvind was just a student. So I'm 15. I'm at a British boarding school called Stowe deep in the Buckingham countryside. And the truth is, I'm not terribly happy. I'm 9,000 miles away from home. I'm one of the two or three kids of color in my school.

I haven't really found my groove yet, but it's my turn to put on what was called the house play, because we were divided into houses in Harry Potter style. I was excited by that. I love theater. That was the one bit of school that was very happy for me. I had just read Dirk Gently's Solistic Detective Agency. I'm not even sure I had finished it. I was maybe halfway through, but I was in love. I had fallen in love with Dirk Gently himself.

There's a phrase that describes him as being full of unearned confidence. I was at a stage in my life that some unearned confidence is what I needed, I think. So I took it and I marched into the head of drama's office and I said, this is going to be the play this year. And he looked at it and he looked at me and he said, you know, that's not a play, right? And he says, I haven't read it,

but isn't it nearly 300 pages long and it's a science fiction story with time travel and ghosts and murder. And I was like, yeah. He's like, how are you going to do that? I said, I don't know, but I'm going to. To his enormous credit, he let me do it. I think in part, and this is an extra one of many extraordinary coincidences, because 25 years earlier, he had been Douglas Adams as Latin and Greek master. Oh my God, you're kidding.

As a very young teacher, and now he was a more senior middle-aged man. And he said, you know, and he enjoyed telling me that story and also enjoyed pointing out that he had seen no sign of the genius to come in young Douglas. So you start to adapt it, you're gonna put it on.

And then you thought, maybe I'll just write Douglas Adams? The complete truth is when we did it in high school, we didn't write him. We didn't write him, we didn't tell him, we didn't ask permission, we just did it because we were 15. And you sort of don't think about things like rights and licenses at 15. What happened two years later is I was at college. The play had stayed with me. It had been a transformational moment in my high school life, in my young creative life. Suddenly, I had earned confidence

because the play had been a hit and it had been fun to do. I'd adapted it and co-adapted it with my friend James Goss. I had co-directed it. I had starred as Dirk Gently and suddenly school was fun because I had found the thing I loved and I had found my tribe to do it with. Flash forward a few years and I'm at Oxford trying to make my way up the greasy pole of the Oxford Drama Society scene. I think we never really cracked Dirk gently.

I should have another go because I'm much better now than I was when I was 15. So we do it again. This time, partly because I'm a pre-law major, I figure out I should probably write to him. So we write to his agent and this extraordinary letter comes back that says, Douglas Adams does not believe that his novel Dirk Gently is suitable for adaptation for the stage or indeed for any other medium, but he will not stop you from trying. And that was as generous a gift as a bunch of college kids could ever be given.

And then yes, on the second or third day, he turned up. Toei, did you know he was going to show up? I think his agents had said something like, he might come sometime this week. So there was much anticipation. And then he walked in and he was unmistakable. He was six foot five. He was Douglas Adams. How did you feel in that moment when you saw him? Excited and terrified in about equal measure.

And, but the real moment was when the show started. I was sitting maybe two or three rows behind him. And of course I wasn't watching the show. I was watching him. And he didn't laugh at the start. He sort of frowned and was puzzled because we, you know, it's a complicated book. We had made some decisions. We had changed some things. One thing we had done. So Dirk Gently is described as having a Transylvanian father coming from the smarter end of Transylvania. With our actor, we had chosen to give him

an Eastern European accent. One of those Jeremy Irons, very Teutonic, more British than the British type accents. My name is Dirk Gently and I'm a holistic detective. So we had given him this and Douglas clearly that had thrown him, so he was a little confused. But then he pulls out a pencil and starts making notes.

Then he starts to laugh and then he's in. So that was very happy making. He was incredibly nice about it. I think there were things he thought worked and things he thought didn't work. But the highest compliment he gave it was he said for the first time he could see that Doug Gently was in fact, susceptible for adaptation into other media, and maybe he should get around to doing it next. Wow. And so then you got to know him after that. He became something of a mentor, would you say?

I'm always careful not to overstate it. I did get to know him. For the next five or six years, I was in his orbit. I interned for his production company. He introduced me to his business partners and colleagues and to his friends. He asked me to tag along on a speaking occasion that he had on a speaking invitation he had had. And we had a long drive in his car. We probably had dinner or lunch, you know, four or five times.

And he became a very important part of my life. It didn't matter. I was not important to him. He was Douglas Adams. I think he found me perfectly fine, interesting to have around maybe. He liked that I was young and enthusiastic and passionate about him and his work. But when a little planet is orbiting a sun,

the planet doesn't need to be important to the sun. The sun is important to the planet. Yeah. My life started, my professional life, my career, my sense of myself as a creative, the idea that work could be fun, thinking about technology and creativity together, thinking about the public role of an author, an intellectual in the world. All of that started for me at 18 years old when Douglas Adams turned up. I mean, his death was tragically premature until then. And I don't mean to be like, you know, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,

how did you enjoy the play? But until that moment, his career was pretty charmed. It seemed like he had one success after another. Is that correct? Or were there things that were frustrating to him? I think everything was frustrating to him. He was good at enjoyment. The man was a bon vivant. He loved good food. He loved good wine. He loved good speaker systems. He loved fast cars, he loved beautiful houses and apartments, certainly. And suddenly things came relatively quickly. So he wrote Hitchhikers the first time, the radio series, when he was 27. He had graduated from Cambridge,

where he had been a sort of reasonable success on the Cambridge comedy scene. Then he very quickly, he had been a sort of reasonable success on the Cambridge comedy scene. Then he very quickly, he had about a year, 18 months of those sort of dead end nonsense jobs that you do as a young writer, but not very long. Then he gets a job working with the Pythons. Yes, Monty Python. He ends up working with his idols, with the reason he had gone to Cambridge, John Cleese was his role model at that stage in his life, and he ends up working with them. He's the only person outside the core group that has both a writing credit and a performing credit in the Pythons. But then, yes, at 27 Hitchhiker's Happens is genuinely an overnight phenomenon. Then the book happens is again a gigantic bestseller within two weeks of coming out.

But then things get more complicated because the truth is he didn't like writing novels. like writing novels. He hadn't intended to be a novelist. He wanted to be a sketch comedian like the Pythons. He wanted to work with other people and he wanted to be a writer performer. Possibly secondarily, he was interested in being a screenwriter. The novel bit happened by accident. The radio series was a hit. He got offered the book deal without pitching for it, without asking for it, without having written a word of it. The first book, I'm certain it wasn't easy because nothing he ever wrote was easy,

but it happened relatively quickly because he was adapting his own material which he had already written. Then they wanted a second book, or the second radio series. Then they wanted a second book, or a second radio series. Then they wanted a third. And Douglas hated being confronted with all this dead blank wood. Dead blank wood was his least favorite thing. So to fast forward, in the 10 years before his death, he hadn't written a single book. What he's mainly doing is two things. He is writing, well, three things, and they're fantastically interesting things. He's writing

and rewriting the Hitchhiker's movie, trying to push the Sisyphean rock up the hill of Hollywood. He has founded a company which is making computer games and what has a reasonable claim to be one of the world's first social networks. And he's also writing lectures, keynotes, and articles on the future of technology, on conservation, and on the internet. So he's hugely productive, but not in the way maybe we would have expected him to be, or that even we remember now, because he's remembered as the guy who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Let's get back to my conversation with Arvin Ethan David. I asked him what inspired him to create an audiobook about Douglas Adams.

What happened is in the course of my research in preparing to write Hitchhikers, I discovered, I re-read everything and not just everything published, I went back to the archive and read everything unpublished. And I discovered that there was this trove of old cassettes and dact tapes and reel-to-reel and answer phone machine cassettes that had never been digitized. There was hours and hours of VHS and all these old recordings that had just sat there for 25 years. And so I called the estate and I went, do you know all this stuff is here?

And they were like, yeah, kind of. And I went, shouldn't we maybe digitize it? And they were like, do you want to? Yes. There was enough stuff that I was like, oh, there's stuff here that the fans will find interesting. But more importantly, there's stuff here that supports this idea that was brewing in me, that he had stuff to say to today. He had stuff to say to our generation and our moment,

our terrifying moment in global history. HOFFMAN Yeah, tell me about that, because you were saying that there's something about his work that helps you calm your nerves. I mean, I think a lot of people are feeling very anxious about the state of the world for a gazillion reasons. How so? What is it about his work that makes you feel, that you feel like speaks to us now and helps you kind of calm your nerves? So this is a guy who became famous writing a series,

a five book series, that starts with the earth being destroyed. What I came to realize is the reason that Hitchhiker starts with the earth being destroyed is Douglas had thought a lot about the way the world would end. He was a warrior and he could see all the things that mankind was doing horrifically wrong. He had worried about them his whole life. The original title for what became Hitchhikers is what I've called this book, The Ends of the Earth. The original idea was that it was going to be an anthology series,

and every episode, the Earth would be destroyed by a different disaster. So one week it would be the AI singularity, the next week it would be nuclear war, the week after that it would be climate change. He had thought about all these things, not just those things, which you sort of expect in a science fiction author to think about AI

and nuclear war and climate change. But he'd also thought deeply about what was wrong with our politics, what was wrong with our economics, what was wrong with our bureaucracy and the way we govern and organize ourselves. He had thought about conservation and the mass extinction crisis. He had thought about war. So all the things that are the background panic of our current moment.

Douglas Adams had been worrying about his whole life. And he wasn't just worrying about them. He was going back to base principles, taking them apart and putting them back together again, and making them funny and making them interesting. But it's also in his nonfiction writing, in his writing about conservation, in his writing about the internet, in his writing about technology, in his writing about politics and those lectures that he was giving in the last decade of his life.

It sounds like you're describing a very neurotic person who's going to create something dark and apocalyptic, but it's so wonderfully absurd and fun, and with a kind of gallows humor that is just delightful. How is that, is his ability to process those worries into this absurdist satirical work, is that part of the thing that you find so inspiring? I mean, yes, and he certainly didn't respond to the problems with despair. There is gallows humor, there is nihilism, but almost always there's also the question

of, okay, how do we fix it? And that's what's so inspiring. This was not a guy who was content to say, everything is terrible, woe is me. He is not just his famous creation, Marvin the Paranoid Android, the chronically depressed robot. He was that to some extent, and people recognized him in that. But he went one step further. He wanted to think, okay, how do we fix things? So to give you an example, he was very clear very early about what social media could do gone wrong. And he died in 2001. He died before Twitter, before Facebook, long before X and GROKE.

He died before the algorithm destroyed us all. He was optimistic about the internet, but he could see what would happen if it went wrong. So the guide itself is a type of social media. The guide is a user-generated repository of information that is sort of democratic, unmoderated. Everyone's opinion is equally valid and is counted as fact. In the first book there is a sign on the door on the offices of the guide that says reality is frequently at fault, the guide is authoritative. What is that, if not a very prescient satire of the world of social media, where people seem to accept as true whatever is on their feed, rather than looking out their window.

So he saw that coming. And his response was not to despair, although the fifth book gets pretty despairing about what happens when a merciless for-profit corporation buys such a social media enterprise and sets about destroying the universe quite deliberately for its profit margin. So he saw that coming. But then in real life, he sets up a company and builds a community-driven website

that does not take advertising, that is heavily moderated, that is strong rules of community engagement and behavior, that has fact checkers in 2000. That is what's inspiring, that he tried. So when we go, going back to the Hitchhiker's Guide, I always love to look at any work that was really important, to look at the ripple effects throughout time. Where do you see the ripple effects culturally of Hitchhiker's Guide? I think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is unimaginable without Hitchhiker's Guide,

which is to say, obviously, the MCU comes from the comics, but the tone of the MCU, the tone of the MCU gets set definitively with Guardians of the Galaxy. That is what introduced that mixture of sentimentality and snark, that mixture of critique and fan worship that defines the MCU. That exists because James Gunn is a massive Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan. The reason hitchhikers didn't get made for so long into a movie was that people would keep saying to Douglas it's science fiction and comedy. That doesn't work. And in 1980, they were right in so far as nobody had done it. I mean, they were wrong, but they didn't have any examples to point to. And for a decade or more, for two decades, they kept saying, you can't do science fiction and comedy unless... Then they're like, okay,

maybe if it's like pastiche, maybe if it's like naked gun or space bombs, you can do that. But Hitchhiker's isn't pastiche. It's not sending up science fiction. It's very thoughtful about science fiction. It's sending up the world. It's satire. It's not pastiche. And so I think it's very hard to look at, if you look at Loki, the whole satire of bureaucracy and Loki is the Vogons. If you actually look at the designs, the credit designs of Loki, the opening and closing credits,

there's lots of little hitchhiker Easter eggs there. But then you have a more profound and interesting thing, which is they are people, he whispered into the minds of millions of teenagers, and indeed whispered to them not just when the books came out, but to successive generations of teenagers. A bunch of those teenagers, the type of teenager that Douglas whispered to, a lot of them have gone on to be pretty influential in technology.

So I want to play the first half of the chapter on writing. Do you want to set that up? So in this chapter, I look at what sort of writer Douglas was and what sort of writer he thought he was. And one of the interesting things is he spent a lot of time saying he wasn't a science fiction author, which is bizarre for one of the most famous science fiction authors who has ever lived. So in this chapter we investigate that somewhat counterintuitive claim that he made. We'll hear that in a moment. So I'm going to play for you the first half of chapter one of Arvind's audiobook,

which is called Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth. The audiobook begins with an intro explaining who Douglas Adams was and then chapter one is called writing. If we are to investigate this idea of Douglas as a general purpose genius, then we should probably start with the sphere in which he had his greatest successes as a science fiction novelist. Surely we can all agree that Douglas Adams was a genius science fiction writer. I never actually thought of myself as a science fiction writer. I thought myself primarily a comedy writer and I became a science fiction writer simply because I exaggerated so much. Most

science fiction is actually extremely badly written. The ideas may be great but the writing is just I find it really hard work to deal with. I mean like I'm an Isaac Asimov for instance who has terrific ideas which are really very interesting but he writes like a piece of American Express junk mail. It's not it's not proper writing and my eyes get irritated. For the science fiction fans among us, this is a bitter pill to have to swallow. It's tough enough to have anyone mock a genre you love, but to have science fiction taken down by one of its high priests? That's a very specific type of betrayal.

The creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy didn't like science fiction? What on earth is going on? Have we all missed something? Here's Stephen Fry, the British comedian, author, actor, general polymath, and one of Douglas' closest friends, talking about his reaction upon first reading Hitchhiker. I hadn't noticed it was science fiction because all the things about science fiction that I dislike, all the things that appeal to the sort of bottle end spectacles brigade, these sort of dreary arguments about, you know, oh, well apparently he broke the second rule of the federation by entering the stained quadrant at the wrong time, you know, all

this kind of drivel. Didn't seem to be there. It was absolutely… This just gets worse and worse. Not only does Douglas Adams not like science fiction, but his best friend, comedy and intellectual icon and national treasure Stephen Fry, is mocking science fiction fans.

And he's praising Hitchhiker only because it is not like other science fiction. This is agonizing. Why am I including this stuff in here? This is tantamount to hate crime. There is a deep disconnect going on here because hitchhiker wasn't Douglas's only science fiction work. Dirk Gently is profoundly grounded in ideas from theoretical physics, and Douglas's first rail television job was on Doctor Who, the ever-regenerating granddaddy of all British science fiction. I spoke about this with James Goss, a science fiction author and a leading Whovian. James and I have known each other since we were schoolboys together. In fact, it was

with James that I first adapted Dirk Gently as a play, and we met Douglas together on the same fateful night. Hello, I'm James Goss and I am a writer. I've adapted various of Douglas's Doctor Who scripts into novels. And I guess I first encountered Douglas Adams by watching the Hitchhiker's TV series, which I thought was great. Now, for those of you who aren't deep Doctor Who fans, there's a lot of jargon and inside TARDIS talk in what James is about to say. So let me give a quick guide. 1. Dr. Who is an immortal alien, a time travelling time lord who seems to spend most of his days hanging out with attractive earth women and foiling alien plots. He does this in a time

travelling police box called the TARDIS. Footnote on the footnote, a police box was a public telephone kiosk used to contact the police. The TARDIS looks like one, but it isn't one. It is also, famously, bigger on the inside. Two. The show, which has been running on and off for more than 60 years, is one of the longest running television shows in history. Multiple generations of British children have grown up with it, and it is a cultural touchstone that transcends science fiction. It is as if Star Trek and Saturday Night Live were the same show. Some of the greatest writers in British television,

including Russell T. Davis, creator of Queer as Folk, and Steven Moffat, co-creator of the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock, have served as showrunners. Three, to that list, add Douglas Adams, who served as script editor, which in his case was effectively lead writer, between 1979 and 1980. During that time, he wrote three legendary episodes.

Sharda, which was never completed, City of Death, generally regarded as one of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, and finally, the pirate planet. Okay, explainer over. Back to James. You do realize that Douglas was the biggest Doctor Who fan. One of the most astonishing things about Douglas, especially his Doctor Who work,

is you can literally, in all of his Doctor Who scripts, and even in some of his Hitchhiker's ones, you can go, he's parodying an episode of Doctor Who and they are very specific episodes of Doctor Who. There's a whole chunk of a missing episode of Doctor Who that turns up in life, the universe, and everything. So an episode from like 1966, where the TARDIS arrives on Lord's cricket ground, turns up in life, the universe Universe and Everything very, very famously. It's like that is a childhood memory that he's carried forward into one of his Hitchhiker's books.

Similarly, the whole idea of the B arc and the A arc and all of that is lifted both from a 60s Doctor Who story called The Arc, but also from an early 70s Doctor Who story called Ark in Space. Both of them brilliant. And clearly Douglas Adams kept watching them all and at the back of his head went, yes, but and just the sheer joy of seeing these ideas just turn up over and over again. I don't think Douglas Adams would be writing Hitchhikers if he hadn't seen Doctor Who.

And if he hadn't carried on absolutely loving it when he was an adult. That's my argument. Now, James is an intense sort, passionate about science fiction in general and ready to defend Doctor Who in particular to the death. But he also knows both Doctor Who and Douglas Adams' work better than almost anyone alive. So is he right? Did Douglas Adams secretly love science fiction? The trouble is that Douglas himself talked about this period of his career as mere journeyman work, a stop-off on the way to Hitchhiker. Listen to him here being interviewed on Terry Wogan's chat show in the mid-80s. First of all, science fiction. It's not something that...

I suppose you were writing Doctor Who at the time. Is that how it goes? Well, no, that was coincidence, actually. I never actually thought of myself as a science fiction writer. Terry Wogan, at the time of this interview, is the dominant chat show host on British television. He's Johnny Carson rolled into Stephen Colbert with a side order of the Jimmy's combined. So the condescension in Wogan's voice in the unfinished sentence, science fiction is not something that, is the condescension of the mainstream to the fringe. Not something that what? That decent people, that proper writers, that grown-ups do? And note also that Douglas doesn't defend science fiction at all. He seems happy to bat it aside. James Goss, however, who as part of his work adapting

Douglas's scripts into novels, has had unfettered access to the Doctor Who archives, makes a pretty convincing case that despite his public denials in his heart of heart, Douglas loved Doctor Who and brought his genius to it in a very specific fashion. The thing that astonished me with The Pirate Plant is, you know, Douglas's first ever Doctor Who TV script was, seems to be famously shambolic. You know, it's an absolute mess about space pirates and traveling spaceships. You know, it's all the ideas you've ever known in Doctor Who. It's an explosion of ideas.

And then when I was going through the notes, you realize that it's the most incredibly structured Doctor Who. I remember chatting about it with Russ V. Davis and he went, it's my favorite story because it's so clever. And the story is so clever because there are charts. In Douglas's notes, there are charts where he plots the moral journeys of every character. The entire story is about genocide and whether or not people knew and their guilt and how that guilt is passed down to generations. So it seems to be about robot parrots and space pirates

and exploding planets and things like that, but it's really all about a whole society that is made rich by devouring other planets and whether or not they know and the collective guilt starts to poison them. So there are pages and pages of charts where he just draws out the journey of guilt and how that guilt affects people. It's a story about people poisoned by their own immorality, but everybody just goes, oh,

it's the one with the tin space pirate and his robot parrot. And you go, yeah, it is, but it's so much more than that. How do we reconcile the image of the 20 something Douglas Adams on his first screenwriting job, spending time making detailed charts of the moral guilt of a civilization, with the glibness with which he dismisses science fiction less than a decade later. Let's go back to that clip of him being interviewed by Terry Wogan. What kind of people read science fiction? I know everybody read The Hitchhikers, but what kind of people do you think read science fiction? To be on Wogan's show is a very big deal.

So when he says, what sort of people read science fiction, the subtext in his intonation is not people like us, not people like you, me, or our audience, not normal people. If Douglas was truly suspicious of science fiction he could have made a cheap joke here, of the type Stephen Fry made about the thick reading glasses of the science fiction fan, but he doesn't. This is what he says about who reads science fiction. A pretty wide cross-section. People never like to admit it actually. Whenever I do book signing sessions, you always get people come along, sort of men come along and say, would you sign this please?

It's for my little boy. And then you get little boys come along and say, would you sign this please? It's for my father. So you get the widest possible cross-section. Now this is a change in tone. Douglas does not mock science fiction fans as Wogan is inviting him to do. Instead he defends the fandom. He recognizes their humanity as fathers and sons and says by implication that these are the same people, the same wide cross-section who are watching this TV show right now. And in a gesture of compassion, he recognizes the slight shame that science fiction fans were forced to feel in the

1980s. 13 years later, in 1999, Douglas is once again given the chance to defend or deny sci-fi fans on the then very popular morning show The Big Breakfast. Here he is talking to host and pop culture pundit Johnny Vaughan. What do you think it is about sci-fi fans? Why do people get so anorakish about it? Well they do say that real life is a crutch for those who can't handle science fiction. I guess that people tend to be very weird and there's a little bit of me that's a little bit weird and I kind of sort of plug into that I suppose. But I used to love science fiction when I was a kid. I don't anymore because it's kind of too close to home.

And I actually watched the first ever episode of Doctor Who when it went out. Again, Douglas goes sort of halfway in defense of the genre that has made him rich and famous. He makes a clever swipe at people who don't get science fiction and who denigrate those who do, and then, conceding that while some of the fandom is weird, he makes clear that he is one of them, one of us. He is, at least a little bit weird too. In fact, Douglas's love for and understanding of science fiction goes far deeper than he admits here. The truth appears to be that Douglas was a huge sci-fi and comic book fan as a child and he often cited Kurt Vonnegut

as an influence. Unsurprisingly, it was James Goss who found the smoking gun in the case that Douglas Adams remained in his deepest heart a proper science fiction geek. In 1977, Douglas was developing a Doctor Who feature film. Now, his bosses at the BBC were extremely sceptical of the idea of a science fiction movie. Given that this was about 18 months before Star Wars came out, it probably says a lot about the BBC's ability to anticipate trends. But Douglas was convinced and to make his case he wrote a detailed treatise on how to make a proper science fiction film. Here is an extract from that treatise, read by James Goss.

Science fiction in films, it is a question of getting the angle right. It has been tried many times unsuccessfully. This is probably because the average non-sci-fi reading member of the public probably sees sci-fi as being gloomy, extrapolations of present tendencies towards totalitarianism. Verdict? Boring. Even I as a science fiction fan do not go and see these films. Science fiction must not ignore what we already know. It can go way beyond it on fantastic flights of fantasy, but the structure of the fantastic must be logical. And this is a lot of the beauty of science fiction, the wild fantasies that can be created from imaginative logical extrapolations of what we already know.

For instance, it is completely unacceptable in modern sci-fi to talk of spaceships travelling faster than light because Einstein must be taken into account. However, theories of hyperspace which allow instantaneous transportation are acceptable. In other words, current knowledge can be argued against but not thrown out the window. Again, black holes. A marvelous area for fantasy but it must be informed fantasy. Anything a writer invents about black holes must take into account the arguments put forward by the theorists. A science fiction audience wants to make that suspension of disbelief and you must allow him to do that by not insulting his intelligence. However, this does not in any way preclude the adventure romp like Doctor Who or Harry Harrison,

which is one of the brightest and best areas of sci-fi because it can be so outrageous in its fantasy but the fun and the skill of it is the maintenance of the inner logic. All the best wild ideas in surreal comedy, science fiction, spy thrillers etc. adhere to a strict inner logic. Without logic there is no surprise and no joy. no joy. Without logic, there is no surprise and no joy. That feels like a golden rule in the universe according to Douglas Adams. Douglas was in his mid-twenties when he wrote that. Hitchhiker and all it brought is ahead of him. He's just a few years out of university, but already you can see the mercilessly rigorous intellect at work, taking incredibly seriously the demands of science fiction as a genre and full of respect for its audience. For those of us who love science

fiction, and in particular, those of us who love science fiction because of Douglas Adams, this comes as a huge relief. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Arvind Ethan David. In the show notes, there's a link to his audiobook, which was produced by Pushkin Industries. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you support the show on Patreon at different levels, you get free Imaginary World stickers, a mug

or a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. Another way to support the show is to recommend it to a friend, post about it on social media, or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org.