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The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [平装]

~ Douglas Adams (作者)

基本信息

出版社: Del Rey (2002年4月30日)

平装: 832页

语种：英语

ISBN: 0345453743

条形码: 9780345453747

商品尺寸: 23.4 x 15.5 x 3.8 cm

商品重量: 816 g

品牌: Del Rey

商品描述

文摘

What Was He Like,

Douglas Adams?

He was tall, very tall. He had an air of cheerful diffidence. He

combined a razor-sharp intellect and understanding of what

he was doing with the puzzled look of someone who had

backed into a profession that surprised him in a world that

perplexed him. And he gave the impression that, all in all, he was rather

enjoying it.

He was a genius, of course. It’s a word that gets tossed around a lot

these days, and it’s used to mean pretty much anything. But Douglas was

a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he

could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you’d seen it his way

you could never go back.

Douglas Noel Adams was born in 1952 in Cambridge, England (shortly

before the announcement of an even more influential DNA, deoxyribonucleic

acid). He was a self-described “strange child” who did not learn

to speak until he was four. He wanted to be a nuclear physicist (“I never

made it because my arithmetic was so bad”), then went to Cambridge to

study English, with ambitions that involved becoming part of the tradition

of British writer/performers (of which the members of Monty Python’s

Flying Circus are the best-known example).

When he was eighteen, drunk in a field in Innsbruck, hitchhiking across

Europe, he looked up at the sky filled with stars and thought, “Somebody

ought to write the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Then he went to

sleep and almost, but not quite, forgot all about it.

He left Cambridge in 1975 and went to London where his many writ-ing

and performing projects tended, in the main, not to happen. He

worked with former Python Graham Chapman writing scripts and sketches

for abortive projects (among them a show for Ringo Starr which contained

the germ of Starship Titanic) and with writer-producer John Lloyd

(they pitched a series called Snow Seven and the White Dwarfs, a comedy

about two astronomers in “an observatory on Mt. Everest–“The idea

for that was minimum casting, minimum set, and we’d just try to sell the

series on cheapness”).

He liked science fiction, although he was never a fan. He supported

himself through this period with a variety of odd jobs: he was, for example,

a hired bodyguard for an oil-rich Arabian family, a job that entailed

wearing a suit and sitting in hotel corridors through the night listening to

the ding of passing elevators.

In 1977 BBC radio producer (and well-known mystery author) Simon

Brett commissioned him to write a science fiction comedy for BBC Radio

Four. Douglas originally imagined a series of six half-hour comedies

called The Ends of the Earth–funny stories which at the end of each, the

world would end. In the first episode, for example, the Earth would be

destroyed to make way for a cosmic freeway.

But, Douglas soon realized, if you are going to destroy the Earth, you

need someone to whom it matters. Someone like a reporter for, yes, the

Hitchchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And someone else . . . a man who was

called Alaric B in Douglas’s original proposal. At the last moment Douglas

crossed out Alaric B and wrote above it Arthur Dent. A normal name

for a normal man.

For those people listening to BBC Radio 4 in 1978 the show came as a

revelation. It was funny–genuinely witty, surreal, and smart. The series

was produced by Geoffrey Perkins, and the last two episodes of the first

series were co-written with John Lloyd.

(I was a kid who discovered the series–accidentally, as most listeners

did–with the second episode. I sat in the car in the driveway, getting

cold, listening to Vogon poetry, and then the ideal radio line “Ford,

you’re turning into an infinite number of penguins,” and I was happy;

perfectly, unutterably happy.)

By now, Douglas had a real job. He was the script editor for the long-running

BBC SF series Doctor Who, in the Tom Baker days.

Pan Books approached him about doing a book based on the radio series,

and Douglas got the manuscript for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the

Galaxy in to his editors at Pan slightly late (according to legend they telephoned

him and asked, rather desperately, where he was in the book, and

how much more he had to go. He told them. “Well,” said his editor,

making the best of a bad job, “just finish the page you’re on and we’ll

send a motorbike around to pick it up in half an hour”). The book, a paperback

original, became a surprise bestseller, as did, less surprisingly, its

four sequels. It spawned a bestselling text-based computer game.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sequence used the tropes of science

fiction to talk about the things that concerned Douglas, the world

he observed, his thoughts on Life, the Universe, and Everything. As we

moved into a world where people really did think that digital watches

were a pretty neat thing, the landscape had become science fiction and

Douglas, with a relentless curiosity about matters scientific, an instinct

for explanation, and a laser-sharp sense of where the joke was, was in

a perfect position to comment upon, to explain, and to describe that

landscape.

I read a lengthy newspaper article recently demonstrating that Hitchhiker’s

was in fact a lengthy tribute to Lewis Carroll (something that

would have come as a surprise to Douglas, who had disliked the little of

Alice in Wonderland he read). Actually, the literary tradition that Douglas

was part of was, at least initially, the tradition of English Humor Writing

that gave us P. G. Wodehouse (whom Douglas often cited as an influence,

although most people tended to miss it because Wodehouse didn’t write

about spaceships).

Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time

went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who

had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of

crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays.

He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing and

explaining with an enthusiasm that was uniquely his own. Douglas’s

ability to miss deadlines became legendary. (“I love deadlines,” he said

once. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”)

He died in May 2001–too young. His death surprised us all, and left a

huge, Douglas Adams—sized hole in the world. We had lost both the man

(tall, affable, smiling gently at a world that baffled and delighted him)

and the mind.

He left behind a number of novels, as often-imitated as they are, ultimately,

inimitable. He left behind characters as delightful as Marvin the

Paranoid Android, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Slartibartfast. He left sentences

that will make you laugh with delight as they rewire the back of

your head.

And he made it look so easy.

–Neil Gaiman,

January 2002

(Long before Neil Gaiman was the bestselling author of novels like American Gods and

Neverwhere, or graphic novels like The Sandman sequence, he wrote a book called Don’t

Panic, a history of Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

图书描述

出版日期: 2002年4月30日

At last in paperback in one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from Douglas Adams’s beloved Hitchiker series.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.

Life, the Universe and Everything

The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky– so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription conspires to thrust him back to reality. So to speak.

Mostly Harmless

Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself?