Wish You Were Here (48 page)
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The current model of how the universe works has it held together by four binding forces: the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity. So far it has been impossible to tie them all together in a coherent account—yet if the Big Bang theory of the universe is correct (and it’s beautiful, predictive and compatible with observation) then all the forces must have been at unity before they uncoupled. Unified Field Theory is the Holy Grail of Physics.
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This extract by permission of Sue Freestone is from her tribute to Douglas in
Publishing News.
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Douglas took a selection of the works of Charles Dickens to Zaire. The allusion to Waugh’s
A Handful of Dust
in which Tony Last is condemned to read Dickens in the jungle forever would not have been lost on him.
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We even share an estimated 40% of our genes with a banana.
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Though, God knows, these can make asking someone out for a Bergman movie, six pints of lager and a Vindaloo look positively rational . . .
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Douglas was for a time a contributor to a scientific group concerned with the rhino’s preposterously huge nasal membrane.
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This comes from Mark and Douglas’s presentation document to the BBC.
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9,192,631,770 in case you ever need it.
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Transcript of an interview with Michael Leapman used for his article in the
Radio Times,
17 August 1989. My thanks to Michael Leapman for digging it out of his archives.
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SRI point out that one of the myths is that poachers are impoverished locals, but the reality is that poaching is conducted by ruthless international criminal organizations which are content to see the rhino hunted to extinction if their stockpile of horn thereby increases in value.
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I remember rather ungraciously whingeing to Sue as I wrote a cheque that the bloody rhinos never bought any of the books we published . . . I have his letter still, and he even got Polly to make her mark on it thus making it doubly difficult to say no.
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188
Douglas misremembers the artist in his essay in
The Salmon of Doubt
as Ralph Steadman. It is a delightful piece, however, that reminds us how engaging his journalism could be.
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189
Actually some of these constants may not be as constant as all that. It’s always fun to see the universe pulling a few surprises to keep the theorists on their toes.
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Steve Meretzky was a
Hitchhiker’s
fan. He’s one of the best games creators in the business, keen on the basics of story-telling and design and not too sidetracked by technology. As well as for Infocom, he has created games for Legend, Blizzard and Boffo.
Planetfall
was huge.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
should not be missed.
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191
Douglas had been expressing and refining these ideas ever since he fell in love with his first Apple, but for an elegant summary his article in the
Independent on Sunday
(November 1999) collected in
The Salmon of Doubt
is definitive.
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I am grateful to Jim Lynn, the technical leader of the H2G2 web project, for his memory of Douglas’s dream machine.
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Perhaps the open source software like Linux will still prevail . . . but don’t hold your breath.
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I have no proper demographic figures here, just a feeling. SF used to be more of a male market, but that has changed over the years. Fantasy has a readership that is better balanced between the sexes. Douglas had very many female readers, but he also had a particular gift for speaking to slightly alienated men for whom Douglas’s sense of the cosmically absurd was sympathetic. The fan correspondence and the postings to the website after Douglas’s death were preponderantly from blokes.
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195
Article by John Markoff, the
New York Times,
Sunday 29 December 1991.
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196
Stephen King’s brilliant novella
Riding the Bullet
was e-published by Philtrum Press and Simon & Schuster in March 2000.
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197
In case anybody thinks that Terry Pratchett spotted Douglas’s market and wrote for it, I must point out that Terry’s comic SF just preceded Douglas’s though it took longer before Terry broke through, as they say.
Strata,
for example, a pre-Discworld novel, is a little gem featuring time travellers who deliberately place cola bottles in ancient sediments in order to bewilder archaeologists of the future.
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What’s more, it will be immensely difficult. Wittgenstein pointed out that the meaning of words cannot be analysed atomically because what he called the performative context in which they are uttered is essential for understanding. There is more to intelligence than logical reasoning: you have to want to interact with the world and be aware of yourself as an actor in it. So far, only organic creatures have feeling and appetite and self-consciousness. There is no reason in principle why consciousness cannot be created from some configuration of matter, but evolution has billions of years’ lead on our efforts.
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199
My thanks to Yoz Grahame for this story.
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200
The one about the interstellar liner that undergoes SMEF—Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure.
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Interview in
Computer Game
magazine, November 1997.
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202
The polygon count represents the number of visual elements in the image. The higher the number, the greater the resolution. I am grateful to Isabel Molina for her assistance with this part of the story.
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203
These witty examples are from Steven Pinker’s
The Language Instinct
(Penguin Books, 1995).
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204
In publishing, the self-improvement market is colossal in the USA and much smaller proportionately in the UK. Do Americans still hope to be perfectible? Are Brits just too embarrassed and constipated?
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205
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
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206
Creation,
op. cit. p. 32.
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207
Such are the mysterious shibboleths of English that the organizers felt obliged to tip off their foreign visitors that the college is pronounced “maudlin.”
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208
From the Overview on the conference website, paragraph four.
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209
See,
inter alia,
“Evolving Inventions” by Koza, Keane and Streeter,
Scientific American,
February 2003.
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210
The last time we met he bought me lunch at Fredericks, in Islington, and we argued about evolutionary psychology. Beware of a key that seems to open all doors, was my line. Not all our character traits stem from the deep past. Don’t be so self-deceiving about our capacity for reason, was his (though I do him an injustice synopsizing so drastically). Note, he said, how restaurants fill up from the sides, an ancient reflex. He laughed when I said that may be true, but in this case the maitre d’ showed us to the best table.
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My thanks to Christoph Reisner for his time and his kindness in getting me a CD of Douglas lecturing. I am sorry that reasons of space prevent me from using more of this excellent material from Germany.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
N
ICK
W
EBB
was a publisher for nearly thirty years before, perversely, turning to writing. He commissioned
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
while he was an editor at Pan Books, and remained good friends with Douglas Adams until the end of the author’s life. He lives in Hackney, England.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2003 by Nick Webb
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. First published in Great Britain by Headline Book Publishing, a division of Hodder Headline, London, in 2003.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Webb, Nick, 1959–
Wish you were here : the official biography of Douglas Adams / Nick Webb.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
First published in Great Britain by Headline Book Publishing in 2003.
Includes bibliographical references..
1. Adams, Douglas, 1952– 2. Novelists, English—20th century—Biography. 3. Ecologists—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.
PR6051.D3352Z95 2005
823'.914—dc22 2004062729
eISBN: 978-0-345-48188-7
v3.0