h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think in terms of content and material and if only in terms of length, this entry is approaching a state where it's "just about right" and just needs a final tidying up.

If I were to move this entry - in this form - to the Alternative Writing Workshop, at least to begin with, are there any Moorcock fans out there who could pass critical judgement on the stage so far reached?

Just cannot see the content for the ink, so to speak, at present....

Wow. It's been ages since I read any of these.

In that case enjoy! But is it the case that my burbling combined with Ekaterine's c;ear original prose makes sense?

I'm also really surprised that nobody's yet picked up on the temporal paradox I highlighted in footnote 7...

In "The Singing Citadel", Michael Moorcock, sometime about 1970, creates a Queen of Chaos called Eequoor, who dwells in a realm where no other colours are permissible apart from subtle shades and variations of the colour blue.

It is clear from the context that Eequoor is what Douglas Adams, nearly ten years later, chose to call a Hoolovoo: a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue, who acheive physical stability only by being refracted into a free-standing prism. One such Hoolovoo was in fact a member of the creative team responsible for the starship Heart of Gold (we learn this in the opening chapters of the book "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", when Zaphod chooses to renounce his duties as President of the galaxy by stealing the ship he is meant to be launching)

Now I don't for one moment think Douglas Adams consciously stole the idea from Moorcock. The Hoolovoo is such a minor throwaway character in h2g2, for one thing: he, she, or it appears once in the trilogy and that's it, never to be seen again. Adams was far too good and far too original a writer for that - witness the debate about the digestive biscuits story (DNA and another world-famous author both wrote much the same story, independently of each other, concerning a railway waiting room and an inadvertently shared pack of biscuits). It does become clear that if any plagiarising was going on, it wasn't being done by Douglas Adams.

Adams was script editor on Dr Who for a long time; to hold down a job like this presupposes that he was very literate and well-read accross the whole spectrum of science fiction. You can also pick up occassional little "blips" in the h2g2 books that read as if they are very sideways tributes to other SF authors - or in the case of Isaac Asimov, pointed remarks!

I don't think it would be outrageous or disrespectful to wonder about Adams having at some time in his youth read the whole shelf-ful of Michael Moorcock novels. The idea of a "super-intelligent shade of the colour blue" might well have arisen spontaneously and unconsciously from a seed planted many years before...

Well, it's 30 years since I read most of this, although I've re-read Jerry C. several times since. The coverage of the end of time is rather scant and whilst it isn't amongst the serious works I always found it pleasing, particulalry the humour. The End of Time makes the phrasing of note 6 a little unfortunate, since the 20th century can't really be regarded as either end of time.

An impossible task to cover everything in the books. Just suggest a reading list maybe, otherwise the full set appears a bit oppressive.