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

You know, sometimes death is a smart career move. It gives the deceased an air of respectability in some circles. This is especially true of creative geniuses, who are inevitably viewed with suspicion by the conventional thinkers of the day. But once deceased, it is perfectly acceptable for the vultures of academe to pick apart the carcass. And soon, perhaps, the feeding will begin upon the opus that was Douglas Adams. They will parse his sentences, digesting his words down to their elemental vowels and consonant, and consume them in the hopes of somehow making his spirit their own, much like cannibals. His spirit, of course, is not to be found in the mere arrangement of letters on a page, but in the ideas and a way of thought.

There was a writer in an earlier age much like Douglas Adams. His name was Jonathan Swift. He outraged the establishment of his day, but eventually passed into respectability. He was required reading at the college I attended. And one day Douglas Adams will be assigned to college students in surveys of great literature. For that is what HHGG is, just as is Gulliver's Travels.

I wonder if anyone ever asked him to comment on the remarkable parallels between the two works? I have long said HHGG is a modern version of GT, complete with the same sort of barbs at the political and academic establishment. There was even a spaceship in GT, or as Swift described it, a floating island controlled by a giant magnetic loadstone.

At this rate, I predict HHGG will be on the required reading list of great English writers around 2201 or so, along with that other master of 20th century literature, C.P. Snow. And through this academic assimilation Douglas Adams will have passed into the world's intellectual DNA. But will we have learned the true lesson, and found out the meaning of life, the universe and everything? Perhaps not. And then it will be time for Swift/Adams to return and once again throw politically incorrect thunderbolts at the pompous posterior of polite society.

In the meantime, it would be wrong to deify Douglas Adams. After all, he was just this guy, you know?