A Conversation for Fans of the 'Hitchhiker' - please HELP!!!

Some suggestions

Post 1

Hoovooloo

I'm tempted to say that if you're expecting to get an MA you can damn well do the research yourself, but...

Absolutely your first port of call MUST be "Don't Panic", by Neil Gaiman, just out in its third and final smiley - sadface edition, ISBN 1-84023-501-2, only £6.99. It'll tell you a great deal about the HHGG phenomenon, including interviews with DNA and comparisons with literary origins.

In terms of literary influences, you may cite Jonathan Swift (especially Gulliver's Travels) as a big one, but the concept of the innocent abroad in a fantastical world is one common in literature - think Alice in Wonderland.

It's also worth making the observation of the change in structure and approach across the five books.

Book 1 - more or less straight adaptation of the radio series, with a few additions. Sudden ending due to deadline. Open ending because sequel was expected.

Book 2 - not quite so straight adaptation of the radio series, shortened in order to meet deadline. Firm ending to prevent need for sequel.

Book 3 - basically an unused script for a Dr. Who movie, cobbled into the HHGG format, which was difficult because all the HHGG characters are so ineffectual. Open ending to allow for a sequel which nobody seemed to want much.

Book 4 - change of pace and focus on romance, not entirely unrelated to events in the author's life. Has the feel of a first draft because it was rushed to meet a deadline (pattern forming...?)

Book 5 - astonishing turnaround, quite a harsh book, intended, it seemed, to firmly stop the trilogy in its tracks. Imagery and writing present which reflect the author's recent world travels and involvement in conservation.

There you go. Pad that out a bit and you should be an MA by Christmas...

H.


Some suggestions

Post 2

Day

Dear H.,

Of course you are right. I didn't ask anyone to write my thesis for me, I only thought that maybe there were some great ideas out there which I haven't thought of.

I thought that sharing ideas was one of the purposes of h2g2. You know, many heads have more ideas than one smiley - winkeye.

Yours,

Day


Some suggestions

Post 3

Hoovooloo

Sharing ideas is the entire raison d'etre of the place, I like to think. So here are a few more...

One should avoid taking HHGG too seriously as literature, because it's not. It was, first and foremost, a *radio show*. Every version since, books included, has flowed from that. It therefore contains features, in almost all its forms, which are a result of its origins in that medium. Foremost among them is the concept of The Book itself.

Creativity thrives on restriction, and radio is a restrictive medium. The choice of science fiction of course removes some of those restrictions, but on the other hand introduces others.

The original idea DNA had was for a series called "The Ends of the Earth", in which the earth would be destroyed at the end of each episode.

So, for the first episode, he had the earth being demolished to make way for a bypass. He had need for an identifying character - an everyman, someone the audience could root for, hence Arthur Dent. He also needed someone to explain to Arthur what the hell was going on (exposition), and that person would necessarily be an alien, hence Ford Prefect. That character would need an excuse for being on earth in the first place, and the drunken idea from the field in Innsbruck welled up and suggested itself, and the rest is history. None of the other episodes of "The Ends of the Earth" got made, thank goodness.

The idea of the Guide was an enormously freeing one, because it allowed the writer to go off on flights of fancy in the middle of the story without affecting the plot. It also gave a logical reason for expository monologues - a big necessity in a radio show with a complex plot. And finally it gave a perfect explanation for all the introductory and concluding monologues which bookend episodes.

It's also worth mentioning that much of the structure of the published books was affected by DNA's persistent inability to write to a deadline. The sudden stop at the end of the first book was caused by his publishers literally saying "stop wherever you're up to, we'll publish that". LtU&E was so late that there wasn't time to edit it, and the first editions went out without the usual adverts for other books in the back because the story went right up to the very back page. The end of chapter 25 in SLaTfATF is something of a rebuke to scifi fanboy readers who wanted more spaceships, and may not have survived to the final draft if the book had *had* a final draft instead of being rushed onto the shelves incredibly late.

One BIG feature of the HHGG books is the way that they are, due to the speed at which they were generally written and the lack of editing and everything else, not densely plotted. Instead, they are very clearly made up pretty much as they go along. There is very little foreshadowing, and where there is any, it is usually more a case of retrofitting an explanation to something which was originally intended as a throwaway line with no intention of development at all. The perfect example of this is the bowl of petunias.

In the radio show - bowl of petunias, "oh no, not again", yes, most amusing. In the book, ditto. A simple line. DNA later retrofits the whole Agrajag sequence in LtU&E to make it look like this line was foreshadowing something. He then completely drops the idea and ignores it totally for the whole of the next book, resurrecting it cleverly for the shocking climax of the final book. All that from a simple joke about a bowl of petunias.

Contrast that with the dense plotting of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". Here was a book constructed like a tensegrity sphere - every bit of it in perfect harmony with the rest, nothing touching, nothing parallel, nothing perpendicular, but you could squash the whole thing flat and it would pop back into shape all on its own. Rereading it, one is very aware that here is a book that the author had in his mind as a single, unified whole, instead of a sequence of episodes strung together. Never mind the fact that even here, in this paragon of plotting, that several of the actual ideas have, like the plot of LtU&E been lifted almost unmodified from Doctor Who scripts (mainly the City of Death and Shada).

Please note, I'm not saying that the lack of planned plot in HHGG is BAD, per se. It's merely a feature of the medium it originated in, and its writer's habits.

What is certainly worth noting is the sheer density of ideas in it. Even just the first book swarms with details, with throwaway jokes about concepts which other writers would stretch to a whole chapter or even book.

A few concepts which were picked up, giggled at and dropped include:

- Peril Sensitive Sunglasses
- Old Janx Spirit and its effects
- The importance of towels
- An Improbability Drive engineer who is nothing but a superintelligent shade of a particular colour...
- The Babel fish
- Veet Voojagig and the biro planet
- Bethselamin, of toilet receipt reknown

I could go on, of course, but you get the idea. All of the above are just throwaway gags which have nothing at all to do with the plot, and I've pulled them from just the first few chapters of just the first book. Many of these ideas are so persuasive that despite the fact that they're such a small part of the book, they assume enormous importance in the eyes of fans - witness this smiley smiley - towel - and indeed some of them have entered the language.

It's the greatest triumph, I think, of a writer, to actually change the language in which he writes - to contribute an idea to it which the general public (not just fans) instantly recognise as being so *right* that they adopt it, sometimes almost immediately. Joseph Heller did it, with "Catch-22". George Orwell did it, with "Big Brother" and "Room 101", and to a lesser extent, "Newspeak" and "doublethink". William Gibson did it, with "cyberspace". And of course Douglas Adams did it, with "Life, the Universe and Everything" and the concept of the answer to it being 42. I'm sure you can think of others. In fact, there's a Guide Entry on concepts from fiction, which might be of some help there...

Anyway, I'm up very late, and like you say, you didn't ask me to write it for you, so I hope some of these witterings give you some inspiration. Do let me know if it's helping at all, won't you?

H.


Key: Complain about this post

More Conversations for Fans of the 'Hitchhiker' - please HELP!!!

Write an Entry

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."

Write an entry
Read more