Happy 42nd Birthday to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel)

Douglas Adams's novel, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, turns 42 today.

Published on 12 October 1979, the novel was based on Adams's radio series of the same name which had aired eighteen months earlier on the BBC. With the radio series a huge success, Adams was convinced to turn the series into a novel. Adams only adapted the first four parts of the radio series into the book, saving the rest for the sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (published a year later), although, as was his wont, Adams made major plot and character changes between the different versions of the story. The same held true of the excellent BBC mini-series (which aired in 1981), the video game (1984) and feature film (2005).

The novel sold extremely well, shifting 250,000 copies in its first three months on sale. Unusually for a British comedic SF novel, the book was a hit in the United States as well and sales of the novel passed a million in 1984. Total sales of the novel are now believed to be in the neighbourhood of 20 million. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the two biggest-selling individual SF novels* of all time, a position it has swapped fairly regularly with Dune in the last few years, although a recent boost in sales for Dune (driven by the new movie adaptation) have almost certainly moved it back into first place and Hitch-Hiker's into second.

As with most versions of the story, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel opens with Earth being demolished by the officious and callous Vogons to make room for a hyperspace by-pass. Ford Prefect, a field researcher for the eponymous book who has been conducting research on Earth for fifteen years, elects to rescue his best friend Arthur Dent from certain death and they flee into deep space. After an improbable meeting with Ford's semi-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (the part-time Galactic President who's now on the run after stealing a hyper-advanced starship for no rational reason), they find themselves caught up in a wild, ancient conspiracy involving god-like computers, dolphins, mice, an alien fjord-designer and, of course, the number 42, which holds the key to the secrets of life, the universe, and everything. Or it would, if anyone knew what the hell the question was.

Sadly, Douglas Adams passed away in 2001 at the far-too-young age of 49 and is not here to celebrate the milestone his famous novel has achieved. However, I am certain that, demolition of the Earth by bad poetry-reciting aliens allowing, the novel will still be going strong in another 42 years from now.

* Sales estimates of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy are complicated due to the fact that it is a very short novel, so for most of its existence it has been published in handy omnibus formats with various of its sequels; the biggest-selling edition of the book is believed to be a 1985 omnibus edition that packaged it with its three immediate sequels: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982) and So Long and Thanks For All the Fish (1984). After 1992, this was supplanted by a five-volume omnibus that added Mostly Harmless (1992), the final book in the series. In recent years, the series has seen new five-volume editions put on sale. However, Dune has a similar estimate problem due to the extreme popularity of a hardcover omnibus that contains the first three books in its series which has been in print since the late 1970s.

RIP David Prowse

David Prowse, the actor who originated the role of Darth Vader in the Star Wars films, has sadly passed away at the age of 85.

Born in Bristol in 1935, Prowse attended Bristol Grammar School. Due to his unusual height (6 ft 6), he secured a job as a bouncer at a dance hall in the 1950s. He took up bodybuilding as a hobby and became the British Heavyweight Weightlifting Champion from 1962 to 1964. He represented England in the Commonwealth Games in 1962.

Prowse's imposing size and public profile as a sportsman caught the attention of casting directors. He made his screen debut in the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale, appearing as Frankenstein's Monster in a hallucination sequence. He reprised the role of Frankenstein's Monster in The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). In 1971 he was cast as Julian in the film A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick.

Additional roles followed on TV and film, with Prowse appearing in Carry On Henry (1971), part of British cinema's most successful comedy franchise, as well as long-running science fiction series Doctor Who (in 1973, playing a minotaur in the serial The Time Monster). In 1975 Prowse appeared as UK children's road safety warden - a "lollipop man" - in a road safety campaign for the Green Cross Code. He was continue in this role in different TV and poster campaigns for the next twenty years.

Prowse was cast in the role of Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977) by George Lucas, who remembered his imposing stature from A Clockwork Orange. Prowse was clad in the iconic black armour in this role. He also provided the voice for the character on set, but Lucas and the other cast and crew - who nicknamed him "Darth Farmer" - decided his strong West Country accent was not suitable for the imposing role of Vader. To Prowse's disappointment, his voice was replaced by that of James Earl Jones in the finished film.

The role immediately made Prowse very famous. Amusingly, he became one of the first people to propose that Vader was actually Luke Skywalker's father at a fan convention in 1978, something that apparently irked Lucas (although he hadn't finalised that idea himself yet) although Prowse had been joking around and, according to producer Gary Kurtz, "made a very good guess." Prowse reprised the role of Vader in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) but his poor swordsman skills saw him replaced during the lightsabre duels by sword trainer and choreographer Bob Anderson. Anderson's shorter stature explains why Vader appears hunched over in some of the duel scenes. Prowse did get back in the costume for the scene where Vader picks up the Emperor and hurls him to his death, since Anderson lacked the stature and strength necessary to do so. Prowse was again annoyed to find himself replaced by another actor - Sebastian Shaw - for the sequence where Vader removes his helmet and his true appearance is exposed for the first time.

Prowse continued to do the Star Wars convention circuit, but his well-known grumbling over his sidelining in the original trilogy, being cut out of residual payments for Return of the Jedi due to "Hollywood accounting" and his immense dislike of the prequel trilogy, saw George Lucas ban him from attending official conventions in 2010. Because of these complaints, and advancing age, Prowse was not asked to reprise the role of Darth Vader in either Revenge of the Sith (2005) or Rogue One (2016).

Prowse continued to act and in 1981 appeared in the BBC mini-series version of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, appearing as a gangster's bodyguard in which he got to use his actual face and voice to menacing effect. He appeared several times in Star Wars documentaries and reunion films. In 2000 he was made an MBE for his services to charity and road safety. 

In 2001 he was diagnosed with septic arthritis and underwent surgery to help minimise the problem. He became an advocate for arthritis charities in the UK. In 2009 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, underwent radiation therapy and was declared in remission in relatively short order.

Prowse announced his retirement from acting and public appearances in 2016, due to age and health issues. He passed away yesterday, with Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) among those paying tribute.

As the "man in the suit" of Darth Vader, Prowse helped create the most iconic SF villain of all time. He will be missed.

THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY turns 42 today

Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise celebrates its 42nd anniversary today. As hopefully everyone knows, 42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything in the series.

Arguably the first truly transmedia franchise, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy began as a radio play performed on the BBC. The first episode was released on 8 March 1978. Later that year Adams novelised the radio script as an instantly-bestselling novel. A second series of the radio play followed in 1979, novelised later that year as The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

In 1981 the story was adapted by BBC television as a (relatively) high-budget mini-series. More novels followed: Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992). There was also a highly-regarded (and recently-remastered) video game in 1984 and a feature film in 2005, although this only received a middling reception. There have also been additional radio plays based on the series.

Hulu confirmed last year that they are developing a new television series, this time with a view to adapting the whole book series (the first TV series only covered the first two books).

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the most popular SF franchises of all time; with more than 20 million books sold, it is breathing down the neck of the Dune series. It was also arguably one of the first highly successful SF comedies (preceded only really by The Jetsons), paving the way for later works including Red Dwarf and Futurama. Much of Hitch-Hiker's iconography, including the number 42, intelligent dolphins and mice and the importance of towels, has become part of the British cultural landscape. The Hugo-nominated novel Space Opera is a recent homage to the books.

Here's to another 42 years (at least) of Arthur Dent and his hapless misadventures in time and space.

Hulu developing new HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY TV series

The American Hulu streaming service is planning a fresh adaptation of Douglas Adams' science fiction comedy franchise, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Originating as a radio series in 1978, the story has been adapted as five novels, a BBC TV mini-series in 1981 (recently reissued on Blu-Ray), several video games and a 2005 Hollywood movie which was, to put it mildly, not great.

The new project is being spearheaded by producer Carlton Cuse (Lost) and writer Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman). It is unclear which of the several different competing versions of the story they will be adapting, although the smart money is on the novels, which took the story further than any of the other mediums.

The BBC mini-series only adapted the first two books, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), so a fresh TV version could take the story further by adapting Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long and Thanks For All the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992).

BBC America recently used Adams' other major genre work, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, as the inspiration for a two-season TV show that was well received but not successful in the ratings game.

Wertzone Classics: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (BBC mini-series)

Arthur Dent wakes up one Thursday morning hoping for a quiet lie-in and a nice lunch. Instead, his house is demolished to make way for a bypass. This is followed by the discovery that his best friend Ford Prefect is in fact an alien from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and then the entire Earth being blown into a trillion pieces by other aliens called Vogons, who enjoy writing bad poetry. Dent's journey will take him to the end of time, back to the beginning of life and will involve searching for the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything and, when that turns out to be disappointing, the Ultimate Question. His only help on this journey will come from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an electronic book clearly written on a very tight deadline. Fortunately, Dent has friends and allies on this trip and he knows where his towel is.

It is often said that Douglas Adams' seminal SF comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has no real definitive version: the version each fan considers to be definitive is normally the one they encountered first (unless it's the terrible 2005 movie, in which case obviously not), whether that's the 1978 radio play, the 1979 novel or even the 1984 text adventure video game. But for many millions of fans, the first version they saw was the 1981 BBC TV mini-series. Written by Adams himself, directed by Alan Bell and produced by John Lloyd, it deftly weaves together the best storyline elements from the first two novels in the book series (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) and the first two seasons of the radio series, whilst dropping elements which were less successful.

The result is a - very relatively - tight version of Adams' rambling magnum opus which takes his sprawling story and starts and finishes it in about three hours and six episodes. This modest length (about a quarter the length of your average Netflix season, for example) takes in the birth and death of the human race, asks existential questions about the nature of the universe and almost never lets up, for a second, on the barrage of jokes, quips, elaborate sight gags, puns and character humour. Watching it in 2018, it's an admirable exercise in writing discipline (not a phrase lightly associated with the famously hesitant Adams, who once took eight years to write a book barely 200 pages in  length), worldbuilding and atmosphere.

Of course it has dated, perhaps annoyingly so for the BBC. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy cost them a fair amount of money by their standards (certainly far more than they spent on the comparable eighteenth season of Doctor Who, the last one starring Tom Baker, which aired the same year) and the relatively sprawling sets (some inherited from the movie Alien), visual effects gags and, especially, the lengthy and brilliant animated sequences taken from the fictional guidebook itself are all impressive. But there's still a lot of filming in quarries with under-detailed black sets and some decidedly dodgy model shots of spaceships. If anything, the show's transfer to Blu-Ray and resulting digital remastering (alas, not a HD remastering as that's technically impossible due to the profusion of scenes shot directly onto low-res video) shows up some of these problems rather than solves them. But you also have to pause and remember that this TV series was shot almost forty years ago. On that basis, some dated effects and dodgy costumes can be forgiven for a script that is still as laugh-out-loud funny and fresh now as it was then.

Hitchhikers works not because it's a silly, funny story, but because it's a story that poses questions about the nature of the universe, the point (or not) of existence and the search for meaning which we all face at one stage or another. Surprisingly - and very much something that betrays its UK origins - the story doesn't really give any satisfactory or pat answers, Adams noting that he's not going to come up with the answer to such profound musings in a three-hour TV show when scientists, philosophers and telephone sanitation engineers have failed to do so in the preceding two million years. Instead, the show throws some ideas back and forth and has a lot of fun in the process.

Performances are uniformly excellent, from Simon Jones' befuddled Arthur Dent to David Dixon's madcap Ford Prefect to Sandra Dickinson's Trillian (although it's hard not to notice that Trillian is decidedly under-developed compared to the other characters), with a ton of other noted British character actors of the 1970s and 1980s dropping in. Soon-to-be Fifth Doctor Peter Davison has an excellent brief role as an animal desperate to be eaten, and even David "Darth Vader" Prowse shows up to show everyone what he looks like outside of a black mask. There isn't a weak link in the cast, and of course the soundtrack is exceptional from the backing music to the iconic theme tune to the final burst of Louis Armstrong that sees the show out.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has now been reissued on Blu-Ray, with three discs packed with extra features, including the entire, massive Making of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy documentary (including new dramatic scenes with the original cast) filmed in the early 1990s. The BBC had huge plans for this show at the time, giving it an impressive sound mix missing from almost all of their contemporary shows, making the series certainly sound far better than it ever has before (helped by a 2018 audio remix).

Unfortunately, the series has a huge problem in that many of the original film elements have not survived the passage of time. Without those, it's not been possible to natively remaster the footage in proper HD. The technical team have managed to moderately improve the quality of both the video and film footage as much as possible (and this is the best the series has ever looked, somewhat better than running the DVD through an upscaler) but there are hard limits on what they can do without the original film elements. This would be less of a problem if the set didn't have "digitally remastered in HD!" on the box, which is something of an exaggeration. Frustratingly, the remastering isn't as good as the recent job that was done on the Season 12 release of Doctor Who, for a season a full six years older than this show. The remaster team were able to recover all of the animated Guide entries and remaster them in HD (thanks to them being stored separately) but they ultimately decided not to mix this into the episodes, feeling it would jar too badly. Instead, the upgraded Guide entries are available to view separately and look excellent.

Technical issues aside, the BBC TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (*****) may (incredibly arguably) be the most concise, focused and successful version of the story made to date, with a relentless assault of ideas, gags and weird and wonderful characters. With the 2005 movie being, how shall we say, "a load of dingo's kidneys", it certainly remains the definitive visual dramatic version of the story to date. It is available now in the UK (Blu-Ray, Limited Edition Blu-Ray, DVD) and will be released next month in the USA (Blu-Ray, DVD).

New Douglas Adams and Kim Stanley Robinson covers

To celebrate both the 30th anniversary of the original novel and the release of the new Hitch-Hiker's book, And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer, Pan Macmillan have re-released the original five Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels in new covers. Most notable about this release is that The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself has a blank cover: you yourself can create the cover using a provided assortment of stickers. So if the cover sucks, it's your own fault!


The new editions also come with fresh new introductions by other writers, such as Russell T. Davies (outgoing producer of the new Doctor Who), Monty Pythoner Terry Jones and Neil Gaiman, and a host of rarely-seen publicity photos and press releases from the time of each book's release.

Tying in with the release of Kim Stanley Robinson's very fine Galileo's Dream, HarperCollins Voyager meanwhile are reissuing his classic Mars Trilogy in very nice new covers. Unfortunately, they are also in the larger 'B-format' paperbacks which I know many readers aren't too keen on. However, the books are so great to look at, it's worth the extra inconvenience of their bulky size.


Both sets of book are available in the UK right now.

Infinitely Improbable

On 12 October 2009, the sixth Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel, entitled And Another Thing, will be released. This is an impressive feat, given that the series' creator and writer Douglas Adams passed away eight years ago. The new novel has instead been written by Eoin Colfer, creator of the popular Artemis Fowl series.


The notion of an author picking up the works of a deceased writer and carrying on has always been controversial. Sometimes it has led to interesting results. Most times it hasn't. If a series with a major, ongoing storyline is cut short by the author's untimely demise, and if the author had enough warning to prepare detailed notes and give his blessing for another writer to finish the work, than that is one thing: David Gemmell and Robert Jordan did this for their novels Fall of Kings and A Memory of Light respectively. But for an author to pick up a series that was essentially finished seems dubious.

Of course, Colfer was asked to pick up the baton by Adams' widow, and Adams himself had spoken of a sixth Hitch-Hiker's novel to retcon the overtly nihilistic ending of the fifth book, Mostly Harmless, which he had written in a burst of depression. So the existence of this book isn't entirely foreign to his wishes. But whether he had any notes for a new author to work from, or if he would have approved of another author picking up on his signature series, is another matter altogether.

Eoin Colfer - who offers his take on the job here - is a talented and funny author, and certainly an excellent choice for this project. But I cannot help feeling uneasy whenever this sort of thing happens, and questions over the publishers' motives are certain to arise. However, as a tribute to Adams and his series - 2009 is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the first novel - this could still be worth a look.