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| Тема |
 едноминутно мълчание за Дъглас А. |
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| Автор |
urko (неидентифициран) |
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| Публикувано | 20.05.01 01:09 |
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Douglas Adams
So long, and thanks for all the fish
May 17th 2001
From The Economist print edition
A master of comic science fiction has died
THE best ideas are often the simplest. Legend has it that the idea for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” came to Douglas Adams when he was, himself, hitchhiking. He was in a field at night (most versions of the legend place this field in Austria), looking at the stars, when the thought came to him that there might be people hitchhiking between those stars on spaceships. Such people would, of course, need a guide to their travels: a compendium of useful information with that most useful of all injunctions, “Don’t Panic”, written on the front cover in large, friendly letters.
Thus the Guide was born. It was a Swiftian satire for the late 20th century. Instead of giants, pygmies and super-intelligent horses, it was populated by bug-eyed monsters who use poetry as a form of torture, creatures whose chromosomes are so unstable that they evolve several times a day, and super-intelligent shades of the colour blue. It even found room for an explanation of where ballpoint pens vanish to. (They slip through wormholes in space to biro heaven when nobody is looking.)
The idea went through several iterations, first as a radio series, then television, then a sequence of books which, though described as a trilogy, ran to five volumes. Then, in a twist that Mr Adams can hardly have expected when, in 1978, he first put pen to paper, the World Wide Web gave him a chance to create something like the real thing, at least for earth-bound travellers (www.h2g2.com). Douglas Adams died of a heart attack on May 11th while exercising in a gym. He was 49, not 42.
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