Douglas Adams - The Salmon of DoubtEditor’s Note
I first met Douglas Adams in 1990. Newly appointed his editor at Harmony Books, 
I had flown to London in search of Douglas’s long-overdue fifth Hitchhiker 
novel, Mostly Harmless. No sooner was I buzzed in the door to the Adams 
residence in Islington than a large, ebullient man bounded down the long 
staircase, greeted me warmly, and thrust a handful of pages at me. “See what you 
think of these,” he said over his shoulder as he bounded back up the stairs. An 
hour later he was back, new pages in hand, eager to hear my opinion of the first 
batch. And so the afternoon passed, quiet stretches of reading alternating with 
more bounding, more conversation, and fresh pages. This, it turned out, was 
Douglas’s favorite way of working.
In September 2001, four months after Douglas’s tragic, unexpected death, I 
received a phone call from his agent, Ed Victor. A good friend had preserved the 
contents of Douglas’s many beloved Macintosh computers; would I be interested in 
combing through the files to see if they contained the makings of a book? A few 
days later a package arrived, and, curiosity whetted, I tore it open.
My first thought was that Douglas’s friend, Chris Ogle, had undertaken a 
Herculean task—which, as it turned out, he had. The CD-ROM onto which Douglas’s 
writing had been collected contained 2,579 items, ranging from huge files that 
stored the complete text of Douglas’s books to letters on behalf of “Save the 
Rhino,” a favorite charity. Here, too, were fascinating glimpses into dozens of 
half-brewed ideas for books, films, and television programs, some as brief as a 
sentence or two, others running to half-a-dozen pages. Alongside these were 
drafts of speeches, pieces Douglas had written for his website, introductions to 
various books and events, and musings on subjects near to Douglas’s heart: 
music, technology, science, endangered species, travel, and single-malt whisky 
(to name just a few). Finally, I found dozens of versions of the new novel 
Douglas had been wrestling with for the better part of the past decade. Sorting 
these out to arrive at the work-in-progress you’ll find in the third section of 
this book would prove my greatest challenge, although that makes it sound 
difficult. It was not. As quickly as questions arose they seemed to answer 
themselves.
Conceived as a third Dirk Gently novel, Douglas’s novel-in-progress began life 
as A Spoon Too Short, and was described as such in his files until August 1993. 
From this point forward, folders refer to the novel as The Salmon of Doubt, and 
fall into three categories. From oldest to most recent, they are: “The Old 
Salmon,” “The Salmon of Doubt,” and “LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor.” Reading through 
these various versions, I decided that for the purposes of this book, Douglas 
would be best served if I stitched together the strongest material, regardless 
of when it was written, much as I might have proposed doing were he still alive. 
So from “The Old Salmon” I reinstated what is now the first chapter, on 
DaveLand. The following six chapters come intact from the second, and longest, 
continuous version, “The Salmon of Doubt.” Then, with an eye to keeping the 
story line clear, I dropped in two of his three most recent chapters from 
“LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor” (which became Chapters Eight and Nine). For Chapter Ten 
I went back to the last chapter from “The Salmon of Doubt,” then concluded with 
the final chapter from Douglas’s most recent work from “LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor.” 
To give the reader a sense of what Douglas planned for the rest of the novel, I 
preceded all this with a fax from Douglas to his London editor, Sue Freestone, 
who worked closely with Douglas on his books from the very first.
Inspired by reading these Adams treasures on the CD-ROM, I enlisted the 
invaluable aid of Douglas’s personal assistant, Sophie Astin, to cast the net 
wider. Were there other jewels we might include in a book tribute to Douglas’s 
life? As it turned out, during fallow periods between books or multimedia 
mega-projects, Douglas had written articles for newspapers and magazines. These, 
together with the text on the CD-ROM, provided the magnificent pool of writings 
that gave life to this book.
The next task was selection, which involved not the slightest shred of 
objectivity. Sophie Astin, Ed Victor, and Douglas’s wife, Jane Belson, suggested 
their favorite bits, beyond which I simply chose pieces I liked best. When 
Douglas’s friend and business partner Robbie Stamp suggested the book follow the 
structure of Douglas’s website (“life, the universe, and everything”), 
everything fell into place. To my delight, the arc of the collected work took on 
the distinct trajectory of Douglas Adams’s too brief but remarkably rich 
creative life.
My most recent visit with Douglas took place in California, our afternoon stroll 
along Santa Barbara’s wintry beach punctuated by running races with his then 
six-year-old daughter, Polly. I had never seen Douglas so happy, and I had no 
inkling that this time together would be our last. Since Douglas died he has 
come to mind with astonishing frequency, which seems to be the experience of 
many who were close to him. His presence is still remarkably powerful nearly a 
year after his death, and I can’t help thinking he had a hand in the amazing 
ease with which this book came together. I know he would have keenly wanted you 
to enjoy it, and I hope you will.
—Peter Guzzardi
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
FEBRUARY 12, 2002
 
 
 
 
 
 
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint 
previously published material: American Atheist Press: “Interview with Douglas 
Adams” American Atheist, vol. 40, no. 1 (Winter 2001-2002). Reprinted by 
permission of the American Atheist Press. Byron Press Visual Publications: 
“Introduction” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Collected Edition) DC 
Comics, volume 1 (May 1997). Reprinted by permission of Byron Press Visual 
Publications. Daily Nexus: “Interview with Daily Nexus” by Brendan Buhler, of 
the University of California Santa Barbara Daily Nexus, Artsweek, (April 5, 
2001). Reprinted by permission of Daily Nexus. Richard Dawkins: “A Lament for 
Douglas Adams” by Richard Dawkins, The Guardian (May 14, 2001). Reprinted by 
permission of the author. Matt Newsome: “Douglas Adams Interview” by Matt 
Newsome. Copyright © 1998, 2002 by Matt Newsome. Reprinted by permission of the 
author. The Onion A.V. Club: “Douglas Adams Interview” by Keith Phipps, from The 
Onion A.V. Club (January 1998). Reprinted by permission of The Onion A.V. Club. 
Pan Macmillan: Excerpts from the Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts by Douglas 
Adams & G. Perkins (ed.). Copyright © 1995 by Serious Productions Ltd. Reprinted 
by permission of Pan Books, an imprint of Pan Macmillan. Robson Books: “Maggie 
and Trudie” from Animal Passions edited by Alan Coven. Reprinted by permission 
of Robson Books. Virgin Net Limited: “Interview with Virgin.net, Ltd.” conducted 
by Claire Smith (September 22, 1999). Reprinted by permission of Virgin Net 
Limited. Nicholas Wroe: “The Biography of Douglas Adams” by Nicholas Wroe, The 
Guardian (June 3, 2000). Reprinted by permission of the author.



Contents
 
Prologue
Foreword
LIFE
THE UNIVERSE
AND EVERYTHING
Epilogue



THE
SALMON
OF
DOUBT



Prologue
Nicholas Wroe, in The Guardian
SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 2000
In 1979, soon after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published, Douglas 
Adams was invited to sign copies at a small science-fiction bookshop in Soho. As 
he drove there, some sort of demonstration slowed his progress. “There was a 
traffic jam and crowds of people were everywhere,” he recalls. It wasn’t until 
he had pushed his way inside that Adams realised the crowds were there for him. 
Next day his publisher called to say he was number one in the London Sunday 
Times best-seller list and his life changed forever. “It was like being 
helicoptered to the top of Mount Everest,” he says, “or having an orgasm without 
the foreplay.”
Hitchhiker had already been a cult radio show, and was made in both television 
and stage versions. It expanded into four more books that sold over 14 million 
copies worldwide. There were records and computer games and now, after twenty 
years of Hollywood prevarication, it is as close as it’s ever been to becoming a 
movie.
The story itself begins on earth with mild-mannered suburbanite Arthur Dent 
trying to stop the local council demolishing his house to build a bypass. It 
moves into space when his friend, Ford Prefect—some have seen him as Virgil to 
Dent’s Dante—reveals himself as a representative of a planet near Betelgeuse and 
informs Arthur that the Earth itself is about to be demolished to make way for a 
hyperspace express route. They hitch a ride on a Vogon spaceship and begin to 
use the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself—a usually reliable repository of all knowledge 
about life, the universe and everything.
Adams’s creativity and idiosyncratic intergalactic humour have had a pervasive 
cultural influence. The phrase “hitchhiker’s guide to . . .” quickly became 
common parlance, and there have been numerous copycat spoof sci-fi books and TV 
series. His Babel fish—a small fish you can place in your ear to translate any 
speech into your own language—has been adopted as the name of a translation 
device on an Internet search engine. He followed up his success with several 
other novels as well as a television programme, and a book and CD-ROM on 
endangered species. He has founded a dot-com company, H2G2, that has recently 
taken the idea of the guide full circle by launching a service that promises 
real information on life, the universe, and everything via your mobile phone.
Much of his wealth seems to have been spent fuelling his passion for technology, 
but he has never really been the nerdy science-fiction type. He is relaxed, 
gregarious, and a solidly built two meters tall. In fact, he has more the air of 
those English public-school boys who became rock stars in the 1970s; he once did 
play guitar on stage at Earls Court with his mates Pink Floyd. In a nicely flash 
touch, instead of producing a passport-size photo of his daughter out of his 
wallet, he opens up his impressively powerful laptop, where, after a bit of 
fiddling about, Polly Adams, aged five, appears in a pop video spoof featuring a 
cameo appearance by another mate, John Cleese.
So this is what his life turned into; money, A-list friends, and nice toys. 
Looking at the bare facts of his CV—boarding school, Cambridge Footlights, and 
the BBC—it seems at first sight no surprise. But his has not been an entirely 
straightforward journey along well-worn establishment tracks.
Douglas Noel Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952. One of his many stock gags is 
that he was DNA in Cambridge nine months before Crick and Watson made their 
discovery. His mother, Janet, was a nurse at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and his 
father, Christopher, had been a teacher who went on to become a postgraduate 
theology student, a probation officer, and finally a management consultant, 
which was “a very, very peculiar move,” claims Adams. “Anyone who knew my father 
will tell you that management was not something he knew very much about.”
The family were “fairly hard up” and left Cambridge six months after Douglas was 
born to live in various homes on the fringes of East London. When Adams was 
five, his parents divorced. “It’s amazing the degree to which children treat 
their own lives as normal,” he says. “But of course it was difficult. My parents 
divorced when it wasn’t remotely as common as it is now, and to be honest I have 
scant memory of anything before I was five. I don’t think it was a great time, 
one way or another.”
After the breakup, Douglas and his younger sister went with their mother to 
Brentwood in Essex, where she ran a hostel for sick animals. He saw his by now 
comparatively wealthy father at weekends, and these visits became a source of 
confusion and tension. To add to the complications, several step-siblings 
emerged as his parents remarried. Adams has said that while he accepted all this 
as normal on one level, he did “behave oddly as a result,” and remembers himself 
as a twitchy and somewhat strange child. For a time his teachers thought he was 
educationally subnormal, but by the time he went to the direct-grant Brentwood 
Prep School, he was regarded as extremely bright.
The school boasts a remarkably diverse list of postwar alumni: clothing designer 
Hardy Amies; the disgraced historian David Irving; TV presenter Noel Edmonds; 
Home Secretary Jack Straw; and London Times editor Peter Stothard were all there 
before Adams, while comedians Griff Rhys Jones and Keith Allen were a few years 
behind him. There are four alumni—two Labour and two Conservative—in the current 
House of Commons. In a scene that now seems rather incongruous in the light of 
Keith Allen’s hard-living image, it was Adams who helped the seven-year-old 
Allen with his piano lessons.
When Adams was thirteen, his mother remarried and moved to Dorset, and Adams 
changed from being a “day boy” at the school to a boarder. It appears to have 
been an entirely beneficial experience. “Whenever I left school at four in the 
afternoon, I always used to look at what the boarders were doing rather 
wistfully,” he says. “They seemed to be having a good time, and in fact I 
thoroughly enjoyed boarding. There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine 
my maverick and rebellious nature. But more accurately I like to have a nice and 
cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit. There is nothing better 
than a few constraints you can comfortably kick against.”
Adams ascribes the quality of his education to being taught by some “very good, 
committed, obsessed and charismatic people.” At a recent party in London he 
confronted Jack Straw on New Labour’s apparent antipathy to direct-grant 
schools, on the basis that it had done neither of them much harm.
Frank Halford was a master at the school and remembers Adams as “very tall even 
then, and popular. He wrote an end-of-term play when Doctor Who had just started 
on television. He called it ‘Doctor Which.’ ” Many years later, Adams did write 
scripts for Doctor Who. He describes Halford as an inspirational teacher who is 
still a support. “He once gave me ten out of ten for a story, which was the only 
time he did throughout his long school career. And even now, when I have a dark 
night of the soul as a writer and think that I can’t do this anymore, the thing 
that I reach for is not the fact that I have had best-sellers or huge advances. 
It is the fact that Frank Halford once gave me ten out of ten, and at some 
fundamental level I must be able to do it.”
It seems that from the beginning Adams had a facility for turning his writing 
into cash. He sold some short, “almost haiku-length,” stories to the Eagle comic 
and received ten shillings. “You could practically buy a yacht for ten shillings 
then,” he laughs. But his real interest was music. He learned to play the guitar 
by copying note for note the intricate finger-picking patterns on an early Paul 
Simon album. He now has a huge collection of left-handed electric guitars, but 
admits that he’s “really a folkie at heart. Even with Pink Floyd on stage, I 
played a very simple guitar figure from ‘Brain Damage’ which was in a 
finger-picking style.”
Adams grew up in the sixties, and the Beatles “planted a seed in my head that 
made it explode. Every nine months there’d be a new album which would be an 
earth-shattering development from where they were before. We were so obsessed by 
them that when ‘Penny Lane’ came out and we hadn’t heard it on the radio, we 
beat up this boy who had heard it until he hummed the tune to us. People now ask 
if Oasis are as good as the Beatles. I don’t think they are as good as the 
Rutles.”
The other key influence was Monty Python. Having listened to mainstream British 
radio comedy of the fifties he describes it as an “epiphanous” moment when he 
discovered that being funny could be a way in which intelligent people expressed 
themselves—“and be very, very silly at the same time.”
The logical next step was to go to Cambridge University, “because I wanted to 
join Footlights,” he says. “I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. 
In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the 
job was in fact taken.”
At university he quickly abandoned performing—“I just wasn’t reliable”—and began 
to write self-confessed Pythonesque sketches. He recalls one about a railway 
worker who was reprimanded for leaving all the switches open on the southern 
region to prove a point about existentialism; and another about the difficulties 
in staging the Crawley Paranoid Society annual general meeting.
The arts administrator Mary Allen, formerly of the Arts Council and the Royal 
Opera, was a contemporary at Cambridge and has remained a friend ever since. She 
performed his material and remembers him as “always noticed even amongst a very 
talented group of people. Douglas’s material was very quirky and 
individualistic. You had to suit it, and it had to suit you. Even in short 
sketches he created a weird world.”
Adams says, “I did have something of a guilt thing about reading English. I 
thought I should have done something useful and challenging. But while I was 
whingeing, I also relished the chance not to do very much.” Even his essays were 
full of jokes. “If I had known then what I know now, I would have done biology 
or zoology. At the time I had no idea that was an interesting subject, but now I 
think it is the most interesting subject in the world.”
Other contemporaries included the lawyer and TV presenter Clive Anderson. The 
culture secretary Chris Smith was president of the union. Adams used to do 
warm-up routines for debates, but not because of any political interest: “I was 
just looking for anywhere I could do gags. It is very strange seeing these 
people dotted around the public landscape now. My contemporaries are starting to 
win lifetime achievement awards, which obviously makes one feel nervous.”
After university, Adams got the chance to work with one of his heroes. Python 
member Graham Chapman had been impressed by some Footlights sketches and had 
made contact. When Adams went to see him, he was asked, much to his delight, to 
help out with a script Chapman had to finish that afternoon. “We ended up 
working together for about a year. Mostly on a prospective TV series which never 
made it beyond the pilot.” Chapman at this time was “sucking down a couple of 
bottles of gin every day, which obviously gets in the way a bit.” But Adams 
believes he was enormously talented. “He was naturally part of a team and needed 
other people’s discipline to enable his brilliance to work. His strength was 
flinging something into the mix that would turn it all upside down.”
After he split up with Chapman, Adams’s career stalled badly. He continued to 
write sketches but was not making anything like a living. “It turned out I 
wasn’t terribly good at writing sketches. I could never write to order, and 
couldn’t really do topical stuff. But occasionally I’d come out with something 
terrific from left field.”
Geoffrey Perkins, head of comedy at BBC television, was the producer of the 
radio version of Hitchhiker. He remembers first coming across Adams when he 
directed a Footlights show. “He was being heckled by a cast member, and then he 
fell into a chair. I next came across him when he was trying to write sketches 
for the radio show Weekending, then regarded as the big training ground for 
writers. Douglas was one of those writers who honourably failed to get anywhere 
with Weekending. It put a premium on people who could write things that lasted 
thirty seconds, and Douglas was incapable of writing a single sentence that 
lasted less than thirty seconds.”
With his dreams of being a writer crumbling around him, Adams took a series of 
bizarre jobs, including working as a chicken-shed cleaner and as a bodyguard to 
the ruling family of Qatar. “I think the security firm must have been desperate. 
I got the job from an ad in the Evening Standard.” Griff Rhys Jones did the same 
job for a while on Adams’s recommendation. Adams recalls becoming increasingly 
depressed as he endured night shifts of sitting outside hotel bedrooms: “I kept 
thinking this wasn’t how it was supposed to have worked out.” At Christmas he 
went to visit his mother and stayed there for the next year.
He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he 
still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his 
confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, this 
propensity for a lack of confidence has continued. “I have terrible periods of 
lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no 
evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but 
after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. 
You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.” So has that approach 
helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs.
Hitchhiker was the last throw of the dice, but in retrospect the timing was 
absolutely right. Star Wars had made science fiction voguish, and the aftermath 
of Monty Python meant that while a sketch show was out of the question, there 
was scope to appeal to the same comic sensibility.
Python Terry Jones heard the tapes before transmission and remembers being 
struck by Adams’s “intellectual approach and strong conceptual ideas. You feel 
the stuff he is writing has come from a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold 
might say. It has a moral basis and a critical basis that has a strong mind 
behind it. For instance, John Cleese has a powerful mind, but he is more logical 
and analytical. Douglas is more quirky and analytical.” Geoffrey Perkins agrees, 
but remembers there was little grand plan behind the project.
“Douglas went into it with a whole load of ideas but very little notion of what 
the story would be. He was writing it in an almost Dickensian mode of episodic 
weekly installments without quite knowing how it would end.”
By the time the series aired in 1978, Adams says, he had put about nine months’ 
solid work into it and had been paid one thousand pounds. “There seemed to be 
quite a long way to go before I broke even,” so he accepted a producer’s job at 
the BBC but quit six months later when he found himself simultaneously writing a 
second radio series, the novel, the television series, and episodes of Doctor 
Who. Despite this remarkable workload, he was already building a legendary 
reputation for not writing. “I love deadlines,” he has said. “I love the 
whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Success only added to his ability to prevaricate. His publishing editor, Sue 
Freestone, quickly realised that he treated writing as performance art, and so 
she set up her office in his dining room. “He needs an instant audience to 
bounce things off, but sometimes this can weirdly backfire.
“There was a scene early in one book when he talked about some plates with, very 
definitely, one banana on each. This was obviously significant, so I asked him 
to explain. But he liked to tease his audience and he said he’d tell me later. 
We eventually got to the end of the book and I asked him again, ‘Okay, Douglas, 
what’s with the bananas?’ He looked at me completely blankly. He had forgotten 
all about the bananas. I still occasionally ask him if he has remembered yet, 
but apparently he hasn’t.”
Writer and producer John Lloyd has been a friend and collaborator with Adams 
since before Hitchhiker. He remembers the “agonies of indecision and panic” 
Adams got into when writing. “We were on holiday in Corfu with three friends 
when he was finishing a book, and he ended up taking over the whole house. He 
had a room to write in, a room to sleep in, a room to go to when he couldn’t 
sleep, and so on. It didn’t occur to him that other people might want a good 
night’s sleep as well. He goes through life with a brain the size of a planet, 
and often seems to be living on a different one. He is absolutely not a 
malicious person, but when he is in the throes of panic and terror and unable to 
finish a book, everything else pales into insignificance.”
However the work was dragged out, it was extremely popular. The books all became 
bestsellers, and Adams was given an advance of over $2 million by his American 
publishers. He wrote a hilarious spoof dictionary with John Lloyd, The Meaning 
of Liff, in which easily recognised concepts, such as the feeling you get at 
four in the afternoon when you haven’t got enough done, were given the names of 
towns—Farnham being the perfect choice for this low-grade depression. In the 
late eighties he completed two spoof detective novels featuring Dirk Gently.
For all his facility with humour, Freestone says she has been touched by how 
profoundly Adams’s work has connected with some readers. “In Hitchhiker, all you 
have to do to be safe is have your towel with you,” she explains. “I heard about 
this woman who was dying in a hospice who felt she would be fine because she had 
her towel with her. She had taken Douglas’s universe and incorporated it into 
her own. It embarrassed the hell out of Douglas when he heard about it. But for 
her it was literally a symbol of safety when embarking on an unknown journey.”
There are serious themes within his work. The second Dirk Gently novel can 
easily be read as being about people who are homeless, displaced, and alienated 
from society. “His imagination goes much deeper than just cleverness,” says 
Freestone. “The social criticism is usually buried by the comedy, but it’s there 
if you want to find it.”
Having been through such a lean period, Adams worked constantly until the 
mid-nineties, when he very deliberately applied the brakes. “I had got 
absolutely stuck in the middle of a novel, and although it sounds ungrateful, 
having to do huge book signings would drive me to angry depressions.”
He says that he still thought of himself as a scriptwriter and only 
inadvertently found himself as a novelist. “It sounds absurd, but a bit of me 
felt cheated and it also felt as if I had cheated. And then there is the money 
cycle. You’re paid a lot and you’re not happy, so the first thing you do is buy 
stuff that you don’t want or need—for which you need more money.”
His financial affairs got into a mess in the 1980s, he says. He won’t discuss 
the details, but says that the knock-on effect was considerable, so that 
everyone assumed he was wealthier than he actually was. It is possible to track 
the movement of Adams’s life even between the first and second series of the 
radio show. In the first there were a lot of jokes about pubs and being without 
any money. The second had more jokes about expensive restaurants and 
accountants.
“I felt like a mouse in a wheel,” he says. “There was no pleasure coming into 
the cycle at any point. When you write your first book aged twenty-five or so, 
you have twenty-five years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. 
The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon you 
begin to run on empty.”
His response to running out of fuel was to attempt some “creative crop 
rotation.” In particular, his interest in technology took off, as did a 
burgeoning passion for environmental issues. In 1990 he wrote Last Chance to 
See. “As is the way of these things, it was my least successful book, but is 
still the thing I am most proud of.”
The book began when he was sent to Madagascar by a magazine to find a rare type 
of lemur. He thought this would be quite interesting, but it turned into a 
complete revelation. His fascination with ecology led to an interest in 
evolution. “I’d been given a thread to pull, and following that lead began to 
open up issues to me that became the object of the greatest fascination.” A link 
at the bottom of his e-mails now directs people to the Dian Fossey Trust, which 
works to protect gorillas, and Save the Rhino. Adams was also a signatory to the 
Great Ape Project, which argued for a change of moral status for great apes, 
recognising their rights to “life, liberty, and freedom from torture.”
He was a founding member of the team that launched Comic Relief, but he has 
never been a hairshirt sort of activist. The parties he held at his Islington 
home would feature music by various legendary rock stars—Gary Brooker of Procol 
Harum once sang the whole of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” including all the 
abandoned verses—and were peopled by media aristocracy and high-tech 
billionaires. Slightly less orthodoxly—for an enthusiastic, almost evangelical 
atheist—he would also host carol services every Christmas.
“As a child I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and 
remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.” He adds Bach to 
the Beatles and the Pythons in his pantheon of influences, but how does this 
square with his passionate atheism? “Life is full of things that move or affect 
you in one way or another,” he explains. “The fact that I think Bach was 
mistaken doesn’t alter the fact that I think the B-minor Mass is one of the 
great pinnacles of human achievement. It still absolutely moves me to tears to 
hear it. I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it 
does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”
This attachment to traditional structures, if not traditional beliefs, is 
carried over in the fact that his daughter, Polly, who was born in 1994, has 
four non-godparents. Mary Allen is one of them, and it was she who introduced 
Adams to his wife, the barrister Jane Belson. Allen says, “In the early eighties 
Douglas was going through some writing crisis and was ringing me every day. I 
eventually asked him whether he was lonely. It seemed that he was, so we decided 
he needed someone to share his huge flat. Jane moved in.” After several false 
starts, they married in 1991 and lived in Islington until last year, when the 
family moved to Santa Barbara.
Adams says the initial move was harder than he expected. “I’ve only recently 
understood how opposed to the move my wife was.” He now says he would recommend 
it to anyone “in the depths of middle age just upping sticks and going somewhere 
else. You reinvent your life and start again. It is invigorating.”
His role in his dot-com business fits into this sense of invigoration. His job 
title is chief fantasist. “I’ve never thought of myself in the role of a 
predictive science-fiction writer, I was never an Arthur C. Clarke wannabe. The 
Guide was a narrative device for absorbing all those ideas that spark off the 
flywheel, but it has turned out to be a very good idea. But it’s early days,” he 
warns. “We’re still in a swimming pool and there is an ocean out there.”
Other new ventures are a novel—eight years late and counting—talk of a Dirk 
Gently film, the H2G2 Web site and an e-novel. “I’ve been talking about how 
electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden 
Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me.”
The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the 
Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people 
coming into the room and breathing on it.” He is surprisingly enthusiastic about 
this apparently antique art form.
“With new, more-immature technologies there is a danger in getting excited about 
all the ways you can push them forward at the expense of what you want to say. 
It is therefore rewarding to work in a medium where you don’t have to solve 
those problems because it is a mature medium.”
After such a long fallow period he wisely notes that many of these new projects 
and ideas will fall by the wayside. “But I’ve been out of the mainstream of 
novel writing for several years and I really needed to take that break. I’ve 
been thinking hard and thinking creatively about a whole load of stuff that is 
not novel writing. As opposed to running on empty, it now feels like the tank is 
full again.”
LIFE AT A GLANCE: Douglas Noel Adams
BORN: March 11, 1952, Cambridge.
EDUCATION: Brentwood School, Essex; St. John’s College, Cambridge.
MARRIED: 1991 Jane Belson (one daughter, Polly, born 1994).
CAREER: 1974-78 radio and television writer; 1978 BBC radio producer.
SOME SCRIPTS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1978 and 1980 (radio), 1981 
(television).
GAMES: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984; Bureaucracy, 1987; Starship 
Titanic, 1997.
BOOKS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979; The Restaurant at the End of 
the Universe, 1980; Life, the Universe and Everything, 1982; The Meaning of Liff 
(with John Lloyd), 1983; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, 1984; Dirk 
Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, 
1988; Last Chance to See, 1990; The Deeper Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd), 
1990; Mostly Harmless, 1992.



Foreword
This is a very Douglassy moment for me. Douglassy moments are most likely to 
involve:
 
• Apple Macintosh Computers
• Impossible deadlines
• Ed Victor, Douglas’s agent
• Endangered species
• Excessively expensive five star-hotels
I am tapping at a (Macintosh) computer as I fight a deadline imposed on me by Ed 
Victor. Would I please see if I might provide a foreword for The Salmon of Doubt 
by next Tuesday?
I am in the most outrageously luxurious hotel in Peru, the Miraflores Park 
Hotel, Lima, enjoying the encellophaned bowls of fruit and Louis Roederer as I 
prepare to go upcountry in pursuit of spectacled bears, one of the least 
understood and most threatened mammals on the planet.
Being an expensive hotel, high-bandwidth Internet connections are available in 
each room and I have just watched a two-hour film on my computer, showing Steve 
Jobs, Apple’s CEO, making his keynote address to the Macintosh Expo in San 
Francisco. The Emperor of Computer Cool has just unveiled the new I-Mac and I 
haven’t been able to call up or email Douglas to talk about it. A new 
revolutionary piece of sexy and extraordinary Apple hardware and Douglas won’t 
get to see it. He won’t have played with an I-Pod or messed around in I-Photo. 
To anyone who knew Douglas, and I am including his millions of readers here, the 
misery and frustration of this will be appallingly evident. It is dreadful for 
him because he has missed New Stuff and it is dreadful for us because the New 
Stuff will never now be celebrated by the acknowledged Poet of New Stuff.
You see, I want to know what to think. I want to know what the new machines look 
like: yes, I can use my own eyes and my own sensibility, but I have got used to 
the superior insights offered by Douglas. He would have offered the exact 
epithet, the perfect metaphor, the crowning simile. Not just on the subject of 
New Stuff, of course. He would have found a way of linking the amiably odd 
behaviour and character of spectacled bears both to familiar human experience 
and to abstract scientific thought. Much of the world that we move in has been 
seen through Douglas’s eyes and become clearer. Which is to say the very 
confusion and absurd lack of clarity of our world has become clearer. We never 
quite knew how conflicting and insane the universe was or how ludicrous and 
feeble-minded the human race could be until Douglas explained it in the uniquely 
affable, paradoxical and unforced style that marks him out for greatness. I’ve 
just visited the bathroom and noted that the soap on offer there (tightly sealed 
in that absurdly unopenable disc of indestructible plastic paper offered by 
hotels for the convenience of their guests) is not called soap at all: it is in 
fact an Almond Facial Bar. That would have been an email to Douglas straight 
away and the email back, which can now never, ever be had, would have made me 
giggle and dance about my hotel room for half an hour.
Everyone heard, in the sad weeks following his shocking and unfair death, how 
good a comic writer Douglas was, how far-ranging his interests and how broad his 
appeal. This book shows what a teacher he was. Just as sunsets have never been 
the same colour or shape since Turner looked at them, so a lemur and a cup of 
tea will never be the same again because of Douglas’s acute and quizzical gaze.
It is very unfair to be asked to write an introduction to a book which contains 
an absolutely brilliant introduction written on the very subject of 
introductions to books. It is even more unfair to be asked to write an 
introduction to the posthumous work of one the great comic writers of our age 
when the book one is introducing contains the definitive introduction to the 
posthumous work of the definitive comic writer of all ages: Douglas’s foreword 
to P. G. Wodehouse’s Sunset at Blandings, as Ed Victor pointed out at Douglas’s 
memorial service in London, serves as an astonishingly accurate description of 
Douglas’s own gifts. Not that this was for a second in Douglas’s mind when he 
wrote it.
Douglas was not hideously Englishly modest, which is not to say that he was vain 
or boastful either. His passion to communicate his ideas and enthusiasms, 
however, could easily trap you on the telephone, over a dinner table or in a 
bathroom to the exclusion of all other company or considerations. In that sense, 
and I don’t think I’m being disrespectful here, a Douglas conversation could, 
mano a mano, tête à tête, be exhausting and confusing for those unable to keep 
up with the passionate pinging from thought to thought. But he could no more 
write confusingly than he could execute a perfect pirouette, and believe me 
there have been few human beings born less able to execute pirouettes without 
the destruction of furniture and all hope of safety to innocent bystanders than 
Douglas Noel Adams.
He was a writer. There are those who write from time to time and do it well and 
there are writers. Douglas, and it is pointless to attempt here an explanation 
or anatomization, was born, grew up and remained a Writer to his too-early dying 
day. For the last ten years or so of his life he ceased to be a novelist, but he 
never for a second stopped being a writer and it is that happy fact that The 
Salmon of Doubt celebrates. Whether in the preparation of lectures, the 
execution of occasional journalism or in articles for specialized scientific or 
technical publications, Douglas’s natural ability to put one word after another 
in the service of awakening, delighting, bamboozling, affirming, informing or 
amusing the mind of the reader never deserted him. His is an ego-less style 
where every trope and every trick available to writing is used when and only 
when it serves the purposes of the piece. I think, when you read this book, you 
will be astonished by the apparent (and utterly misleading) simplicity of his 
style. You feel he is talking to you, almost off the cuff. But, as with 
Wodehouse, the ease and sweet running of his authorial engine was the result of 
a great deal of tuning and oily wrenching of nuts and gaskets.
Douglas has in common with certain rare artists (Wodehouse again included), the 
ability to make the beholder feel that he is addressing them and them alone: I 
think this in part explains the immense strength and fervour of his ‘fan base’, 
if I can use so revolting a phrase. When you look at Velázquez, listen to 
Mozart, read Dickens or laugh at Billy Connolly, to take four names at random 
(it always takes a great deal of time and thought to take names at random for 
the purposes of argument), you are aware that what they do they do for the world 
and the results are, of course, magnificent. When you look at Blake, listen to 
Bach, read Douglas Adams or watch Eddie Izzard perform, you feel you are perhaps 
the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everyone else 
admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do. 
I advance this as a theory. Douglas’s work is not the high art of Bach or the 
intense personal cosmos of Blake, it goes without saying, but I believe my view 
holds nonetheless. It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams 
turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain you want to 
tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh 
and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they 
didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do – just as your 
friends (thank heavens) don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on 
and on about to them.
You are on the verge of entering the wise, provoking, benevolent, hilarious and 
addictive world of Douglas Adams. Don’t bolt it all whole – as with Douglas’s 
beloved Japanese food, what seems light and easy to assimilate is subtler and 
more nutritious by far than might at first appear.
The bottom drawer of recently deceased writers is often best left firmly locked 
and bolted: in the case of Douglas, I am sure you will agree, the bottom drawer 
(or in his case the nested sub-folders of his hard drive) has been triumphantly 
well worth the prising open. Chris Ogle, Peter Guzzardi, Douglas’s wife Jane and 
his assistant Sophie Astin have done a wonderful job. A Douglas-less world is 
much less pleasant than a Douglas-full world, but the leaping of The Salmon of 
Doubt helps put off the full melancholy of his sudden departure.
 
Stephen Fry
Peru
JANUARY 2002
 



LIFE



 
 
 
Dear Editor,
 
The sweat was dripping down my face and into my lap, making my clothes very wet 
and sticky. I sat there, watching. I was trembling violently as I sat, looking 
at the small slot, waiting—ever waiting. My nails dug into my flesh as I 
clenched my hands. I passed my arm over my hot, wet face, down which sweat was 
pouring. The suspense was unbearable. I bit my lip in an attempt to stop 
trembling with the terrible burden of anxiety. Suddenly, the slot opened and in 
dropped the mail. I grabbed at my Eagle and ripped off the wrapping paper.
My ordeal was over for another week!
D. N. Adams (12), Brentwood, Essex,
JANUARY 23, 1965,
Eagle and Boys’ World Magazine
 
 
*       *       *
[Editor’s Note: In the sixties The Eagle was an enormously popular English 
science-fiction magazine. This letter is the first known published work of 
Douglas Adams, then age twelve.]

The Voices of All Our Yesterdays
I vaguely remember my schooldays. They were what was going on in the background 
while I was trying to listen to the Beatles.
When “Can’t Buy Me Love” came out, I was twelve. I sneaked out of school during 
morning milk break, bought the record, and broke into matron’s room because she 
had a record player. Then I played it, not loud enough to get caught, but just 
loud enough to hear with my ear pressed up against the speaker. Then I played it 
again for the other ear. Then I turned the record over and did the same for “You 
Can’t Do That.” That was when the housemaster found me and put me into 
detention, which is what I had expected. It seemed a small price to pay for what 
I now realize was art.
I didn’t know it was art then, of course. I only knew that the Beatles were the 
most exciting thing in the universe. It wasn’t always an easy view to live with. 
First you had to fight the Stones fans, which was tricky because they fought 
dirty and had their knuckles nearer the ground. Then you had to fight the 
grownups, parents and teachers who said that you were wasting your time and 
pocket money on rubbish that you would have forgotten by next week.
I found it hard to understand why they were telling me this. I sang in the 
school choir and knew how to listen for harmony and counterpoint, and it was 
clear to me that the Beatles were something extraordinarily clever. It 
bewildered me that no one else could hear it: impossible harmonies and part 
playing you had never heard in pop songs before. The Beatles were obviously just 
putting all this stuff in for some secret fun of their own, and it seemed 
exciting to me that people could have fun in that way.
The next exciting thing was that they kept on losing me. They would bring out a 
new album and for a few listenings it would leave me cold and confused. Then 
gradually it would begin to unravel itself in my mind. I would realize that the 
reason I was confused was that I was listening to Something that was simply 
unlike anything that anybody had done before. “Another Girl,” “Good Day 
Sunshine,” and the extraordinary “Drive My Car.” These tracks are so familiar 
now that it takes a special effort of will to remember how alien they seemed at 
first to me. The Beatles were now not just writing songs, they were inventing 
the very medium in which they were working.
I never got to see them. Difficult to believe, I know. I was alive at the time 
the Beatles were performing and never got to see them. I tend to go on about 
this rather a lot. Do not go to San Francisco with me, or I will insist on 
pointing out Candlestick Park to you and bleating on about the fact that in 1966 
the Beatles played their last concert there, just shortly before I’d woken up to 
the fact that rock concerts were things you could actually go to, even if you 
lived in Brentwood.
A friend of mine at school once had some studio tickets to see David Frost’s 
show being recorded, but we ended up not going. I watched the show that night, 
and the Beatles were on it playing “Hey Jude.” I was ill for about a year. 
Another day that I happened not to go to London after all was the day they 
played their rooftop concert in Savile Row. I can’t—ever—speak about that.
Well, the years passed. The Beatles passed. But Paul McCartney has gone on and 
on. A few months ago the guitarist Robbie McIntosh phoned me and said, “We’re 
playing at the Mean Fiddler in a few days, do you want to come along?”
Now this is one of the daftest questions I’ve ever been asked, and I think it 
took me a few moments even to work out what he meant. The Mean Fiddler, for 
those who don’t know, is a pub in an unlovely part of northwest London with a 
room at the back where bands play. You can probably get about two hundred people 
in.
It was the word we that temporarily confused me, because I knew that the band 
that Robbie was currently playing in was Paul McCartney’s, and I didn’t think 
that Paul McCartney played in pubs. If Paul McCartney did play in pubs, then it 
would be daft to think that I would not saw my own leg off in order to go. I 
went.
In front of two hundred people in a pub, Paul McCartney stood up and played 
songs he’d never, I think, played in public before. “Here, There and Everywhere” 
and “Blackbird,” to name but two. I’ve played “Blackbird” in pubs, for heaven’s 
sake. I spent weeks learning the guitar part when I was supposed to be revising 
for A-levels. I almost wondered if I was hallucinating.
There were two moments of complete astonishment. One was the last encore, which 
was an immaculate, thunderous performance of, believe it or not, “Sgt. Pepper’s 
Lonely Hearts Club Band.” (Remember, this was in a pub.) And the other was one 
of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll songs, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which I had 
first heard crouching with my ear cupped to the Dansette record player in the 
school matron’s room.
There is a game people like to play that goes, “When would you most like to have 
lived and why?” The Italian Renaissance? Mozart’s Vienna? Shakespeare’s England? 
Personally, I would like to have been around Bach. But I have a real difficulty 
with the game, which is that living at any other period of history would have 
meant missing the Beatles, and I honestly don’t think I could do that. Mozart 
and Bach and Shakespeare are always with us, but I grew up with the Beatles and 
I’m not sure what else has affected me as much as that.
So Paul McCartney is fifty tomorrow. Happy birthday, Paul. I wouldn’t have 
missed it for the world.
The [London] Sunday Times,
JUNE 17, 1992

Brentwood School
I was at Brentwood School for twelve whole years. And they were, by and large, 
in an up and downy kind of way, pretty good years: fairly happy, reasonably 
leafy, a bit sportier than I was in the mood for at the time, but full of good 
(and sometimes highly eccentric) teaching. In fact, it was only later that I 
gradually came to realise how well I had been taught at Brentwood—particularly 
in English, and particularly in Physics. (Odd, that.) However, the whole 
twelve-year experience is, for me, completely overshadowed by the memory of one 
terrible, mind-scarring experience. I am referring to the episode of The 
Trousers. Let me explain.
I have always been absurdly, ridiculously tall. To give you an idea—when we went 
on school expeditions to Interesting and Improving Places, the form-master 
wouldn’t say “Meet under the clock tower,” or “Meet under the War Memorial,” but 
“Meet under Adams.” I was at least as visible as anything else on the horizon, 
and could be repositioned at will. When, in Physics, we were asked to repeat 
Galileo’s demonstration that two bodies of different weight fall to the ground 
at the same speed, I was the one who was given the task of dropping the cricket 
ball and the pea, because it was quicker than going to an upstairs window. I 
always towered over everybody. Right back at the very beginning of my school 
career, aged seven, I introduced myself to another new boy (Robert Neary) by 
coming up behind him and, in a spirit of experiment, dropping a cricket ball on 
his head and saying, “Hello, my name’s Adams, what’s yours?” This, for Robert 
Neary, I’m sure was his one terrible, mind-scarring memory.
In the Prep School, where I was for five years out of my twelve, we all wore 
short trousers: grey shorts with blazers in the summer, and in the winter those 
pepper-and-salt tweed suits with short trousers. There is of course an extremely 
good reason for wearing shorts when you’re young, even in the depths of an 
English winter (and they were colder then, weren’t they?). According to Wired 
magazine, we can’t expect to see self-repairing fabrics until about the year 
2020, but ever since we emerged from whatever trees or swamps we lived in five 
million years ago, we have had self-repairing knees.
So, shorts made sense. Even though we all had to wear them, it did begin to get 
a bit ridiculous in my case. It wasn’t towering over the other boys I minded so 
much, it was towering over the masters. Wearing shorts. My mother pleaded with 
the principal on one occasion to please make an exception in my case and let me 
wear long trousers. But Jack Higgs, ever fair but firm, said no: I was only, six 
months away from going up to the main school, whereupon I, along with everybody 
else, would be able to wear long trousers. I would have to wait.
At last I left the Prep School. And two weeks before the beginning of the 
Michaelmas term, my mother took me along to the school shop to buy—at last—a 
long-trousered school suit. And guess what? They didn’t make them in a size long 
enough for me. Let me just repeat that, so that the full horror of the situation 
can settle on you reading this as it did on me that day in the summer of 1964, 
standing in the school shop. They didn’t have any school trousers long enough 
for me. They would have to make them specially. That would take six weeks. Six 
weeks. Six minus two was, as we had been so carefully and painstakingly taught, 
four. Which meant that for four whole weeks of the next term I was going to be 
the only boy in school wearing shorts. For the next two weeks I took up playing 
in the traffic, being careless with kitchen knives, and neglecting to stand 
clear of the doors on station platforms, but, sadly, I led a charmed life, and I 
had to go through with it: four weeks of the greatest humiliation and 
embarrassment known to man or, rather, to that most easily humiliated and 
embarrassed of all creatures, the overgrown twelve-year-old boy. We’ve all 
experienced those painful dreams in which we suddenly discover we are stark 
naked in the middle of the high street. Believe me, this was worse, and it 
wasn’t a dream.
The story rather fizzles out there because a month later, of course, I got my 
long trousers and was readmitted into polite society. But, believe me, I still 
carry the scars inside, and though I try my best to bestride the world like a 
Colossus, writing best-selling books and . . . (well, that’s about it, really, I 
suppose), if I ever come across as a maladjusted, socially isolated, sad, 
hunched emotional cripple (I’m thinking mainly of Sunday mornings in February, 
here), then it’s those four weeks of having to wear short trousers in September 
1964 that are to blame.

Y
“Why” is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter 
of the alphabet named after it.
The alphabet does not go “A B C D What? When? How?” but it does go “V W X Why? 
Z.”
“Why?” is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are 
when someone asks you “What’s the time?” or “When was the battle of 1066?” or 
“How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?” 
The answers are easy and are, respectively, “Seven-thirty-five in the evening,” 
“Ten-fifteen in the morning,” and “Don’t ask stupid questions.”
But when you hear the word “Why?,” you know you’ve got one of the biggest 
unanswerables on your hands, such as “Why are we born?” or “Why do we die?” and 
“Why do we spend so much of the intervening time receiving junk mail?”
Or this one:
“Will you go to bed with me?”
“Why?”
There’s only ever been one good answer to that question “Why?” and perhaps we 
should have that in the alphabet as well. There’s room for it. “Why?” doesn’t 
have to be the last word, it isn’t even the last letter. How would it be if the 
alphabet ended not, “V W X Why? Z,” but “V W X Why not?”
Don’t ask stupid questions.
—From Hockney’s Alphabet
(Faber & Faber)

The Meaning of Liff* started life as an English exercise I had to do at school, 
which then got turned into a game fifteen



*The Meaning of Liff and its successor, The Deeper Meaning of Liff, are books 
coauthored by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.
years later by John Lloyd and myself. We were sitting with a few friends in a 
Greek taverna playing charades and drinking retsina all afternoon until we 
needed to find a game that didn’t require so much standing up.
It was simply this (it needed to be simple; the afternoon was too far advanced 
for complicated rules): someone would say the name of a town and somebody else 
would say what the word meant. You had to be there.
We rapidly discovered that there were an awful lot of experiences, ideas, and 
situations that everybody knew and recognized, but that never got properly 
identified simply because there wasn’t a word for them. They were all of the “Do 
you ever have the situation where . . . ,” or “You know what feeling you get 
when . . . ,” or “You know, I always thought it was just me . . .” kind. All it 
needs is a word, and the thing is identified.
So, the vaguely uncomfortable feeling you got from sitting on a seat which is 
warm from somebody else’s bottom is just as real a feeling as the one you get 
when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you, but hitherto only 
the latter has actually had a word for it. Now they both have words. The first 
one is “shoeburyness,” and the second, of course, is “fear.”
We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to 
realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It 
simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, 
standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, 
but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something 
that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It 
is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we 
are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for 
is “woking.”
Gradually, little stacks of index cards with these words on them started to grow 
in John Lloyd’s bottom drawer, and anybody who heard about them would add 
concepts of their own.
They first saw the light of day when John Lloyd was putting together the Not 
1982 calendar, and was stuck for things to put on the bottoms of the pages (and 
also the tops and quite a few middles). He turned out the drawer, chose a dozen 
or so of the best new words, and inserted them in the book under the name Oxtail 
English Dictionary. This quickly turned out to be one of the most popular bits 
of Not 1982, and the success of the idea in this small scale suggested the 
possibility of a book devoted to it—and here it is: The Meaning of Liff, the 
product of a hard lifetime’s work studying and chronicling the behaviour of man.
From Pan Promotion News 54,
OCTOBER 1983

My Nose
My mother has a long nose and my father had a wide one, and I got both of them 
combined. It’s large. The only person I ever knew with a nose substantially 
larger than mine was a master at my prep school who also had tiny little eyes 
and hardly any chin and was ludicrously thin. He resembled a cross between a 
flamingo and an old-fashioned farming implement and walked rather unsteadily in 
crosswinds. He also hid a great deal.
I wanted to hide, too. As a boy, I was teased unmercifully about my nose for 
years until one day I happened to catch sight of my profile in a pair of angled 
mirrors and had to admit that it was actually pretty funny. From that moment, 
people stopped teasing me about my nose and instead started to tease me 
unmercifully about the fact that I said words like “actually,” which is 
something that has never let up to this day.
One of the more curious features of my nose is that it doesn’t admit any air. 
This is hard to understand or even believe. The problem goes back a very long 
way to when I was a small boy living in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother 
was the local representative of the RSPCA, which meant the house was always full 
of badly damaged dogs and cats, and even the occasional badger, stoat, or 
pigeon.
Some of them were damaged physically, some psychologically, but the effect they 
had on me was to seriously damage my attention span. Because the air was thick 
with animal hair and dust, my nose was continually inflamed and runny, and every 
fifteen seconds I would sneeze. Any thought I could not explore, develop, and 
bring to some logical conclusion within fifteen seconds would therefore be 
forcibly expelled from my head, along with a great deal of mucus.
There are those who say that I tend to think and write in one-liners, and if 
there is any truth to this criticism, then it was almost certainly while I lived 
with my grandmother that the habit developed.
I escaped from my grandmother’s house by going to boarding school, where, for 
the first time in my life, I was able to breathe. This new-found blissful 
freedom continued for a good two weeks, until I had to learn to play rugby. In 
about the first five minutes of the first match I ever played, I managed to 
break my nose on my own knee, which, although it was clearly an extraordinary 
achievement, had the same effect on me that those geological upheavals had on 
whole civilizations in Rider Haggard novels—it effectively sealed me off from 
the outside world forever.
Various ENT specialists have, at different times, embarked on major 
speleological expeditions into my nasal passages, but most of them have come 
back baffled. The ones who didn’t come back baffled didn’t come back at all, and 
are therefore now part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
The only thing that ever tempted me to try taking cocaine was the dire warning 
that the stuff eats away at your septum. If I thought cocaine could actually 
find a way through my septum, I would happily shove it up there by the bucketful 
and let it eat away as much as it liked. I have been put off, however, by the 
observation that friends who do shove it up their noses by the bucketful have 
even shorter attention spans than mine.
So, by now I am pretty well resigned to the fact that my nose is decorative 
rather than functional. Like the Hubble Space Telescope, it represents a massive 
feat of engineering, but is not actually any good for anything, except perhaps a 
few cheap laughs.
Esquire, SUMMER 1991

The Book That Changed Me
1.  Title:
The Blind Watchmaker.
 
2.  Author:
Richard Dawkins.
 
3.  When did you first read it?
Whenever it was published. About 1990, I think.
 
4.  Why did it strike you so much?
It’s like throwing open the doors and windows in a dark and stuffy room. You 
realise what a jumble of half-digested ideas we normally live with, particularly 
those of us with an arts education. We “sort of” understand evolution, though we 
secretly think there’s probably a bit more to it than that. Some of us even 
think that there’s some “sort of” god, which takes care of the bits that sound a 
little bit improbable. Dawkins brings a flood of light and fresh air, and shows 
us that there is a dazzling clarity to the structure of evolution that is 
breathtaking when we suddenly see it. And if we don’t see it, then, quite 
literally, we don’t know the first thing about who we are and where we come 
from.
 
5.  Have you reread it? If so, how many times?
Yes, once or twice. But I also dip into it a lot.
 
6.  Does it feel the same as when you first read it?
Yes. The workings of evolution run so contrary to our normal intuitive 
assumptions about the world that there’s always a fresh shock of understanding.
 
7.  Do you recommend it, or is it a private passion?
I’d recommend it to anybody and everybody.

Maggie and Trudie
I am not, I should say at once, in any formal relationship with a dog. I don’t 
feed a dog, give it a bed, groom it, find kennels for it when I’m away, delouse 
it, or suddenly arrange for any of its internal organs to be removed when they 
displease me. I do not, in short, own a dog.
On the other hand, I do have a kind of furtive, illicit relationship with a dog, 
or rather two dogs. And in consequence I think I know a little of what it must 
be like to be a mistress.
The dogs do not live next door. They don’t even live in the same—well, I was 
going to say street and tease it out a bit, but let’s cut straight to the truth. 
They live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is a hell of a place for a dog, or 
indeed anyone else, to live. If you’ve never visited or spent time in Santa Fe, 
New Mexico, then let me say this: you’re a complete idiot. I was myself a 
complete idiot till about a year ago when a combination of circumstances that I 
can’t be bothered to explain led me to borrow somebody’s house way out in the 
desert just north of Santa Fe to write a screenplay in. To give you an idea of 
the sort of place that Santa Fe is, I could bang on about the desert and the 
altitude and the light and the silver and turquoise jewelry, but the best thing 
is just to mention a traffic sign on the freeway from Albuquerque. It says, in 
large letters, GUSTY WINDS, and in smaller letters MAY EXIST.
I never met my neighbours. They lived half a mile away on top of the next sand 
ridge, but as soon as I started going out for my morning run, jog, gentle 
stroll, I met their dogs, who were so instantly and deliriously pleased to see 
me that I wondered if they thought we’d met in a previous life (Shirley MacLaine 
lived nearby and they might have picked up all kinds of weird ideas from just 
being near her).
Their names were Maggie and Trudie. Trudie was an exceptionally silly-looking 
dog, a large, black French poodle who moved exactly as if she had been animated 
by Walt Disney: a kind of lollop that was emphasised by her large floppy ears at 
the front end and a short stubby tail with a bit of topiary-work on the end. Her 
coat consisted of a matting of tight black curls, which added to the general 
Disney effect by making it seem that she was completely devoid of naughty bits. 
The way in which she signified, every morning, that she was deliriously pleased 
to see me was to do a thing that I always thought was called “prinking” but is 
in fact called “stotting.” (I’ve only just discovered my error, and I’m going to 
have to replay whole sections of my life through my mind to see what confusions 
I may have caused or fallen afoul of.) “Stotting” is jumping upward with all 
four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you’ve seen a large black 
poodle stotting in the snow.
The way in which Maggie would signify, every morning, that she was deliriously 
pleased to see me was to bite Trudie on the neck. This was also her way of 
signifying that she was deliriously excited at the prospect of going for a walk, 
it was her way of signifying that she was having a walk and really enjoying it, 
it was her way of signifying she wanted to be let into the house, it was her way 
of signifying she wanted to be let out of the house. Continuously and playfully 
biting Trudie on the neck was, in short, her way of life.
Maggie was a handsome dog. She was not a poodle, and in fact the sort of breed 
of dog she was was continuously on the tip of my tongue. I’m not very good with 
dog breeds, but Maggie was one of the real classic, obvious ones: a sleek, black 
and tan, vaguely retrieverish sort of big beagle sort of thing. What are they 
called. Labradors? Spaniels? Elkhounds? Samoyeds? I asked my friend Michael, the 
film producer, once I felt I knew him well enough to admit that I couldn’t quite 
put my finger on the sort of breed of dog Maggie was, despite the fact that it 
was so obvious.
“Maggie,” he said, in his slow, serious Texan drawl, “is a mutt.”
So every morning the three of us would set out: me, the large English writer, 
Trudie the poodle, and Maggie the mutt. I would run-jog-stroll along the wide 
dirt track that ran through the dry red dunes, Trudie would gambol friskily 
along, this way and that, ears flapping, and Maggie would bowl along cheerily 
biting her neck. Trudie was extraordinarily good-natured and long-suffering 
about this, but every now and then she would suddenly get monumentally fed up. 
At that moment she would execute a sudden midair about-turn, land squarely on 
her feet facing Maggie, and give her an extremely pointed look, whereupon Maggie 
would suddenly sit and start gently gnawing her own rear right foot as if she 
were bored with Trudie anyway.
Then they’d start up again and go running and rolling and tumbling, chasing and 
biting, out through the dunes, through the scrubby grass and undergrowth, and 
then every now and then would suddenly and inexplicably come to a halt as if 
they had both, simultaneously, run out of moves. They would then stare into the 
middle distance in embarrassment for a bit before starting up again.
So what part did I play in all this? Well, none really. They completely ignored 
me for the whole twenty or thirty minutes.
Which was perfectly fine, of course, I didn’t mind. But it did puzzle me, 
because early every morning they would come yelping and scratching around the 
doors and windows of my house until I got up and took them for their walk. If 
anything disturbed the daily ritual, like I had to drive into town, or have a 
meeting, or fly to England or something, they would get thoroughly miserable and 
simply not know what to do. Despite the fact that they would always completely 
ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn’t just go and have 
a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs 
that were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order 
for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can’t ignore someone who isn’t 
there, because that’s not what “ignore” means.
Further depths to their thinking were revealed when Michael’s girlfriend 
Victoria told me that once, when coming to visit me, she had tried to throw a 
ball for Maggie and Trudie to chase. The dogs had sat and watched stony-faced as 
the ball climbed up into the sky, dropped, and at last dribbled along the ground 
to a halt. She said that the message she was picking up from them was “We don’t 
do that. We hang out with writers.”
Which was true. They hung out with me all day, every day. But, exactly like 
writers, dogs who hang out with writers don’t like the actual writing bit. So 
they would moon around at my feet all day and keep nudging my elbow out of the 
way while I was typing so that they could rest their chins on my lap and gaze 
mournfully up at me in the hope that I would see reason and go for a walk so 
that they could ignore me properly.
And then in the evening they would trot off to their real home to be fed, 
watered, and put to bed for the night. Which seemed to me like a fine 
arrangement, because I got all the pleasure of their company, which was 
considerable, without having any responsibility for them. And it continued to be 
a fine arrangement till the day when Maggie turned up bright and early in the 
morning ready and eager to ignore me on her own. No Trudie. Trudie was not with 
her. I was stunned. I didn’t know what had happened to Trudie and had no way of 
finding out, because she wasn’t mine. Had she been run over by a truck? Was she 
lying somewhere, bleeding by the roadside? Maggie seemed restless and worried. 
She would know where Trudie was, I thought, and what had happened to her. I’d 
better follow her, like Lassie. I put on my walking shoes and hurried out. We 
walked for miles, roaming around the desert looking for Trudie, following the 
most circuitous route. Eventually I realised that Maggie wasn’t looking for 
Trudie at all, she was just ignoring me, a strategy I was complicating by trying 
to follow her the whole time rather than just pursuing my normal morning walk 
route. So eventually I returned to the house, and Maggie sat at my feet and 
moped. There was nothing I could do, no one I could phone about it, because 
Trudie didn’t belong to me. All I could do, like a mistress, was sit and worry 
in silence. I was off my food. After Maggie sloped off home that night, I slept 
badly.
And in the morning they were back. Both of them. Only something terrible had 
happened. Trudie had been to the groomers. Most of her coat had been cropped 
down to about two millimeters, with a few topiary tufts on her head, ears, and 
tail. I was outraged. She looked preposterous. We went out for a walk, and I was 
embarrassed, frankly. She wouldn’t have looked like that if she was my dog.
A few days later I had to go back to England. I tried to explain this to the 
dogs, to prepare them for it, but they were in denial. On the morning I left, 
they saw me putting my cases in back of the 4wd, and kept their distance, became 
tremendously interested in another dog instead. Really ignored me. I flew home, 
feeling odd about it.
Six weeks later I came back to work on a second draft. I couldn’t just call 
’round and get the dogs. I had to walk around in the backyard, looking terribly 
obvious and making all sorts of high-pitched noises such as dogs are wont to 
notice. Suddenly they got the message and raced across the snow-covered desert 
to see me (this was mid-January now). Once they had arrived, they continually 
hurled themselves at the walls in excitement, but then there wasn’t much else we 
could do but go out for a brisk, healthy Ignore in the snow, Trudie stotted, 
Maggie bit her on the neck, and so we went on. And three weeks later I left 
again. I’ll be back again to see them sometime this year, but I realise that I’m 
the Other Human. Sooner or later I’m going to have to commit to a dog of my own.
—Animal Passions (ed. Alan Coren; Robson
Books; SEPTEMBER 1994).

The Rules
In the old Soviet Union they used to say that anything that wasn’t forbidden was 
compulsory; the trick was to remember which was which. In the West we’ve always 
congratulated ourselves on taking a slightly more relaxed, commonsense view of 
things, and forget that common sense is often just as arbitrary. You’ve got to 
know the rules. Especially if you travel.
A few years ago—well, I can tell you exactly, in fact, it was early 1994—I had a 
little run-in with the police. I was driving along Westway into central London 
with my wife, who was six months pregnant, and I overtook on the inside lane. 
Not a piece of wild and reckless driving in the circumstances, honestly, it was 
just the way the traffic was flowing; but anyway I suddenly found myself being 
flagged down by a police car. The policemen signalled me to follow them down off 
the motorway and—astonishingly—to stop behind them on a bend in the slip road, 
where we could all get out and have a little chat about my heinous crime. I was 
aghast. Cars, trucks, and, worst of all, white vans were careering down the slip 
road, none of them, I’m sure, expecting to find a couple of cars actually parked 
there, right on the bend. Any one of them could easily have rear-ended my 
car—with my pregnant wife inside. The situation was frightening and insane. I 
made this point to the police officer, who, as is so often the case with the 
police, took a different view.
The officer’s point was that overtaking on an inside lane was inherently 
dangerous. Why? Because the law said it was. But being parked on a blind bend on 
a slip road was not dangerous because I was there on police instructions, which 
made it legal and hence (and this was the tricky bit to follow) safe.
My point was that I accepted I had (quite safely) made a manoeuvre that was 
illegal under the laws of England, but that our current situation, parked on a 
blind bend in the path of fast-moving traffic, was life-threatening by reason of 
the actual physical laws of the universe.
The officer’s next point was that I wasn’t in the universe, I was in England, a 
point that has been made to me before. I gave up trying to win an argument and 
agreed to everything so that we could just get out of there.
As it happened, the reason I had rather overcasually overtaken on the inside 
lane was that I am very used to driving in the United States where everybody 
routinely exercises their constitutional right to drive in whatever damn lane 
they please. Under American law, overtaking on the inside lane (where traffic 
conditions allow) is perfectly legal, perfectly normal, and, hence, perfectly 
safe.
But I’ll tell you what isn’t.
I was once in San Francisco, and I parked in the only available space, which 
happened to be on the other side of the street. The law descended on me.
Was I aware of how dangerous the manoeuvre I’d just made was? I looked at the 
law a bit blankly. What had I done wrong?
I had, said the law, parked against the flow of traffic.
Puzzled, I looked up and down the street. What traffic? I asked.
The traffic that would be there, said the law, if there was any traffic.
This was a bit metaphysical, even for me, so I explained, a bit lamely, that in 
England we just park wherever we can find a parking space available, and weren’t 
that fussy about which side of the street it was on. He looked at me aghast, as 
if I was lucky to have got out of a country of such wild and crazy car parkers 
alive, and promptly gave me a ticket. Clearly he would rather have deported me 
before my subversive ideas brought chaos and anarchy to streets that normally 
had to cope with nothing more alarming than a few simple assault rifles. Which, 
as we know, in the States are perfectly legal, and without which they would be 
overrun by herds of deer, overbearing government officers, and lawless British 
tea importers.
My late friend Graham Chapman, an idiosyncratic driver at the best of times, 
used to exploit the mutual incomprehension of British and U.S. driving habits by 
always carrying both British and California driver’s licences. Whenever he was 
stopped in the States, he would flash his British licence, and vice versa. He 
would also mention that he was just on his way to the airport to leave the 
country, which he always found to be such welcome news that the police would 
breathe a sigh of relief and wave him on.
But though there are frequent misunderstandings between the Europeans and the 
Americans, at least we’ve had decades of shared movies and TV to help us get 
used to each other. Outside those bounds you can’t make any assumptions at all. 
In China, for instance, the poet James Fenton was once stopped for having a 
light on his bicycle. “How would it be,” the police officer asked him severely, 
“if everybody did that?”
However, the most extreme example I’ve come across of something being absolutely 
forbidden in one country and normal practice in another is one I can’t quite 
bring myself to believe, though my cousin swears it’s true. She lived for 
several years in Tokyo, and tells of a court case in which a driver who was 
being prosecuted for driving up onto the pavement, crashing into a shop window 
and killing a couple of pedestrians was allowed to enter the fact that he was 
blind drunk at the time as a plea in mitigation.
What are the rules you need to know if you are moving from one country to 
another? What are the things that are compulsory in one country and forbidden in 
another? Common sense won’t tell you. We have to tell each other.
The Independent on Sunday, JANUARY 2000

Introductory Remarks,
Procol Harum at the Barbican
Ladies and gentlemen:
Anybody who knows me will know what a big thrill it is for me to be here to 
introduce this band tonight. I’ve been a very great fan of Gary Brooker and 
Procol Harum ever since thirty years ago when they suddenly surprised the world 
by leaping absolutely out of nowhere with one of the biggest hit records ever 
done by anybody at all ever under any circumstances. They then surprised the 
world even more by turning out to be from Southend and not from Detroit as 
everybody thought. They then surprised the world even more by their complete 
failure to bring out an album within four months of the single, on the grounds 
that they hadn’t written it yet. And then, in a move of unparalleled marketing 
shrewdness and ingenuity, they also actually left “A Whiter Shade of Pale” off 
the album. They never did anything straightforwardly at all, as anyone who’s 
ever tried to follow the chords of “A Rum Tale” will know.
Now, they had one very very particular effect on my life. It was a song they 
did, which I expect some of you here will know, called “Grand Hotel.” Whenever 
I’m writing, I tend to have music on in the background, and on this particular 
occasions I had “Grand Hotel” on the record player. This song always used to 
interest me because while Keith Reid’s lyrics were all about this sort of 
beautiful hotel—the silver, the chandeliers, all those kinds of things—but then 
suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that 
came out of nowhere and didn’t seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what 
was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought, “It 
sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floor show going on. Something huge 
and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe.” And so that was 
where the idea for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from—from 
“Grand Hotel.”
Anyway, enough from me. We’re in for a great night tonight. There’s no band 
quite like them. And tonight I’m glad to say the London Symphony Orchestra is 
going to sit in with them. So I’d like for you to welcome please—the London 
Symphony Orchestra; the Chameleon Arts Chorus; Procol Harum; the conductor, the 
great Nicholas Dodd; and Gentleman-Scholar-Musician, and I believe now also Rear 
Admiral—Gary Brooker. Thank you very much.
—From the Procol Harum and London
Symphony Orchestra concert,
FEBRUARY 9, 1996

Hangover Cures
What is it we are all going to be trying to make next Saturday? Not New Year’s 
Resolutions, if we’re halfway sane. They all fail so embarrassingly early into 
the New Year that few of us are going to want to compound our sense of futility 
by making New Millennium Resolutions and have them fail, relatively speaking, a 
thousand times earlier than usual.
In fact—if I may digress for a moment (and if you don’t want me to digress, then 
you may find that you are reading the wrong column)—it turns out that there may 
be a very good reason why we fail to keep our New Year’s Resolutions other than 
the obvious abject feebleness of will. It’s this. We can’t remember what they 
are. Simple. And if we actually wrote them down, then we probably can’t remember 
where we put the piece of paper, either. Oddly enough, the piece of paper has 
sometimes been known to turn up again exactly a year later when you’re casting 
around for something on which to write the next year’s abortive attempts to pull 
your life into some kind of shape. This is not, it turns out, a coincidence.
Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression “it turns out” to be 
incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative 
connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the 
trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. 
It’s hugely better than its predecessors “I read somewhere that . . .” or the 
craven “they say that . . .” because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy 
bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground 
breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately 
involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where 
was I?
It seems that the brain is affected by alcohol. Well, we know that, of course, 
and those who don’t yet are about to find out. But there are different 
gradations to the effect, and herein lies the crux. The brain organises its 
memories like a kind of hologram (it turns out). To retrieve an image, you have 
to re-create the exact conditions in which it was captured. In the case of a 
hologram, it’s the lighting, in the case of the brain it is, or can be (it turns 
out), the amount of alcohol sloshing around in it. Things that happen to you or, 
frighteningly enough, that you yourself say or do while under the influence of 
alcohol will only be recalled to your memory when you are under the influence of 
that exact same quantity of alcohol again. These memories are completely beyond 
the reach of your normal, sober mind. Which is why, after some ill-advised 
evening out, you will be the only person who is completely unaware of some 
barkingly stupid remark you made to someone whose feelings you care about 
deeply, or even just a bit. It is only weeks, months, or, in the case of New 
Year’s Eve, exactly a year later that the occasion suddenly returns to your 
consciousness with a sickening whump and you realise why people have been 
avoiding you or meeting your eyes with a glassy stare for so long. This can 
often result in your saying “Jesus God” to yourself in a loud voice and reaching 
for a stiff drink, which leads you up to the next point of inebriation, where of 
course fresh shocks await your pleasure.
And the same is true on the way back down. There are certain memories that will 
only be retriggered by revisiting exactly the same state of dehydration as the 
one in which the original events occurred. Hence the New Year’s Resolution 
problem, which is that you never actually remember the resolutions you made, or 
even where you wrote them down, until the exact same moment the following year, 
when you are horribly reminded of your complete failure to stick by them for 
more than about seven minutes.
So what is the answer to this terrible, self-perpetuating problem? Well, 
obviously, rigorous self-discipline. A monastic adherence to a regime of steamed 
vegetables, plain water, long walks, regular workouts, early nights, early 
mornings, and probably some kind of fragrant oils or something. But seriously, 
the thing we are most going to want on New Year’s Day, and be desperately trying 
to remember how to make, is a good hangover cure, and especially one that 
doesn’t involve diving through the ice on the Serpentine. The trouble is, we can 
never remember them when we want them, or even know where to find them. And the 
reason we can never remember them when we want them is that we heard about them 
when we didn’t actually need them, which isn’t any help, for the reasons 
outlined above. Nauseating images involving egg-yolks and Tabasco sauce swill 
through your brain, but you are not really in any fit state to organise your 
thoughts. Which is why we need, urgently, to organise them now while there is 
still time. So this is an appeal for good, effective methods of freshening up 
the brain on New Year’s Day that don’t involve actual cranial surgery. Hangover 
cures, please, therefore, to www.h2g2.com. And may the next thousand years be 
especially good ones for you and your descendants.
The Independent on Sunday,
DECEMBER 1999

My Favourite Tipples
I love whisky in every way. I love the way it looks in the bottle, that rich 
golden colour. I love the labels arranged on the shelf—the kilts and claymores 
and slightly out-of-focus sheep. I love the sense that it’s a drink that—unlike, 
for instance, vodka from Warrington—is rich in the culture and history of the 
place where it is distilled. I love particularly the smoky, peaty aromas of the 
single malts. In fact the only thing I don’t like about whisky is that if I take 
the merest sip of the stuff it sends a sharp pain from the back of my left 
eyeball down to the tip of my right elbow, and I begin to walk in a very special 
way, bumping into people and snarling at the furniture. I have therefore learnt 
to turn my attention to other tipples.
Margaritas I’m very fond of, but they make me buy very stupid things. Whenever 
I’ve had a few margaritas I always wake up in the morning with a sense of dread 
as to what I will find downstairs. The worst was a six-foot-long pencil and a 
two-foot-wide India eraser that I had shipped over from New York as a result of 
one injudicious binge. The confusing thing was that they arrived home several 
weeks after I did, so I found them downstairs one morning after having had just 
one glass of Chianti with my evening pizza.
I therefore now drink Stolichnaya vodka martinis if I go to New York, because 
they’re very smart and sophisticated and New Yorky, but, most important, they 
render me incapable of doing anything stupid, or indeed anything at all, though 
I occasionally converse very knowledgeably about quantum chromo-dynamics and pig 
farming when under their influence.
I like Bloody Marys, but only ever have them in airports. I have no explanation 
for this. It never occurs to me to have a Bloody Mary in the normal course of 
events, but put me in an airport lounge and I make for the Stoli and the tomato 
juice like a rat from a sinking ship, and arrive a few hours later at my 
destination throbbing with jet lag.
At home I tend to drink whatever is lying around in the fridge, which is usually 
very little. My fridge has a peculiar feature: you put a bottle of good 
champagne in it, and when you come to look for it you find a bottle of noxious 
cheap white wine in its place. I still have not worked out how this happens, but 
I usually console myself with a glass of the world’s most boring drink, the only 
one I can drink with no ill effects whatsoever: a gin and tonic.
The Independent on Sunday,
DECEMBER 1990

Radio Scripts Intro
I do enjoy having these little chats at the front of books. This is a complete 
lie, in fact. What actually happens is that you are battling away trying to 
finish, or at least start, a book you promised to deliver seven months ago, and 
faxes start arriving asking you if you could possibly write yet another short 
little introduction to a book that you clearly remember writing “The End” to in 
about 1981. It won’t, promises the fax, take you two minutes. Damn right it 
won’t take you two minutes. It actually takes about thirteen hours and you miss 
another dinner party and your wife won’t speak to you, and the book gets so late 
that you start missing entire camping holidays in the Pyrenees and your wife 
won’t talk to you, particularly since the camping holiday was your idea and not 
hers and she was only going on it because you wanted to and now she has to go 
and do it by herself when you know perfectly well that she hates camping. (So do 
I, incidentally. I am making this bit up.)
And then more faxes come in demanding more introductions, this time for omnibus 
editions of books, each of which I have already written individual introductions 
to. After a while I find I have written so many introductions that someone 
collects them all together and puts them in a book and asks me to write an 
introduction to it. So I miss another dinner party and also a scuba-diving trip 
to the Azores and I discover that the reason my wife isn’t talking to me is that 
she is now in fact married to someone else. (I am making this bit up as well, as 
far as I know.)
In the days when I used to be able to go to parties, in other words, in the days 
when I had only written a couple of books and the business of writing 
introductions to them had yet to become a full-time activity, it used to save a 
lot of time when I discovered that two of my friends didn’t know each other, 
just to say to them, “This is Peter, this is Paula, why don’t you introduce 
yourselves?” This usually worked fantastically well, and before you knew it 
Peter and Paula would be a happy couple going off on joint skiing holidays in 
the French Alps with your wife and her second husband.
So. Dear reader. This is the anniversary reissue of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to 
the Galaxy radio scripts. Why don’t you introduce yourselves?
I have enjoyed this little chat.
—Introduction to The Original Hitchhiker
Scripts, 10th Anniversary Edition
(Harmony Books, MAY 1995)
 
*       *       *
 
How should a prospective writer go about becoming an author?
 
First of all, realise that it’s very hard, and that writing is a grueling and 
lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had 
better really, really, really want to do it. Next, you have to write something. 
Unless you are committed to novel writing exclusively, I suggest that you start 
out writing for radio. It’s still a relatively easy medium to get into because 
it pays so badly. But it is a great medium for writers because it relies so much 
on the imagination.

Unfinished Business of the Century
Just a few more days to go. I think it’s important not to leave a century, let 
alone a millennium, without cleaning up behind you, and there is clearly 
unfinished business to attend to. I suggest that the Net community try to 
identify this unfinished business and see if, between us, we can’t get it 
squared away so that we can all enjoy the New Year celebrations with the sense 
of a century well done.
But first, a word to the pedants.
Yes, I know you all think that the millennium doesn’t change till a year later, 
and very tedious you are about it, too. In fact, you are so keen to have 
something you can wag your fingers at the rest of the world about, that you are 
completely missing the point. IT HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE WHATSOEVER! It is merely an 
excuse to go “Whoa! Look at that! There they go!” as all the digits change.
What other significance can it possibly have? Ten (along with its multiples) is 
an arbitrary number. January 1 is an arbitrary date. And if you happen to think 
that the birth of Jesus Christ is a significant moment, then all we can say with 
any certainty is that 1 A.D. isn’t when it happened. Or 0 A.D., if the previous 
year had been called that (which, as we all know because the pedants keep 
banging on about it, it wasn’t).
Then, as the historians (a much more interesting bunch than the pedants) tell 
us, the calendar has been played around with so many times in the intervening 
years anyway that the whole thing is doubly meaningless.
Consider this: we’ve only relatively recently got our time- and date-keeping 
precisely defined and standardised, with the aid of atomic clocks and suchlike. 
And on January 1, 2000 (if the doomsayers are to believed) all of our computer 
systems will go haywire and plunge us back in the stone age (or not, as the case 
may be). So it seems to me that midnight on December 31 is the only solid and 
reliable point we have in the entire sorry mess, and so perhaps we should be 
celebrating that just a little bit. And instead of saying that we have got the 
end of the millennium (or bi-millennium) wrong, we should say that our ancestors 
got the beginning of it wrong, and that we’ve only just sorted the mess out 
before starting a new mess of our own. What the hell does it matter anyway? It’s 
just an excuse for a party.
But first, to unfinished business.
One particularly niggling piece of Unfinished Business, it occurred to me the 
other day in the middle of a singing session with my five-year-old daughter, is 
the lyrics to “Do-Re-Mi,” from The Sound of Music. It doesn’t exactly rank as a 
global crisis, but nevertheless it brings me up short anytime I hear it, and it 
shouldn’t be that difficult to sort it out.
But it is.
Consider.
Each line of the lyric takes the name of a note from the sol-fa scale, and gives 
its meaning: “Do (doe), a deer, a female deer; Re (ray), a drop of golden sun,” 
etc. All well and good so far. “Mi (me), a name I call myself; Fa (far), a long, 
long way to run.” Fine. I’m not saying this is Keats, exactly, but it’s a 
perfectly good conceit and it’s working consistently. And here we go into the 
home stretch. “So (sew), a needle pulling thread.” Yes, good. “La, a note to 
follow so . . .” What? Excuse me? “La, a note to follow so . . .” What kind of 
lame excuse for a line is that?
Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is. It’s a placeholder. A placeholder is 
what a writer puts in when he can’t think of the right line or idea just at the 
moment, but he’d better put in something and come back and fix it later. So, I 
imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in “a note to follow so” and thought 
he’d have another look at it in the morning.
Only, when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn’t come 
up with anything better. Or the next morning. Come on, he must have thought, 
this is simple. Isn’t it? “La . . . a something, something . . . what?”
One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix 
it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No 
one manages to fix it. And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked 
in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on.
How difficult can it be? How about this for a suggestion? “La, a . . . , a . . 
.”—well, I can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world 
pulls together on this, we can crack it. And I think we shouldn’t let the 
century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of 
disarray.
What else? Well, what do you think? What are the things we really owe it to 
ourselves to sort out in the next few months, before the digits roll over and we 
all have a set of brand-new shiny twenty-first-century problems to deal with? 
World hunger? Lord Lucan? Jimmy Hoffa? Where to put old eight-track tapes so 
that no one in the twenty-first century will ever have to see one ever again? 
Suggestions, please, and answers, to www.h2g2.com.
The Independent on Sunday,
NOVEMBER 1999

The Dream Team
DREAM FILM CAST: Sean Connery as God, John Cleese as the Angel Gabriel, and 
Goldie Hawn as Mother Theresa’s younger sister, Trudie. With a guest appearance 
by Bob Hoskins as Detective Inspector Phil Makepiece.
DREAM ROCK BAND: My absolute dream rock band no longer: exists because their 
rhythm guitarist was shot. But I’d have their bass player because he is 
unquestionably the best. There may be more pyrotechnical players, but for sheer 
musicality, invention, and drive, there’s no one better than McCartney. He’d 
share vocals with Gary Brooker, the greatest soul voice of British rock and roll 
and a hell of a piano player. Two lead guitarists (they can take turns to play 
rhythm): Dave Gilmour, whom I’ve always wanted to hear play with Gary Brooker 
because they share a taste for huge drama and soaring melody lines; and Robbie 
Mclntosh, who is both a great blues rocker and an exquisite acoustic guitar 
picker. Drummer—Steve Gadd (remember “50 Ways”?). By the time you’ve got a band 
this size, you more or less have to have maestro Ray Cooper in it as well, on 
percussion, though it would also be very tempting to include the incredible 
woman percussionist whose name I don’t know from Van Morrison’s band. Strings? 
Brass section? Royal Philharmonic? A New Orleans jazz band? For all that, you’d 
need synth wizard Paul “Wix” Wickens. And a large truck.
DREAM LOVER: The Dagenham Girl Pipers. With all due respect and love to my dear 
wife, there are some things that, however loving or tender your wife may be, 
only a large pipe band can give you.
DREAM PROJECT: Given unlimited financial resources, I would love to fund a major 
research project into human origins, the transition from ape to man. A couple of 
years ago I became fascinated by the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, the notion that our 
transitional ancestors spent a period in a semiaquatic environment. I’ve heard 
the idea ridiculed many times but never convincingly refuted, and I would love 
to discover the truth, one way or the other.
DREAM ALTERNATIVE CAREERS: Zoologist, rock musician, system software designer.
DREAM HOLIDAY: Intense scuba diving in Australia, out beyond the Great Barrier 
Reef to the wonderful clarity of the Coral Sea—Cod Hole, shark diving, wreck 
diving; then to Western Australia to dive with enormous whale sharks, and 
finally to Shark Bay to dive with dolphins. Then I’d stop off for dinner in Hong 
Kong on the way home.
DREAM HOME: Something large and rambling on the beach somewhere, probably Far 
North Queensland, with lots of wildlife around and high-bandwidth computer 
connections to the rest of the world. Also a boat and a pickup truck.
DREAM CUISINE: If I was told I had to choose the cuisine of one country and eat 
only that for the rest of my life, I’d choose Japanese.
DREAM DAY OUT: I’ve already had this, in fact. It was 1968—a friend of mine and 
I took a day off school, went up to London, and saw 2001 in Cinerama in the 
afternoon and Simon and Garfunkel live at the Albert Hall in the evening.
The Observer, MARCH 10, 1995
 
*       *       *
 
Where do you get the inspiration for your books?
 
I tell myself I can’t have another cup of coffee till I’ve thought of an idea.

Intro for Comic Books # 1
People often ask me where I get my ideas from, sometimes as often as 
eighty-seven times a day. This is a well-known hazard for writers, and the 
correct response to the question is first to breathe deeply, steady your 
heartbeat, fill your mind with peaceful, calming images of birdsong and 
buttercups in spring meadows, and then try to say, “Well, it’s very interesting 
you ask that . . .” before breaking down and starting to whimper uncontrollably.
The fact is that I don’t know where ideas come from, or even where to look for 
them. Nor does any writer. This is not quite true, in fact. If you were writing 
a book on the mating habits of pigs, you’d probably pick up a few goodish ideas 
by hanging around a barnyard in a plastic mac, but if fiction is your line, then 
the only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk 
that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
I exaggerate, of course. That’s my job. There are some specific ideas for which 
I can remember exactly where they came from. At least, I think I can; I may just 
be making it up. That also is my job. When I’ve got a big writing job to do, I 
will often listen to the same piece of music over and over again. Not while I’m 
doing the actually writing, of course, you need things to be pretty quiet for 
that, but while I’m fetching another cup of coffee or making toast or polishing 
my spectacles or trying to find more toner for the printer or changing my guitar 
strings or clearing away the coffee cups and toast crumbs from my desk or 
retiring to the bathroom to sit and think for half an hour—in other words, most 
of the day. The result is that a lot of my ideas come from songs. Well, one or 
two at least. To be absolutely accurate, there is just one idea that came from a 
song, but I keep the habit up just in case it works again which it won’t, but 
never mind.
So now you know how it’s done. Simple, isn’t it?
—From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy (collected edition), DC Comics,
MAY 1997
 
 

Interview With Virgin Airlines
If theres one man who should know a thing or two about travel it has to be the 
guy who has eaten burger and fries at the restaurant at the end of the universe. 
We tracked down author Douglas Adams at his new home in the states where he 
recently relocated for the filming of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I asked him:
Whats your best childhood holiday memory?
 
My childhood holidays were pretty modest. The highlight was a fortnight in the 
Isle of Wight when I was about six. I remember catching what I was convinced a 
plaice, though it was only the size of a postage stamp and probably died when I 
tried to keep it as a pet.
Have you been back there since you were a child?
 
I've been back to the Isle of Wight about once. I stayed at a hotel where the 
evenings' entertainment was to turn off the lights in the restaurant and watch 
as a family of badgers played on the lawn.
Where did you go the first time you went on holidays without your parents?
 
I hitchhiked around Europe when I was eighteen.
What did you get up to?
 
I went to Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, staying in Youth Hostels and 
camp sites, and supplemented my diet by going on free tours around breweries. 
Istanbul was particularly wonderful, but I ended up with terrible food poisoning 
and had to return to England by train sleeping in the corridor just next to the 
loo. Ahh, magical times.
Have you been back there since?
 
I returned to Istanbul once. I was flying back from Australia and arbitrarily 
decided to stop off in Istanbul on the way back. But getting a taxi in from the 
airport and staying in a nice hotel instead of getting a ride in on the back of 
a truck and sleeping in the back room of a cheap boarding house somehow robbed 
it of its magic. I wandered around for a couple of days trying to avoid carpet 
sellers and then gave up.
Where is the most remote or bizarre place you have ended up?
 
Easter Island is, of course, the most remote place on Earth. Famous for being 
further from anywhere than anywhere else is. Which is why it is odd that I ended 
up there completely by accident and only for about an hour. I learned a very 
important lesson from this which is read your ticket.
When were you there and why?
 
I was flying from Santiago to Sydney and was a bit tired, having spent the 
previous two weeks looking for fur seals, and didn’t wake up to what the plane’s 
itinerary was until the pilot mentioned that we were just coming in for our 
one-hour stopover on Easter Island.
There was a little fleet of minibuses at the airport, which whisk you away for a 
quick peek at the nearest statue while the plane refuels. It was incredibly 
frustrating because if I had been paying attention the day before, I could 
easily have changed my ticket and stayed over for a couple of days.
What’s your favorite city? What fascinates you most about it?
 
In my imagination, it’s Florence, but that’s only because of memories of 
traveling there as a student and spending days on end blissed out on sun, cheap 
wine, and art. Recent visits have overlaid those earlier memories with traffic 
jams and smog.
Now I think I’d say that my favourite city is just a small town—Santa Fe, New 
Mexico. I love the high desert air, margaritas and guacamole, the silver belt 
buckles and the sense that people sitting at the next table to you in the café 
are probably Nobel laureates.
When was the last time you hitchhiked?
 
About ten years ago, on the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean. Hitchhiking 
was the only method of getting around the island. There was no public transport, 
but a couple of people owned Land Rovers, so you just had to hope they’d be 
passing. I ended up in a forest at dusk wearing shorts, but having left my 
mosquito repellent behind. As a result I endured the most agonising night of my 
life.
Where was your favourite place when you were on the road of Last Chance to See?
 
Madagascar—though in fact that was a kind of prelude to Last Chance to See. I 
loved the forest and the lemurs and the warmth of the people.
What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?
 
The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps 
“baffling” would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended 
to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, 
and I can’t help but wonder why. I’m convinced that if we go back far enough in 
the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in 
there somewhere. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
Have you ever been there?
 
I haven’t been to the Yangtse since construction started. I never want to see 
the thing.
And the most interesting natural structure?
 
A giant, two-thousand-mile-long fish in orbit around Jupiter, according to a 
reliable report in the Weekly World News. The photograph was very convincing, 
and I’m only surprised that more reputable journals like New Scientist, or even 
just The Sun, haven’t followed up with more details. We should be told.
If you were to name a place that “looks like it’s just been dropped from outer 
space,” where would you think of?
 
Fjordland in South Island, New Zealand. An impossible jumble of mountains, 
waterfalls, lakes, and ice—the most extraordinary place I think I’ve ever seen.
If you could go anywhere in the universe right now, where would you go, how 
would you get there, and who and what would you take with you?
 
Locally, I think Europa, one of the sixteen moons of Jupiter It’s one of the 
most mysterious bodies in the solar system, much beloved of science-fiction 
writers because it’s one of the few places that could possibly sustain life of 
some kind, and there are certain oddities in its structure which have led to 
wild speculations about its being artificial. Plus, on nights when the orbital 
alignments are right, you must get a great view of the fish.
—Interview conducted by Claire Smith
Virgin.net, Limited, SEPTEMBER 22, 1999

Riding the Rays
Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent 
adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent thirty-five-year-old woman. 
Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard 
in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. In fact it’s not so 
much a country as such, more a sort of thin crust of semi-demented civilisation 
caked around the edge of a vast, raw wilderness, full of heat and dust and 
hopping things.
Tell most Australians that you like their country and they will give a dry laugh 
and say, “Well, it’s the last place left now, isn’t it?” which is the sort of 
worrying thing that Australians say. You don’t quite know what they mean but it 
worries you in case they’re right.
Just knowing that the place is lurking there on the other side of the world 
where we can’t see it is oddly unsettling, and I’m always looking for excuses to 
go even if only to keep an eye on it. I also happen to love it. Most of it I 
haven’t even seen yet, but there’s one place that I’ve long wanted to revisit, 
because I had some frustratingly unfinished business there.
And just a few weeks ago I suddenly found the excuse I’d been looking for.
I was in England at the time. I could tell I was in England because I was 
sitting in the rain under a wet blanket in a muddy field listening to some 
fucking orchestra in a kind of red tent playing hits from American movie 
soundtracks. Is there anywhere else in the world where people would do such a 
thing? Anywhere? Would they do it in Italy? Would they do it in Tierra del 
Fuego? Would they do it on Baffin Island? No. Even in Japan, where national 
pastimes include ripping out your own intestines with a knife, I think they 
would draw the line.
In between the squalls of rain and trumpets I fell into conversation with an 
engaging fellow who turned out to be my sister’s next-door neighbour up there in 
Warwickshire, which was where the sodden field was. His name was Martin 
Pemberton, and he was an inventor and designer. Among the things he had invented 
or designed, he told me, were various crucial bits of tube trains, a wonderful 
new form of thinking toaster, and also a Sub Bug.
What, I asked politely, was a Sub Bug?
A Sub Bug, he explained, was a jet-propelled underwater buggy sort of thing. A 
bit like the front half of a dolphin. You hold on to the rear and it pulls you 
through the sea at depths of up to thirty feet. Remember that bit in the movie 
of Thunderball? A bit like those things. Great for exploring coral reefs.
I’m not sure if that’s exactly what he said. He may have said “azure sea” or 
“limpid depths.” Probably not, but that was the picture in my brain as I sat in 
the blustery rain watching an escaped umbrella totter past the bandstand.
I had to try one. I said so to Martin. I may even have wrestled him to the 
ground and knelt on his windpipe, everything was a bit of a blur to be honest, 
but anyway he said he would be delighted to let me try one. The question was 
where? I could try it anywhere, even just in the local swimming pool. No. The 
trick was to get to try it in Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef. I needed an 
angle, though, if I was going to get some hapless magazine to stump up a trip 
for me to try it which, believe me, is the only way to travel.
Then I remembered my unfinished business in Australia.
There’s an island I had visited briefly once ten years ago in the Whitsundays, 
at the southern end of the reef. It was a pretty dreadful place, called Hayman 
Island. The island itself was beautiful, but the resort that had been built on 
it was not, and I had ended up there by mistake, exhausted, at the end of an 
author tour. I hated it. The brochure was splattered with words like 
“international” and “superb” and “sophisticated,” and what this meant was that 
they had Muzak pumped out of the palm trees and themed fancy-dress parties every 
night. By day I would sit at a table by the pool getting slowly sozzled on 
Tequila Sunrises and listening to the conversations at nearby tables which 
seemed mostly to be about road accidents involving heavy-goods vehicles. In the 
evening I would retire woozily to my room in order to avoid the sight of 
maddened drunk Australians rampaging through the night in grass skirts or cowboy 
hats or whatever the theme of the evening was, while I watched Mad Max movies on 
the hotel video. These also featured a lot of road accidents, several of which 
involved heavy-goods vehicles. I couldn’t even find anything to read. The hotel 
shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them.
On one occasion I talked to an Australian couple on the beach. I said, “Hello, 
my name is Douglas, don’t you hate the Muzak?” They said they didn’t, as a 
matter of fact. They thought it was very nice and international and 
sophisticated. They lived on a sheep farm some 850 miles west of Brisbane, where 
all they ever heard, they said, was nothing. I said that must be very nice and 
they said that it got rather boring after a while, and that a little light Muzak 
was balm to them. They refused to go along with my assertion that it was like 
having Spam stuffed in your ears all day, and after a while the conversation 
petered out.
I made my escape from Hayman Island and ended up on a scuba-diving boat on Hook 
Reef, where I had the best week of my life, exploring the coral, diving with a 
wild variety of fish, dolphins, sharks, and even a minke whale.
It was only after I had left Hayman Island that I heard of something really 
major that I had missed there.
There was a bay tucked round on the other side, called Manta Ray Bay, that was 
full, as you might expect, of manta rays: huge, graceful, underwater flying 
carpets, one of the most beautiful animals in the world. The man who told me 
about it said that they were such placid and benign creatures that they would 
even allow people to ride on their backs underwater.
And I had missed it. For ten years I fretted about this.
Meanwhile I had also heard that Hayman Island itself had changed out of all 
recognition. It had been bought up by the Australian airline Ansett, who had 
spent a squillion dollars on ripping the Muzak out of the palm trees and 
transforming the resort into something that was not only international and 
superb and sophisticated and so on, but also breathtakingly expensive and, by 
all accounts, actually pretty good.
So here, I thought, was the angle. I would write an article about taking a Sub 
Bug all the way to Hayman Island, finding a friendly manta ray, and doing, 
effectively, a comparative test drive.
Now any sane, rational person might say that that was thoroughly stupid idea, 
and indeed a lot of them did. However this is that article: a comparative test 
drive between an underwater propeller-driven, blue and yellow one-person Sub Bug 
and a giant manta ray.
Did it work out?
Guess.
The sheer fatuous unreality of the idea struck me forcibly as we watched the 
huge forty-kilogram silver box containing the Sub Bug being wheeled across the 
tarmac at Hamilton Island airport. There was, I realised, a huge difference 
between telling people in England that I was going to Australia to do a 
comparative test drive between a Sub Bug and a manta ray, and telling people in 
Australia that I had come to do a comparative test drive, etc. I suddenly felt 
like an extremely idiotic Englishman whom everyone would hate and despise and 
point at and snigger about and make fun of.
My wife, Jane, calmly explained to me that I always became completely paranoid 
when I had jet lag, and why didn’t I just have a drink and relax.
Hamilton Island looks like a pretty good example of what not to do to a 
beautiful subtropical island on the edge of one of the great wonders of the 
natural world, which is to cover it with hideous high-rise junk architecture, 
and sell beer and T-shirts and also picture postcards of how beautiful it used 
to be before all the postcard shops arrived. However, we would only be there for 
a few minutes. Sitting waiting for us at the jetty by the small airport was the 
Sun Goddess, which was the sort of glamorous gleaming white boat that James Bond 
always seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on, considering he was 
actually supposed to be a civil servant. It had been sent to meet guests going 
on to Hayman Island, and was the first indication of how much the place had 
changed.
We were ushered graciously aboard. One attendant offered us glasses of champagne 
while another stood guard by the sliding glass doors that led into the 
air-conditioned interior.
His job was to push them open for us. He explained that this had become 
necessary because unfortunately the doors didn’t open automatically when you 
approached them, and some of their Japanese visitors would often just stand in 
front of them for whole minutes getting increasingly bewildered and 
panic-stricken until someone slid them open by hand.
The journey took about an hour, streaking effortlessly over the dark and 
gleaming sea under a brilliant sun. Smaller lush green islands slid past us in 
the distance. I watched the long wake of water folding back into the sea behind 
us, sipped at my champagne, and thought of an old bridge that I know in 
Sturminster Newton in Dorset. It still has a cast-iron notice bolted to it that 
warns anybody thinking of damaging or defacing the bridge in any way that the 
penalty is transportation. To Australia. Now, Sturminster Newton is a lovely 
town, but it astonishes me that the bridge is still standing.
Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on 
the way back to see what I missed, it’s often quite a shock), discovered 
something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that 
Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new 
offences after they had arrived in Australia?
I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was 
wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our 
grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we 
wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the 
Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some 
surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they 
reserve exclusively for use on the British.
From offshore, Hayman Island looks deserted, just a large verdant hill fringed 
with pale beaches set in a dark blue sea. Only from very close to can you spot 
the long, low hotel nestling among the palms. There is hardly anywhere you can 
get a good look at it from, since it is virtually smothered with what look like 
giant feral pot plants. It snakes and winds its way through the greenery: 
pillars, fountains, shaded plazas, sun decks, discreet little shops selling 
heart-stoppingly expensive little things with designer labels you’d have to 
carefully unpick, and indiscreetly large swimming pools.
It was pretty fabulous. We adored it immediately. It was exactly the sort of 
place that twenty years ago I would have despised anybody for going to. One of 
the great things about growing older and getting things like freebie holidays is 
that you can finally get to do all those things that you used to despise other 
people for doing: sitting around on a sundeck wearing sunglasses that cost about 
a year’s student grant, ordering up grotesque indulgences on room service, being 
pampered and waited on hand and foot by—and get this, this is a very important 
and significant part of what happens to you on Hayman Island—staff who don’t 
just say “No worries” when you thank them for topping up your champagne glass, 
they actually say “No worries at all.” They truly and sincerely want you, 
specifically you, not just any old fat git lying around in a sun hat, but you 
personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds 
that you have come to for you to concern yourself about in any way at all. 
Really. Really. We don’t even despise you. Really. No worries at all.
If only it were true. I had my Sub Bug to worry about, of course. This huge 
great thing that I had lugged ten times farther than Moses had dragged the 
children of Israel, just in order to see how it compared with a manta ray as a 
means of getting about underwater. It had been quietly removed from the boat in 
its huge silver-coloured box and discreetly stored at the dive centre where 
nobody could see it or guess at its purpose.
The phone rang in our room. The room was extremely pleasant, incidentally. I’m 
sure you’re keen to hear what the room was like, since we were staying in it at 
your expense. It was not enormous but it was very comfortable and sunny and 
tastefully decorated in Californian pastels. Our favourite item was the balcony 
that overlooked the sea because it had an awning that you lowered by pressing an 
electric switch. The switch had two settings. You could either turn it to AUTO, 
in which case the awning lowered itself whenever the sun came out, or you could 
set it to MANUEL [sic], in which case, we assumed, a small, incompetent Spanish 
waiter came and did it for you. We thought this was terribly funny. We laughed 
and laughed and laughed and had another glass of champagne and then laughed some 
more and then the phone rang.
“We have your Sub Bug,” said a voice.
“Ah yes,” I said. “Yes, the, er, Sub Bug. Thank you very much. Yes, is that all 
right?”
“No worries,” said the voice, “at all.”
“Ah. Good.”
“So if you like, why don’t you come down to the dive centre in the morning. We 
can check it out, see how it works, see what you need, take it out for a spin, 
whatever you want. We’ll just do whatever we can to help you.”
“Oh. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“No worries at all.”
The voice was very friendly and reassuring. My jet-lagged paranoia began to 
subside a little. We went and had dinner.
The resort had four restaurants, and we chose the Oriental Seafood Restaurant. 
Seafood in Australia mostly seems to consist of barramundi, Morton Bay bugs, and 
everything else.
“Morton Bay bugs,” said our smiling Chinese waitress, “are like lobsters, only 
this big.” She held her two forefingers about three inches apart. “We smash 
their head in. Is very nice. You will like.”
We didn’t like that much, in fact. The restaurant was very smartly decorated in 
Japanese-style black and white, but the food looked better than it tasted and 
they played Muzak at us. For a moment I felt the ghost of the old, naff Hayman 
Island stalking through its glamorously tasteful new home. The other restaurants 
available were Polynesian, Italian, and the one to which they gave top billing, 
La Fontaine, a French restaurant that we decided to keep for the last of our 
four nights, though we had nagging doubts. I tend to like local cooking unless 
I’m in Wales, and the thought of French haute cuisine transported here did not 
fill me with confidence. I wanted to keep an open mind, though, because as it 
happens one of the best meals I ever had was steamed crab and chateaubriand of 
zebu cooked by a French-trained chef in the south of Madagascar. But then the 
French had infested Madagascar for seventy-five years and bequeathed it a rich 
legacy of culinary skills and hideous bureaucracy. We decided at least to look 
at La Fontaine that night. As we prowled our way toward it, we traversed acres 
of beautifully laid carpet, passed grand pianos, chandeliers, and reproduction 
Louis XVI furniture. I found myself racking my brains for any memory I might 
have of perhaps some schismatic eighteenth-century French court that might have 
been set up, however briefly, on the Great Barrier Reef. I asked Jane, who is an 
historian, and she assured me that I was being extremely silly, and so we went 
to bed.
We were woken at precisely seven-thirty the following morning and indeed every 
morning by a seagull that perched on our balcony and performed our regular 
early-morning wake-up screech. After breakfast we went to the dive centre, which 
was about half a mile from the hotel, and met Ian Green.
It was Ian who had called the previous evening. He was in charge of all the 
diving stuff on Hayman, and a more helpful and friendly person would be hard to 
imagine. We got the Sub Bug unpacked, and examined it as it stood gleaming in 
the sun.
It is, as I have said, shaped like the front half of a dolphin. The body of it 
is blue, and toward the front there are two small yellow fins, one on each side, 
that can rotate through a few degrees and direct the Sub Bug upward or downward. 
At the back are two large handles that you hold on to as the Sub Bug pulls you 
through the water. Within reach of your thumbs are buttons that make the thing 
go, and control its ascent and descent. Inside the Bug is a cylinder of 
compressed air—a normal scuba cylinder—and this provides power to spin the two 
propellers that push the Bug forward, and also supplies air down a flexible tube 
to a free-floating regulator. A regulator is the thing you stick in your mouth 
that gives you your air when you’re diving. The point of this arrangement is 
that you only need your mask and flippers; you don’t need to carry a scuba tank 
on your own back, because you’re getting your air direct from the Sub Bug. The 
Bug is designed in such a way that you can set a maximum depth beyond which it 
will not go. The very maximum anyway is thirty feet.
Ian had received a flurry of faxes from Martin Pemberton about setting up the 
machine, and was pretty confident about it
“No worries at all,” he said, and asked me what I planned.
I said it might be an idea to take it for a shallow local try out before taking 
it out into deep water.
“No worries,” he said.
I said that we could then take it with us on the proper diving expedition that 
was going out from the island the following morning.
“No worries,” he said.
“So I will then spend a little time trying it out, getting used to it, and 
putting it through its paces around the reef.”
“No worries,” he said.
“And then, er,” I said, “for the purposes of this article I have to write, which 
is by way of being a sort of comparative test drive, I want to try the same 
thing on a manta ray.”
“No chance,” he said. “No chance at all.”
I suppose I should have foreseen this.
Or perhaps it was just as well that I hadn’t foreseen it. If I had foreseen it, 
I wouldn’t have been standing there half in a wet suit looking out at the 
glittering Tasman Sea and thinking, “Oh damn.” I would have been sitting 
fiddling in my office in Islington wondering if I’d done enough “work” yet to 
justify going out and getting a bun.
The issue was very simple. As someone who has spent over two years working on 
ecological projects, the very first thing I should have realised was that you 
don’t disturb the animals. It might have been all right to try and mount a manta 
ray ten years ago when I first heard about it, but not now. No way. You don’t 
touch the reef. You don’t take anything. No shells, no coral. You don’t touch 
the fish, except maybe a few that it’s okay to feed. And you certainly don’t 
fuck about trying to ride manta rays.
“Hardly any chance you’d even be able to get near one anyway,” said Ian. 
“They’re very timid creatures. I guess some people have managed to get to ride 
on a ray in the past, but I would imagine it would be very difficult. But now we 
just can’t allow it.”
“No,” I said, rather shamefacedly. “I understand, believe me. I just hadn’t 
really thought it through, I guess.”
“But we can go and have some fun with the Sub Bug,” said Ian. “No worries. We 
can take some pictures too. That’s a hell of a camera you’ve got there.”
We now come to another rather embarrassing part of the story about which I have 
so far been extremely silent. Some very nice people at Nikon in England had lent 
me for this trip brand-new Nikonos AF SR underwater autofocus camera, which is 
about £15,000 worth of the most sexy and desirable and fabulous camera equipment 
in the world. The camera is just wonderful, brilliant technology. Really. You 
want to take a photograph underwater, this is the perfect thing. It’s an 
astounding bit of kit. Why am I going on about it like this? Well, I spend a lot 
of time working on a computer, and because I am used to using a Macintosh, I 
hardly even bother to read manuals and so—I didn’t really bother to read the 
manual for this camera.
I realised that when I got the films back.
Please—I really don’t want to say any more, except to say thank you very much, 
Nikon. It really is an awesome camera and I hope very much that you will let me 
borrow it again one day. I won’t mention the camera again in this article.
We took a small dinghy out to a tiny deserted island about ten minutes away. Ian 
and I spent a happy hour or so pootling around with the Bug. We dealt with a 
couple of problems—a grain of sand in a valve, and so on. We worked out that the 
Bug didn’t work too well in very shallow water when it had to work against a 
tide. Well, we’d take it deeper tomorrow. Jane lay in the sun on the beach and 
read a book. After a while we got back in the dinghy and went back to Hayman. 
Not much of a story in all that, I suppose, but the reason I mention it is that 
I remember it very vividly, and one of the shortcomings, I sometimes feel, of 
somewhere like, for instance, Islington, is the lack of any immediately 
accessible tiny islands that you can spend the afternoon pootling around with 
Sub Bugs on. Just a bit of a poignant thought, really. We don’t even have any 
decent bridges you can deface.
There were about ten of us on the dive boat the following morning. The hotel is 
so spacious and rambling that you don’t often get to see many of the other 
guests, but it was interesting to begin to realise how many of them were 
Japanese. Not only Japanese, but Japanese who held hands and gazed into each 
other’s eyes a lot. Hayman, we discovered, was a major Japanese honeymoon 
destination.
The Sub Bug sat up on the back of the boat, and I sat looking at it as we made 
the hour’s journey out to the reef. Hardly any of the Barrier Reef islands are 
actually on the reef itself, except for Heron Island. You have to get there by 
boat. I was very excited. Apart from a couple of refresher dives in pools, this 
was my first proper scuba dive in years. I absolutely love it. I’m one of those 
people who has been tantalised by the flying dream for years, and scuba diving 
is the closest thing I know to flying. And for someone who is six foot five and 
less sylphlike than, to pick a name at random, the Princess of Wales, the 
sensation of weightlessness is an ecstatic one. Also, I usually vomit on the way 
back, which is a good way of working up an appetite.
We reached the reef, moored, got into our wet-suit gear, and prepared to dive. 
At low tide, the reef usually breaks the surface of the water. You can even walk 
on it, though that is now discouraged because of the damage it can cause. Even 
when the tide is high, though, reef diving is not a deep-diving sport. Most of 
what there is to see lies in the upper thirty feet, and there’s rarely any cause 
to go deeper than sixty feet. The very deepest a sports diver can go is about 
ninety feet, but there’s really not a lot of point. You’re usually looking at 
bare rock rather than coral at that depth, and Boyle’s law means that you use up 
your air much faster down there. Also, you have to spend much more time on the 
surface between dives if you’re not going to get the bends. The Sub Bug keeps 
you at a safe maximum depth of thirty feet.
I wanted to do a regular dive first to get my bearings. Two at a time, we 
clamped our masks and regulators to our faces did the Big Stride off the diving 
deck at the back of the boat; and dropped into the water in an eruption of 
bubbles. A moored dive boat always attracts the attention of a lot of local fish 
who expect, usually rightly, that they will get fed. The ones you’ll get to see 
if you’re lucky are the Maori wrasses, which are extraordinary pale olive-green 
creatures about the size of a Samsonite suitcase. They have large, protuberant 
mouths and very heavy protuberant brows, but the reason for the name Maori, an 
Australian will assure you apologetically, is some paintlike markings on their 
brow. Australians are not racists anymore.
There were quite a few wrasses around the boat, and I made the mistake of 
getting between a couple of them and some pieces of bread that someone had 
thrown from the boat. The animals blithely barged past me to get at the food.
I sank down to the reef in the huge space of water and light beneath the boat, 
and drifted easily round it for a while to get used to being underwater again, 
then came back to the boat to divest myself of my scuba tank and collect the Sub 
Bug. Together, Ian and I hauled it into the water. I got myself into position 
behind the thing, and started it up. One of the curious features of scuba diving 
is that your suit and equipment seem so heavy and cumbersome and unwieldy on the 
surface—which is one of the things that tend to frighten beginners—but once you 
descend below water level, everything begins to flow smoothly and easily, and 
the trick is to exert yourself absolutely as little as possible, in order to 
conserve oxygen. It is, almost by definition, the least aerobic sport there is. 
It won’t make you fit.
At first I was disappointed that the Sub Bug wouldn’t move me faster than I 
could swim. We were gently pulling our way down, but as I started to get used 
once more to the slowness with which everything happens underwater, I began to 
relish the long, slow, balletic curves it let you make through the water, 
stretched out at full length behind it instead of swimming in the normal 
position with your arms by your side or on your chest. Following the contours of 
the reef became like skiing in ultra slow motion—an almost Zenlike idea. I began 
to enjoy it a lot, though after fifteen minutes of experimenting with it, I 
began to feel I had exhausted its repertoire and began to look forward to 
swimming under my own power again. I suspect that it’s probably a machine best 
suited to people who want to experience a dive but don’t want to bother with the 
business of learning to use buoyancy jackets and so on.
I returned to the boat and we hauled the thing back up out of the water. Well, 
I’d driven the Sub Bug. But over lunch I was worried about the total collapse of 
my absurd comparative test-drive plan, and discussed my thoughts with Ian and 
Jane.
“I think we just have to think about the comparative test drive on a kind of 
conceptual basis,” I said. “And we have to award some points. Obviously the Sub 
Bug wins some points for being portable up to a point. You can take it on a 
plane, which you wouldn’t do with a manta ray, or at least not with a manta ray 
you liked, and I think that we probably like all manta rays on principle really, 
don’t we? Your manta ray is going to be a lot faster and more manoeuvrable, and 
you don’t need to change its tank every twenty minutes. But the big points that 
the Sub Bug wins are for the fact that you can actually get on it. I think it 
has to get a lot of credit for that, if you’re thinking of it as transport. But 
then, let’s turn the whole thing around again. The reason you can’t actually 
ride a manta ray is a sound ecological one, and on just about every ecological 
criterion the manta ray wins hands down. In fact, any form of transport that you 
can’t actually use would be a major ecological benefit, don’t you think?”
Ian nodded understandingly.
“Can I get on and read my book now, please?” said Jane.
For the afternoon dive, Ian said he wanted to take me in a different direction 
from the boat. I asked him why, and he looked noncommittal. I followed him down 
into the water and slowly we flippered our way across to a new part of the reef. 
When we reached it, the flat top of the reef was about four feet below the 
surface, and the sunlight dappled gently over the extraordinary shapes and 
colours of the brain coral, the antler coral, the sea ferns and anemones. The 
stuff you see beneath the water often, seems like a wild parody of the stuff you 
see above it. I remember the thought I had when first I dived on the Barrier 
Reef year ago, which was that this was all the stuff that people used to have on 
their mantelpieces in the fifties. It took me a while to rid myself of the 
notion that the reef was a load of kitsch.
I’ve never learnt the names of a lot of fish. I always swot them up on the boat 
and forget them a week later. But watching the breathtaking variety of shape and 
movement keeps me entranced for hours, or would if the oxygen allowed. If I were 
not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn’t the 
forces of natural selection that designed fish, it must have been an Italian.
I was moving forward slowly in the shallows. A few feet in front of me the reef 
gradually dipped down into a broad valley. The valley floor was wide and dark 
and flat. Ian was directing my attention toward it. I didn’t know why. There 
seemed to be just an absence of interesting coral. And then, as I looked, the 
whole black floor of the valley slowly lifted upward and started gently to waft 
its way away from us. As it moved, its edges were rippling softly and I could 
see that underneath it was pure white. I was transfixed by the realisation that 
what I was looking at was an eight-foot-wide giant manta ray.
It banked away in a wide, sweeping turn in the deeper water. It seemed to be 
moving breathtakingly slowly, and I was desperate to keep up with it. I came 
down the side of the reef to follow it. Ian motioned me not to alarm the 
creature, but just move slowly. I had quickly realised that its size was 
deceptive and it was moving much more swiftly than I realised. It banked again 
round the contour of the reef, and I began to see its shape more clearly. It was 
very roughly diamond-shaped. Its tail is not long, like a sting ray’s. The most 
extraordinary thing is its head. Where you would expect its head to be, it’s 
almost as if something has taken a bite out of it instead. From the two forward 
points—the outer edges of the “bite,” if you see what I mean—depend two horns, 
folded downward. And on each of these horns is a single large black eye.
As it moved, shimmering and undulating its giant wings, folding itself through 
the water, I felt that I was looking at the single most beautiful and unearthly 
thing I had ever seen in my life. Some people have described them as looking 
like living stealth bombers, but it is an evil image to apply to a creature so 
majestic, fluid, and benign.
I followed it as it swam around the outside of the reef, I couldn’t follow fast 
or well, but it was making such wide, sweeping turns that I only had to move 
relatively short distances round the reef to keep it in sight. Twice, even three 
times it circled round the reef and then at last it disappeared and I thought I 
had lost it for good. I stopped and looked around. No. It had definitely gone. I 
was saddened, but exhilarated with wonder at what I had seen. Then I became 
aware of a shadow moving on the sea floor at the periphery of my vision. I 
looked up, unprepared for what I then saw.
The manta ray soared over the top of the reef above me, only this time it had 
two more in its wake behind it. Together the three vast creatures, moving in 
perfect, undulating harmony of line, as if following invisible rollercoaster 
rails, sped off and away till they were lost at last in the darkening distance 
of the water.
I was very quiet that evening as we packed the Sub Bug back into its big silver 
box. I thanked Ian for finding the manta rays. I said I understood about not 
riding them.
“Ah, no worries, mate,” he said. “No worries at all.”
—1992
 
*       *       *
 
Who are your favorite authors?
 
Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, P. G. Wodehouse, Ruth Rendell.

Sunset at Blandings
This is P. G. Wodehouse’s last—and unfinished—book. It is unfinished not just in 
the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man 
and his work, stops in mid-flow, but in the more important sense that the text 
up to that point is also unfinished. A first draft for Wodehouse was a question 
of getting the essential ingredients of a story organised—its plot structure, 
its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the 
cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing—the relentless revising, 
refining, and polishing—that turned his works into the marvels of language we 
know and love. When he was writing a book, he used to pin the pages in 
undulating waves around the wall of his workroom. Pages he felt were working 
well would be pinned up high, and those that still needed work would be lower 
down the wall. His aim was to get the entire manuscript up to the picture rail 
before he handed it in. Much of Sunset at Blandings would probably still have 
been obscured by the chair backs. It was a work in progress. Many of the lines 
in it are just placeholders for what would come in later revisions—the dazzling 
images and conceits that would send the pages shooting up the walls.
Will you, anyway, find much evidence of the great genius of Wodehouse here? 
Well, to be honest, no. Not just because it is an unfinished work in progress, 
but also because at the time of writing he was what can only be described as 
ninety-three. At that age I think you are entitled to have your best work behind 
you. In a way, Wodehouse was condemned by his extreme longevity (he was born the 
year that Darwin died and was still working well after the Beatles had split up) 
to end up playing Pierre Menard to his own Cervantes. (I’m not going to unravel 
that for you. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should read Jorge 
Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard Author of Don Quixote.” It’s only six 
pages long, and you’ll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing 
it out to you.) But you will want to read Sunset for completeness and for that 
sense you get, from its very unfinishedness, being suddenly and unexpectedly 
close to a Master actually at work—a bit like seeing paint pots and scaffolding 
being carried in and out of the Sistine Chapel.
Master? Great genius? Oh yes. One of the most blissful joys of the English 
language is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever, one of the 
guys on the very top table of all, was a jokesmith. Though maybe it shouldn’t be 
that big a surprise. Who else would be up there? Austen, of course, Dickens and 
Chaucer. The only one who couldn’t make a joke to save his life would be 
Shakespeare.
Oh come on, let’s be frank and fearless for a moment. There’s nothing worse than 
watching a certain kind of English actor valiantly trying to ham it up as, for 
instance, Dogberry in Much Ado. It’s desperate stuff. We even draw a veil over 
the whole buttock-clenching business by calling the comic device he employs in 
that instance malapropism—after Sheridan’s character Mrs. Malaprop, who does 
exactly the same thing only funny in The Rivals. And it’s no good saying it’s 
something to do with the fact that Shakespeare was writing in the sixteenth 
century. What difference does that make? Chaucer had no difficulty being funny 
as hell way back in the fourteenth century when the spelling was even worse.
Maybe it’s because our greatest writing genius was incapable of being funny that 
we have decided that being funny doesn’t count. Which is tough on Wodehouse (as 
if he could have cared less) because his entire genius was for being funny, and 
being funny in such a sublime way as to put mere poetry in the shade. The 
precision with which he plays upon every aspect of a word’s character 
simultaneously—its meaning, timbre, rhythm, the range of its idiomatic 
connections and flavours, would make Keats whistle. Keats would have been proud 
to have written “the smile vanished from his face like breath off a 
razor-blade,” or of Honoria Glossop’s laugh that it sounded like “cavalry on a 
tin bridge.” Speaking of which, Shakespeare, when he wrote “A man may smile, and 
smile and be a villain” might have been at least as impressed by “Many a man may 
look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.”
What Wodehouse writes is pure word music. It matters not one whit that he writes 
endless variations on a theme of pig kidnappings, lofty butlers, and ludicrous 
impostures. He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring 
variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day. In fact, what it’s 
about seems to me to be wonderfully irrelevant. Beauty doesn’t have to be about 
anything. What’s a vase about? What’s a sunset or a flower about? What, for that 
matter, is Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto about? It is said that all art 
tends toward the condition of music, and music isn’t about anything—unless it’s 
not very good music. Film music is about something. “The Dam Busters’ March” is 
about something. A Bach fugue, on the other hand, is pure form, beauty, and 
playfulness, and I’m not sure that very much, in terms of human art and 
achievement, lies beyond a Bach fugue. Maybe the quantum electrodynamic theory 
of light. Maybe Uncle Fred Flits By, I don’t know.
Evelyn Waugh, I think, compared Wodehouse’s world to a pre-fall Eden, and it’s 
true that in Blandings, Plum—if I may call him that—has managed to create and 
sustain an entirely innocent and benign Paradise, a task that, we may recall, 
famously defeated Milton, who was probably trying too hard. Like Milton, 
Wodehouse reaches outside his Paradise for the metaphors that will make it real 
for his readers. But where Milton reaches, rather confusingly, into the world of 
classics gods and heroes for his images (like a TV writer who only draws his 
references from other TV shows), Wodehouse is vividly real. “She was standing 
scrutinising the safe, and heaving gently like a Welsh rarebit about to come to 
the height of its fever.” “The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like 
seaweed on an ebb-tide.” When it comes to making metaphors (well, all right, 
similes if you insist), you don’t mess with Master. Of course, Wodehouse never 
burdened himself with the task of justifying the ways of God to Man, but only of 
making Man, for a few hours at a time, inextinguishably happy.
Wodehouse better than Milton? Well, of course it’s an absurd comparison, but I 
know which one I’d keep in the balloon, and not just for his company, but for 
his art.
We Wodehouse fans are very fond of phoning each other up with new discoveries. 
But we may do the great man a disservice when we pull out our favourite quotes 
in public, like “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes,” or “. . . like so 
many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing 
from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag” or 
(here I go again) my current favourite, “He spun round with a sort of guilty 
bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk” because, 
irreducibly wonderful though they are, by themselves they are a little like 
stuffed fish on a mantelpiece. You need to see them in action to get the full 
effect. There is not much in Freddie Threepwood’s isolated line “I have here in 
this sack a few simple rats” to tell you that when you read it in context you 
are at the pinnacle of one of the most sublime moments in all English 
literature.
Shakespeare? Milton? Keats? How can I possibly mention the author of Pearls, 
Girls and Monty Bodkin and Pigs Have Wings in the same breath as these men? He’s 
just not serious!
He doesn’t need to be serious. He’s better than that. He’s up in the 
stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, 
where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the 
realms of pure, creative playfulness.
From the Introduction to Sunset at
Blandings (Penguin Books)

Tea
One or two Americans have asked me why the English like tea so much, which never 
seems to them to be a very good drink. To understand, you have to make it 
properly.
There is a very simple principle to the making of tea, and it’s this—to get the 
proper flavour of tea, the water has to be boilING (not boilED) when it hits the 
tea leaves. If it’s merely hot, then the tea will be insipid. That’s why we 
English have these odd rituals, such as warming the teapot first (so as not to 
cause the boiling water to cool down too fast as it hits the pot). And that’s 
why the American habit of bringing a teacup, a tea bag, and a pot of hot water 
to the table is merely the perfect way of making a thin, pale, watery cup of tea 
that nobody in their right mind would want to drink. The Americans are all 
mystified about why the English make such a big thing out of tea because most 
Americans HAVE NEVER HAD A GOOD CUP OF TEA. That’s why they don’t understand. In 
fact, the truth of the matter is that most English people don’t know how to make 
tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is 
a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally 
clueless about hot stimulants.
So the best advice I can give to an American arriving in England is this: Go to 
Marks and Spencer and buy a packet of Earl Grey tea. Go back to where you’re 
staying and boil a kettle of water. While it is coming to the boil, open the 
sealed packet and sniff. Careful—you may feel a bit dizzy, but this is in fact 
perfectly legal. When the kettle has boiled, pour a little of it into a teapot, 
swirl it around, and tip it out again. Put a couple (or three, depending on the 
size of the pot) of tea bags into the pot. (If I was really trying to lead you 
into the paths of righteousness, I would tell you to use free leaves rather than 
bags, but let’s just take this in easy stages.) Bring the kettle back up to the 
boil, and then pour the boiling water as quickly you can into the pot. Let it 
stand for two or three minutes, and then pour it into a cup. Some people will 
tell you that you shouldn’t have milk with Earl Grey, just a slice of lemon. 
Screw them. I like it with milk. If you think you will like it with milk then 
it’s probably best to put some milk into the bottom of the cup before you pour 
in the tea.* If you pour milk into a cup of hot tea, you will scald the milk. If 
you think you will prefer it with a slice of lemon, then, well, add a slice of 
lemon.
Drink it. After a few moments you will begin to think that the place you’ve come 
to isn’t maybe quite so strange and crazy after all.
MAY 12, 1999

The Rhino Climb
Great wumps of equatorial heat are coming up at me from off the tarmac. It’s the 
short rainy season in Kenya, but the sun burned off the morning dampness in 
minutes. I’m slathered in sunblock, the road stretches off into the distant heat 
haze, and my legs are settling in nicely. Dotted along the road ahead and behind 
me are other walkers, some striding vigorously, others appearing just to amble, 
but all in fact moving at the same speed. One of them is wearing a large, grey, 
sculptural edifice, made out of a painted woven plastic fabric stretched over a 
metal frame. A large horn bobs along in front of it. The thing is a grotesque 
but oddly beautiful caricature of a rhinoceros moving along with



*This is socially incorrect. The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put 
the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing 
whatever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is 
generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. 
It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.
swift, busy strides. The sun beats down. Lopsided lorries grind their way 
dangerously past us. The drivers shout and grin at our rhinoceros. When we pass, 
as we frequently do, lorries that have clearly just rolled over and collapsed on 
the side of the road, we wonder if it was anything to do with us.
The other walkers have all been walking for several days now, from the shore at 
Mombasa along the main highway to the truck stop at Voi, the local centre of the 
universe. I joined them here last night, rattling in by Land-Rover from Nairobi 
with my sister Jane, who’s been doing some work for Save the Rhino 
International, which is what we are all here to support. From here we will 
follow the road on as the tarmac gradually peters out toward the Tanzanian 
border.
Over the border lies Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in the world. It is 
to the peak of Kilimanjaro that the expedition is intending to climb—a small 
bunch of Englishman out walking miles a day in the midday sun and taking turns 
at wearing a large rhino costume. Mad dogs have thrown in the towel long ago.
What’s all this, I expect you’re thinking, about “the tallest mountain in the 
world”? Everest, surely, deserves at least an honourable mention in this 
category? Well, it all depends or your point of view. Certainly, Everest stands 
a sturdy 29,028 feet above sea level, which is, in its way, impressive. But if 
you were going to climb Everest, you would probably start, if you were using a 
reliable guide, somewhere in the Himalayas. Anywhere in the Himalayas is pretty 
damn high to start with and so, to hear some people tell it, it’s just a 
smartish jog to do the last little bit to the actual top of Everest. The way to 
keep it interesting these days is to do it without oxygen or in your underpants 
or something.
But Kilimanjaro is not part of a widespread upheaval like Everest. It was a long 
time before people managed to work out which bit of the Himalayas was actually 
the highest, and the discovery was finally made, as I recall, on a desk in 
London. No such problem with Kilimanjaro. It’s volcanic and stands on its own, 
surrounded by a few footling little hills. When you finally get to see Killy, 
searching among the befuddling clouds on the horizon, your blood suddenly runs 
cold. “Oh,” you say at last, “you mean above the clouds.” Your whole head tilts 
upward. “Oh my god . . .” From base to apex, it is the tallest mountain in the 
world. It’s certainly a hell of a thing to climb in a rhino costume. This 
crackpot idea was first put to me months earlier by the founders of Save the 
Rhino International, David Stirling and Johnny Roberts, and I didn’t realise at 
first that they meant it. They raved on for a bit about having acquired a whole 
set of rhino costumes that Ralph Steadman had designed for an opera, and that 
they would be just the thing for making the ascent of Kilimanjaro in. They had 
already been used, David told me by way of reassurance, for running in the New 
York Marathon. “It’ll have enormous impact,” they said, “believe me. Really.”
I began to realise the truth of this as we approached our first village of the 
day, and perhaps now would be a good point to explain what the purpose of the 
whole expedition was. It was not, in fact, to raise money directly for rhino 
conservation. Rhinos, which used to be plentiful on the plains of East Africa, 
are now hideously rare, but in Kenya they are about as well conserved as they 
can be anywhere in Africa. Richard Leakey’s Kenya Wildlife Service consists of 
eight thousand well-trained, well-equipped, well-armed, highly motivated 
soldiers, and represents a formidable force. Too formidable, some of his 
opponents feel. Poaching in Kenya is, officially, “no longer a problem.” But 
conservation is a continually evolving business, and we have begun to realise 
that just wading into Africa and telling the local people that they mustn’t do 
to their wildlife what we’ve done to ours, and that we are there to make sure 
they don’t, is an attitude that, to say the least, needs a little refining.
The communities that live along the margins of the great national parks have a 
tough time. They are poor and undernourished, their lands are restricted by the 
parks, and when from time to time the odd lion or elephant breaks out of the 
park, they are the ones who suffer. Arguments about preserving the genetic 
diversity of the planet can seem a little abstract to someone who has just lost 
the crops he needs to feed his family or, worse, has just lost one of his 
family. In the long run conservation can’t be imposed by outsiders, overriding 
the needs of local people. If anyone is going to take care of the wildlife, 
then, in the end, it must be the local people—and someone must take care of 
them.
Our route took us alongside and sometimes through the great national parks of 
Tsavo East and Tsavo West, and it was the people who lived on these perimeters 
that we had come visit, and also to help. The £100,000 we were hoping to raise 
from the walk would be spent on building school classrooms, stocking libraries, 
and paying for other community projects. We wanted to encourage them to see that 
whatever problem the wildlife may pose to them, it was of benefit to them as 
well.
As we were approaching our first village of the day, the rhino with Todd Jones 
inside it, was in the lead. All the walkers took turns at wearing the thing for 
an hour at a time, and you quickly learned to tell who was in it at any moment 
from the way in which it moved. If the rhino sauntered, then it was Giles 
inside. Giles was an ex-Gordonstoun Hugh Grant lookalike who had spent the last 
few years hitchhiking languidly around Africa with his own parachute. His 
technique was to turn up at airfields with this parachute, find someone who was 
flying in the general direction he wanted to go, hitch a lift, and then, when 
the fancy took him, just jump out of the plane. Apparently his girlfriend was a 
top supermodel who, every few months, would find out where he was, fly out 
there, and then (I’m guessing here) have him washed and sent up to her hotel 
room.
If the rhino ambled along in a genial way, then it was Tom inside. Tom was a 
tall, Wodehousian man with exactly the wrong complexion for Africa. He had the 
amiable air of a member of the landed gentry, and when I asked him where he 
lived he said, in a vague kind of way, “Shropshire.”
If the rhino bustled along busily, it was Todd inside. Todd was not a mad 
Englishman because he was Welsh. He was in charge of the rhino costumes, had 
worn them originally in the opera for which they had been designed, during which 
he had had to carry enormously heavy sopranos on his back. He told me that he 
had originally wanted to be a vet, but had ended up being a succession of 
animals instead. Any time you see a film or TV show or a commercial that 
features someone dressed up as an animal, it’s probably Todd inside. “I was in 
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” he told me. “Guess,” he added, “which one 
I was.” One evening he showed me pictures of his family. Here was a beautiful 
picture of his wife, another of his young daughter, a sweet picture of his baby 
son, and here was one of Todd himself. Todd was done up, very convincingly, as a 
bright blue centaur.
As Todd/rhino bustled along, suddenly huge crowds of children erupted onto the 
road ahead of us, and hurried toward us, singing and dancing and chanting, 
“Rhino! Rhino! Rhino!” We were quickly surrounded and escorted the last few 
hundred yards to where they had prepared a reception for us in the village 
square. The whole village had turned out to greet us with enormous enthusiasm. 
We sat and watched, panting in the heat and sluicing ourselves down with bottled 
water, as the children of the village put on a display of dancing and choral 
singing that was, frankly, amazing. When I say children, I’m not just talking 
about seven-year-olds, I’m talking about seventeen-year-olds as well. It’s odd 
that we don’t anymore have a comfortable word that covers the whole range. 
“Youngsters”? Patronising. “Kids”? No. “Youths”? Sounds as if they’ve just 
broken into a warehouse and stolen something. Children, then. The children had 
written a song about rhinos, which they then sang for us. In the background 
Giles had quietly taken over from Todd in the rhino suit, and after a while he 
joined in the dancing, lolloping, and swaying around, chasing and playing with 
the children before finally dodging off behind a tree for a quick ciggy. We 
then, with slightly less enthusiasm, sat through a series of speeches that some 
local dignitaries had turned up to deliver. Wherever we went, there were local 
dignitaries keen to be seen to be associated with us.
Gradually the whole point of the rhino suit was beginning to dawn on me. The 
arrival of the rhino and the Rhino Climb team was something that the village had 
been looking forward to and preparing for for months. It was the biggest event 
of the year, a carnival, a festival, a holiday. Being visited by a rhino was 
something that would be remembered by the villagers, and particularly the 
children, for years in a way that being visited by a bunch of English toffs in 
hats would not.
We were then taken to see the village school. Like most of the village, it was 
made of breezeblocks, and was half-finished. The doors and windows were empty 
holes, the furniture was just a few rickety benches and some trestle tables, and 
laid out on these were dozens of pictures of the local wildlife that the 
children had drawn, and which we were to judge, and give prizes for. The prizes 
were Rhino Climb baseball hats, and, whoever won the prizes, we had to make sure 
that every member of the village actually got a hat. And once we have collected 
our sponsorship money, we will be able to complete the building of their 
schoolroom for them.
When at last we left, the children danced along with us for several miles, 
laughing and singing improvised songs—one of them would start, and the others 
would quickly pick it up and join in.
The words seem oddly dated, don’t they? It all sounds rather naïve and 
sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing 
together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is 
snarl and take drugs. But these children/kids/youths, and all the ones we came 
across on our journey, were happy in a way that we in the West are almost 
embarrassed by.
The last of the children drop away from us. Our support Land Rover drives slowly 
past, distributing Cokes and Fantas. Jim, our photographer, is sitting on its 
tailgate, taking pictures of us with his Canon EOS 1, which I’ve been coveting 
ever since I saw it. Keis, our Dutch video cameraman, hoists his lightweight 
Sony three-chip up to his shoulder and pans along the line of walkers. I wonder 
if there’s anywhere in the West that you could find a hundred children to sing 
and dance like that.
The following day is my first stint in the rhino suit. I’m much too big for it, 
and my legs stick out absurdly from the bottom, so that I look like a giant 
prawn tempura. Inside, the heat and the stench of stale sweat and old Dettol are 
almost overpowering until you get into the swing of things. Todd walks along 
beside me, determinedly keeping me engaged in conversation. After a while I 
realise he’s monitoring me to make sure I don’t faint. Todd’s a good man and I 
like him a lot. He takes good care of people, and takes even better care of his 
beloved rhino suit.
I stop for a moment to pour some water into and over my face, and catch a 
glimpse of myself in the window of the Land-Rover. I look unimaginably stupid, 
and I reflect that there is something very odd about this sponsored walking 
business. It’s always undertaken for good causes: cancer research, famine 
relief, wildlife conservation, and so on, but the deal seems to be this: “Okay, 
you are trying to raise funds for this very worthwhile cause, and I can see that 
it’s an important and crucial matter and that lives or indeed whole species are 
at stake and something needs to be done as a matter of urgency, but well . . . I 
don’t know . . . Tell you what—do something really pointless and stupid and 
maybe a bit dangerous, then I’ll give you some money.”
I only spent a week on the walk. I didn’t get to climb Kilimanjaro, though I did 
get to see it. I was very sorry not to get to go up it, though, having seen it, 
I have to say that I wasn't very, very sorry. I did get to see one rhino, 
briefly, out of the thousands that used to roam in this area, and I wondered if 
it had any sense at all that all was not right with its world. Human beings have 
been on this planet for a million years or so, and in that time we have faced 
all sorts of threats to our survival: famine, plague, warfare, AIDS. 
Rhinoceroses have been here for 40 million years, and just one threat has 
brought them to the brink of extinction: human beings. We are not the only 
species to have caused devastation to the rest of the world and it must be said 
in our favour that we are the only one that has become aware of the consequences 
of its behaviour and tried to do something about it. However, I reflect as I 
shift the costume back into a comfortable walking posture and squint forward 
over its bobbing plastic horn, we do go about it in some odd ways.
Esquire, MARCH 1995

For Children Only
You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite 
a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, 
whereas a fried egg comes out of a hen. Like most things, of course, it isn’t 
quite that simple. The fried egg isn’t properly a fried egg till it’s been put 
in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn’t do to a Friday, of 
course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, 
if you like, or on a cooker. It’s all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of 
sense if you think about it for a while.
It’s also good to know the difference between a lizard and a blizzard. This is 
quite an easy one. Though the two things sound very much alike, you find them in 
such very different parts of the world that it is a very simple matter to tell 
them apart. If you are somewhere inside the Arctic circle then what you are 
looking at is probably a blizzard, whereas if you are in a hot and dry place 
like Madagascar or Mexico, it’s more likely to be a lizard.
This animal is a lemur. There are lots of different kinds of lemurs, and they 
nearly all live in Madagascar. Madagascar is an island—a very large island: 
much, much larger than your hat, but not as large as the moon.
The moon is much larger than it appears to be. This is worth remembering because 
next time you are looking at the moon you can say in a deep and mysterious 
voice, “The moon is much larger than it appears to be,” and people will know 
that you are a wise person who has thought about this a lot.
This particular kind of lemur is called a ring-tailed lemur. Nobody knows why it 
is called this, and generations of scientists have been baffled by it. One day a 
very wise person indeed will probably work out why it is called a ring-tailed 
lemur. If this person is exceedingly wise, then he or she will only tell very 
close friends, in secret, because otherwise everybody will know it, and then 
nobody will realise how wise the first person to know it really was.
Here are two more things you should know the difference between: road and woad. 
One is a thing that you drive along in a car, or on a bicycle, and the other is 
a kind of blue body paint that British people used to wear thousands of years 
ago instead of clothes. Usually it’s quite easy to tell these two apart, but if 
you find it at all difficult to say your r’s properly, it can lead to terrible 
confusion: imagine trying to ride a bicycle on a small patch of blue paint, or 
having to dig up an entire street just to have something to wear if you fancy 
spending the evening with some Druids.
Druids used to live thousands of years ago. They used to wear long white robes 
and had very strong opinions about what a wonderful thing the sun was. Do you 
know what an opinion is? I expect someone in your family has probably got one, 
so you could ask them to tell you about it. Asking people about their opinions 
is a very good way of making friends. Telling them about your own opinions can 
also work, but not always quite as well.
Nowadays most people know what a wonderful thing the sun is, so there aren’t 
many Druids around anymore, but there are still a few just in case it slips our 
mind from time to time. If you find someone who has a long white robe and talks 
about the sun a lot, then you might have found a Druid. If he turns out to be 
about two thousand years old, then that’s a sure sign.
If the person you’ve found has got a slightly shorter white coat, with buttons 
up the front, then it may be that he is an astronomer and not a Druid. If he is 
an astronomer, then one of the things you could ask him is how far away the sun 
is. The answer will probably startle you a lot. If it doesn’t, then tell him 
from me that he hasn’t explained it very well. After he’s told you how far away 
the sun is, ask him how far away some of the stars are. That will really 
surprise you. If you can’t find an astronomer yourself, then ask your parents to 
find one for you. They don’t all wear white coats, which is one of the things 
that sometimes make them hard to spot. Some of them wear jeans or even suits.
When we say that something is startling, we mean that it surprises us a very 
great deal. When we say that something is a starling, we mean that it is a type 
of migratory bird. “Bird” is a word we use quite often, which is why it’s such 
an easy word to say. Most of the words we use often, like house and car and 
tree, are easy to say. Migratory is a word we don’t use nearly so much, and 
saying it can sometimes make you feel as if your teeth are stuck together with 
toffee. If birds were called “migratories” rather than “birds,” we probably 
wouldn’t talk about them nearly so much. We’d all say, “Look, there’s a dog!” or 
“There’s a cat!” but if a migratory went by, we’d probably just say, “Is it 
teatime yet?” and not even mention it, however nifty it looked. But migratory 
doesn’t mean that something is stuck together with toffee, however much it 
sounds like it. It means that something spends part of the year in one country 
and part of it in another.

Brandenburg 5
Whatever new extremities of discovery or understanding we reach, we always seem 
to find the footsteps of Bach there already. When we see images of the strange 
mathematical beasts lurking at the heart of the natural world—fractal 
landscapes, the infinitely unfolding paisley whorls of the Mandelbrot Set, the 
Fibonacci series, which describes the pattern of leaves growing on the stem of a 
plant, the Strange Attractors that beat at the heart of chaos—it is always the 
dizzying, complex spirals of Bach that come to mind.
Some people say that the mathematical complexity of Bach renders it unemotional. 
I think the opposite is true. As I listen to the interplay of parts in a piece 
of Bach polyphony, each individual strand of music gathers hold of a different 
feeling in my mind, and takes them on simultaneous interweaving roller coasters 
of emotion. One part may be quietly singing to itself, another on an 
exhilarating rampage, another is sobbing in the corner, another dancing. 
Arguments break out, laughter, rage. Peace is restored. The parts can be utterly 
different, yet all belong indivisibly together. It’s as emotionally complex as a 
family.
And now, as we discover that each individual mind is a family of different 
parts, all working separately but together to create the fleeting shimmers we 
call consciousness, it seems that, once again, Bach was there before us.
When you listen to the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, you don’t need a musicologist 
to tell you that something new and different is happening. Even two and three 
quarter centuries after it actually was new, you can hear the unmistakable 
thrumming energy of a master at the height of his powers doing something wild 
and daring with absolute self-confidence. When Bach wrote it, he put himself at 
the harpsichord instead of the viola he more usually played in ensembles. It was 
at a happy, productive time of his life when he was at last surrounded by some 
good musicians. The harpsichord traditionally played a supporting role in this 
kind of group, but not this time. Bach let rip.
As you listen to the first movement, you hear something strange, new, and 
terrifying giving birth to itself. Or maybe it’s a giant engine, or even a great 
horse being prepared for a Herculean task, surrounded by (you can’t help 
jumbling metaphors when language tries to keep up with music) a flotilla of 
helpers fussing around it. You hear it ticking over, trotting, having a little 
canter here and there, getting a bit frisky, and then taking a trial run as its 
helpers encourage it onward, keening with bated breath. It hauls itself back in 
again, does another quick circuit . . . and then the other instruments fall 
silent. It stands free and alone, pawing at the ground, breathing deeply, 
gathering its strength, trotting forward . . .
And then it makes its move—running . . . hurtling . . . flying . . . climbing . 
. . clambering . . . pushing . . . panting . . . twisting . . . thrashing . . . 
pounding at the ground . . . pounding . . . pounding . . . suddenly breaking 
away, running onward desperately, and then, with one last little unexpected step 
up in the bass, it’s home and free—the main tune charges in triumphantly and 
it’s all over bar the weeping and dancing (i.e., the second and third 
movements).
The familiarity of the Brandenburgs should not blind us their magnitude. I’m 
convinced that Bach is the greatest genius who ever walked among us, and the 
Brandenburgs are what he wrote when he was happy.
—Penguin Classics Vol. 27: Bach—
Brandenburg Concertos 5 & 6,
Violin Concerto in A Minor (English
Chamber Orchestra, conducted by
Benjamin Britten)



THE
UNIVERSE



Frank the Vandal
The Macintosh came out five years ago, and I seem to have had the builders in my 
house for almost that long. Someone asked me the other day what they were doing, 
and I explained that I had been trying to pluck up the courage to ask them that 
myself.
Things are rather complicated by the fact that one of them is an electrician 
called Frank the Vandal. That is, his friends, if he has any that aren’t in 
hospital, call him Frank, and I call him Frank the Vandal because every time he 
needs to get at any bit of wiring, he tends to hack his way through anything 
else that’s in the way to get at it—plasterwork, woodwork, plumbing, telephone 
lines, furniture, even other bits of wiring that he’s put in himself on previous 
raids. He is, I am assured, very good as an electrician, though I think he is 
maybe not very good as a human being. But I’m digressing here from the point I 
was trying to make, and have rather lost the thread because Frank just cut the 
power off since I did the last save. So, where was I? Ah yes.
The house was virtually a complete wreck when I bought it. Not quite as much a 
wreck as it is when Frank’s been here, but nevertheless, it was pretty much an 
empty shell into which walls, floors, plumbing, and so on had to be put. When 
the walls have to be built, an expert (or so I’m told—not so sure about that 
myself, but in principle an expert) bricklayer comes into the house and builds 
them. I need floors and stairs and cupboards and things, so a carpenter, 
whistling a merry carpenter’s tune, comes round and plies his trade. Then a 
plumber comes round and dittoes. Then Frank the Vandal comes round to wrench 
some wiring into place, and of course the carpenter and plumber and so on have 
to come round again and make extensive repairs. I’m going to have to drop the 
subject of Frank because he’s not a part of the analogy I am by slow degrees 
attempting elegantly to construct. It’s just that he preys on my mind a bit at 
the moment and it’s difficult not to sit here feeling nervous while he’s in the 
house. So forget Frank. You’re lucky. You can.
Now the point is this. The house is here. Building this house is the purpose of 
the whole exercise. If I want anything done in it, I pick up the phone (assuming 
Frank hasn’t hacked through the line trying to get at a light switch) and 
someone comes round to the house and does it.
If I want to have some cupboards installed, I don’t have to do the following: I 
don’t have to have the house completely dismantled, shipped up to Birmingham 
where the carpenter is, put together again in a way that a carpenter 
understands, then have the carpenter work on it, and then have the whole thing 
dismantled again, shipped back down to Islington, and put together again so that 
it works as a house that I can live in.
So why do I have to do that with my computer? Let me put that another way so 
that it makes sense. Why, when I’m working in a document in one word processor, 
do I keep on finding that if I want to do something else to the document, I have 
virtually to dismantle the document and ship it over to another word processor 
that has a feature I need that the first one doesn’t? (Why don’t I just use the 
second word processor? Well, because it doesn’t have other features that the 
first one does, of course.) Or, if I want to put a picture in it, why do I have 
to go off to another program entirely and do the picture there, and then go 
through all the mind-numbing palaver of discovering that for some reason the WP 
I’m using doesn’t know how handle graphics in that particular format, or claims 
that it does, but then just goes all black and sulky or makes the machine go 
bing when I actually ask it to. In the end I have to paste all the various bits 
into PageMaker, which then refuses to print for some reason. I know that 
MultiFinder has made all this a bit easier, but it’s really just the equivalent 
of making Birmingham easier to get to, if you follow me.
I don’t want to know about PICT files. I don’t want to know about TIFF files (I 
don’t. They give me the willies.) I don’t want to have to worry about what file 
type to ask MacWrite II to save my work in so that I can get Nisus to read it 
and run one of its interminable macros over it. I’m a Mac user, for heaven’s 
sake. This is meant to be easy.
The Mac started out as a wonderfully simple and elegant idea (give them so 
little memory that they won’t be able to do anything anyway), and it’s time that 
that degree of simplicity could be brought to bear on the much, much more 
powerful and complex system that the Mac has now become.
What I want to be able to do is this:
 
1. Turn on the machine.
2. Work.
3. Have a bit of fun provided I’ve done enough of 2, which is rarely, but that’s 
another issue.
 
When I say “work,” I mean I want to be able to start typing on the screen, and 
if I feel like putting in a drawing, I draw on the screen. Or I bring something 
from my scanner onto the screen, or I send something from my screen to someone 
else. Or I get my Mac to play the tune I’ve just written on the screen on a 
synthesiser. Or, well, the list obviously is endless. And if I need any 
particular tool to enable me to do anything complicated, I simply ask for it. 
And I mean simply. I should never have to put away the thing I’m working on 
unless I’ve actually finished it (fat chance, say my publishers) or want to do 
something else entirely.
What I’m talking about is the death of the “application.” I don’t mean just when 
they “unexpectedly” quit, I mean it’s time we simply got rid of them. And 
getting hold of the tools I need should be as simple as pasting a button into 
HyperCard.
Ah! HyperCard!
I know it’s unfashionable to say this, because a lot of people feel that 
HyperCard simply isn’t powerful enough to do useful work in. It is, after all, a 
first stab at an idea that’s in its infancy. The list of things you can’t do 
with it is almost as long as the list of macros in Nisus. (What are all those 
things? The very act of pulling down the macros menu causes lights to dim all 
over North London.) But it’s a sensationally good idea, and I would dearly love 
to see something like it become the whole working environment for the Mac. You 
want the number crunching power of Excel? Paste it in. You want animation? Paste 
in Director. You don’t like the way Director works? (You must be mad. It’s 
brilliant.) Paste in the bits you like of any other animation tools you find 
lying about.
Or even rewrite it.
If it’s properly written in object-oriented code, it should be as easy as 
writing HyperTalk. (All right. You can’t write HyperTalk. It should be easier to 
write than HyperTalk. Just point at the bits you like and click.) We should not 
have to be tyrannised by application designers who don’t know the first thing 
about how actual people do their actual work, we should be able to just pick up 
the bits we like and paste them in.
I’ve gone on a bit about electricians. I would now like talk about cupboards. 
One particular cupboard. It’s a cupboard in the corner of my study, and I 
daren’t go into it because I know that if I go into it I will not emerge till 
the end of the afternoon and I will emerge from it a sad and embittered man who 
has done battle with a seething black serpentine monster and lost. The seething 
black serpentine monster is a three-foot-high pile of cables, and it both taunts 
me and haunts me. It taunts me because it knows that whatever cable it is that I 
want at any particular moment to connect one particular arcane device to another 
particular arcane device is not to be found anywhere in its tangled entrails, 
and it haunts me because I know it’s right.
I hate cables. They hate me too, because they know that one day I will simply be 
able to go into that cupboard with a flamethrower and get rid of the lot of 
them. In the meantime they are determined to extract from me the last ounce of 
frustrated misery that they can. We do not need the bastards. We shouldn’t need 
the bastards.
Take my current situation as an example. In order to be safe from Frank the 
Vandal, I have transferred this article onto my portable Mac (I know, I know, 
you hate me. Listen. We’ll all have one in the end. They’ll bring the price 
down, trust me. Or rather, don’t trust me, trust Apple. Well, yes, I see your 
point. Please can I get back to what I was saying anyway?) and I have taken the 
additional precaution of taking it round to a friend’s house which is entirely 
electrically isolated from anything that Frank may be up to.
When I get back home with the finished piece, I can either copy it onto a floppy 
disk, assuming I can find one under the debris of half-finished chapters on my 
desk, then put that into my main Mac and print it (again assuming that Frank 
hasn’t been near my AppleTalk network with his chainsaw). Or I can try to do 
battle with the monster in the cupboard till I find another AppleTalk connector 
somewhere in its innards. Or I can crawl around under my desk and disconnect 
AppleTalk from the IIx and connect it to the portable. Or . . . you get the 
picture, this is ridiculous. Dickens didn’t have to crawl around under his desk 
trying to match plugs. You look at the sheer yardage of Dickens’s output on a 
shelf and you know he never had to match plugs.
All I want to do is print from my portable. (Poor baby.) That isn’t all I want, 
in fact. I want to be able regularly to transfer my address book and diary 
stacks backward and forward between my portable and my IIx. And all my current 
half-finished chapters. And anything else I’m tinkering with, which is the 
reason why my half-finished chapters are half-finished! In other words, I want 
my portable to appear on the desktop of my IIx. I don’t want to have to do 
battle with cupboard monsters and then mess about with TOPS every time I want 
that to happen. I’ll tell you all I want to have to do in order to ge my 
portable to appear on the Desktop of my IIx.
I just want to carry it into the same room.
Bang. There it is. It’s on the Desktop.
This is Infra-Red talk. Or maybe it’s microwave talk. I don’t really care any 
more than I want to care about PICTs and and RTFs and SYLKs and all the other 
acronyms, which merely say, “We’ve got a complicated problem, so here’s a 
complicated answer to it.”
Let me make one thing clear. I adore my Macintosh, or rather my family of 
however many Macintoshes it is that I’ve recklessly accumulated over the years. 
I’ve adored it since I first saw one at Infocom’s offices in Boston in 1983. The 
thing that has kept me enthralled and hypnotised by it in all that time is the 
perception that lies at the heart of its design, which is this: “There is no 
problem so complicated that you can’t find a very simple answer to it if you 
look at it the right way.” Or, to put it another way, “The future of computer 
power is pure simplicity.” So my two major wishes for the 1990s are that the 
Macintosh systems designers get back to that future, and that Frank the Vandal 
gets out of my house.
MacUser magazine, 1989

Build It and We Will Come
I remember the first time I ever saw a personal computer. It was at Lasky’s, on 
the Tottenham Court Road, and it was called a Commodore PET. It was quite a 
large pyramid shape, with a screen at the top about the size of a chocolate bar. 
I prowled around it for a while, fascinated. But it was no good. I couldn’t for 
the life of me see any way in which a computer could be of any use in the life 
or work of a writer. However, I did feel the first tiniest inklings of a feeling 
that would go on to give a whole new meaning to the words “disposable income.”
The reason I couldn’t imagine what use it would be to me was that I had a very 
limited idea of what a computer actually was—as did we all. I thought it was a 
kind of elaborate adding machine. And that is exactly how “personal” computers 
(a misleading term as applied to almost any machine we’ve seen so far) were for 
a while developed—as super adding machines with a long feature list.
Then, as our ability to manipulate numbers with these machines became more 
sophisticated, we wondered what might happen if we made the numbers stand for 
something else, like for instance the letters of the alphabet.
Bingo! An extraordinary, world-changing breakthrough! We realised we had been 
myopically shortsighted to think this thing was just an adding machine. It was 
something far more exciting. It was a typewriter!
So we began to develop it as a super typewriter. With a long and increasingly 
incomprehensible feature list. Users of Microsoft Word will know what I’m 
talking about.
The next breakthrough came when we started to make these numbers, which were now 
flying round inside these machines at insane speeds, stand for the picture 
elements of a graphic display. Pixels.
Aha! we thought. This machine turns out to be much more exciting even than a 
typewriter. It’s a television! With a typewriter stuck in front of it!
And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened 
form—www—takes three time longer to say than what it’s short for) and we have 
yet another exciting new model. It’s a brochure. A huge, all-singing, 
all-dancing, hopping, beeping, flash-ridden brochure.
Of course, the computer isn’t any of these things. These are all things we were 
previously familiar with from the real world which we have modelled in the 
computer so that we can use the damn thing.
Which should tell us something interesting.
The computer is actually a modelling device.
Once we see that, we ought to realise that we can model anything in it. Not just 
things we are used to doing in the real world, but the things the real world 
actually prevents us from doing.
What does a brochure prevent us from doing?
Well, first of all its job is to persuade people to buy what you have to sell, 
and do it by being as glossy and seductive as possible and only telling people 
what you want them to know. You can’t interrogate a brochure. Most corporate 
websites are like that. Take BMW, for instance. Its Web site is gorgeous and 
whizzy and it won’t answer your questions. It won’t let you find out what other 
people’s experience of owning BMWs is like, what shortcomings any particular 
model might or might not have, how reliable they are, what they cost to run, 
what they’re like in the wet, or anything like that. In other words, anything 
you might actually want to know. You can e-mail them, but your question or their 
answer—or anybody else’s answer—will not appear on the site. Of course, there 
are plenty of Web sites where people do share exactly that kind of information, 
and they’re only a few clicks away, but you won’t find a word about them on 
BMW’s site. In fact, if you want proper, grown-up information about BMWs, the 
last place you’ll find it is at www.bmw.com. It’s a brochure.
Same with British Airways. It’ll tell you anything you like about British 
Airways flights except who else is flying those routes. So if you want to see 
what the choice is, you go instead to one of the scores of other sites that will 
tell you. Which is bad news for British Airways because they never get to find 
out what you were actually looking for, or how what they were offering stacked 
up against the competition. And because that is very valuable information, they 
have to send out teams of people with clipboards to try to find out, despite the 
fact that everybody lies to people with clipboards.
The people who have got this spectacularly right so far are the guys at Amazon. 
You go to their site because it’s awash with shared information. The more 
information there is, the more people go there, and the more people go there, 
the more information they generate, and the more books Amazon sells. Of course, 
they are not afraid of open debate because, unlike BMW, they are not responsible 
for the product they sell. It will take BMW and British Airways a long time and 
a big deep breath to realise that they are part of the community they sell to.
But even Amazon has only got part of the picture. Like real-world shops, they 
can only record the sales they actually make. What about the sales they don’t 
make and don’t know that they haven’t made because they haven’t made them? I 
went on to Amazon the other day because I wanted to order the 1968 Zeffirelli 
Romeo and Juliet on DVD. Turns out it doesn’t exist. I could buy it on VHS, but 
I don’t want it on VHS. So the whole transaction was null. There was no way of 
recording that I came in looking to buy something, and that the something I 
wanted to buy wasn’t there. I only got to select (or not select} from what 
happened to be available, I didn’t get to be able to say what I actually wanted. 
So I wrote to them about it and guess what, now you can. They’re very smart like 
that. They are now able to supply the studios with information about what there 
is actually demand for out there. And on the basis of another—not entirely 
disinterested—suggestion of mine they are going to start a running poll on which 
books people would most like to see turned into movies. This is information that 
no one has ever been able to collect before.
But let us take this one stage further. How often have you looked through a 
brochure or a catalogue and thought, “I wish somebody would write a book about . 
. .” or “If only somebody made a bicycle with a . . .” Or “Why doesn’t somebody 
make a screwdriver that . . .” or “Why don’t they make that in blue?” A brochure 
can’t answer you, but the Web can.
What is the thing you’d really love to have, if only someone had the sense to 
make one? Suggestions, please, to www.h2g2.com.
— The Independent on Sunday,
NOVEMBER 1999
 
*       *       *
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
 
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is 
just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new 
and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of 
things.

Interview, American Atheists
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Mr. Adams, you have been described as a “radical Atheist.” Is 
this accurate?
DNA: Yes. I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If 
you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean 
‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not 
believe that there is a god—in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a 
subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. 
It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really 
mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold 
seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view 
expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague, 
wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague, wishy-washy Agnosticism—both of which I think 
betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.
People will then often say, “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just 
in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I 
usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it 
turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it 
further turned out that this kind of legalistic, 
cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, 
then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)
Other people will ask how I can possibly claim to know. Isn’t 
belief-that-there-is-not-a-god as irrational, arrogant, etc., as 
belief-that-there-is-a-god? To which I say no for several reasons. First of all 
I do not believe-that-there-is-not-a-god. I don’t see what belief has got to do 
with it. I believe or don’t believe my four-year-old daughter when she tells me 
that she didn’t make that mess on the floor. I believe in justice and fair play 
(though I don’t know exactly how we achieve them, other than by continually 
trying against all possible odds of success). I also believe that England should 
enter the European Monetary Union. I am not remotely enough of an economist to 
argue the issue vigorously with someone who is, but what little I do know, 
reinforced with a hefty dollop of gut feeling, strongly suggests to me that it’s 
the right course. I could very easily turn out to be wrong, and I know that. 
These seem to me to be legitimate uses for the word believe. As a carapace for 
the protection of irrational notions from legitimate questions, however, I think 
that the word has a lot of mischief to answer for. So, I do not 
believe-that-there-is-no-god. I am, however, convinced that there is no god, 
which is a totally different stance and takes me on to my second reason.
I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is 
automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is 
that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me, “Well, you haven’t been 
there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of 
Norwegian beaver cheese is equally valid”—then I can’t even be bothered to 
argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as 
in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used 
to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God 
is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that 
would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that 
being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of 
view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness 
at all.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: How long have you been a nonbeliever, and what brought you to 
that realization?
DNA: Well, it’s a rather corny story. As a teenager I was a committed Christian. 
It was in my background. I used to work for the school chapel, in fact. Then one 
day when I was about eighteen I was walking down the street when I heard a 
street evangelist and, dutifully, stopped to listen. As I listened it began to 
be borne in on me that he was talking complete nonsense, and that I had better 
have a bit of a think about it.
I’ve put that a bit glibly. When I say I realized he was talking nonsense, what 
I mean is this. In the years I’d spent learning history, physics, Latin, math, 
I’d learnt (the hard way) something about standards of argument, standards of 
proof, standards of logic, etc. In fact we had just been learning to spot the 
different types of logical fallacy, and it suddenly became apparent to me that 
these standards simply didn’t seem to apply in religious matters. In religious 
education we were asked to listen respectfully to arguments that, if they had 
been put forward in support of a view of, say, why the Corn Laws came to be 
abolished when they were, would have been laughed at as silly and childish 
and—in terms of logic and proof—just plain wrong. Why was this?
Well, in history, even though the understanding of events, of cause and effect, 
is a matter of interpretation, and even though interpretation is in many ways a 
matter of opinion, nevertheless those opinions and interpretations are honed to 
within an inch of their lives in the withering crossfire of argument and 
counterargument, and those that are still standing are then subject to a whole 
new round of challenges of fact and logic from the next generation of 
historians—and so on. All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal 
more robust, sophisticated and well-supported in logic and argument than others.
So I was already familiar with and (I’m afraid) accepting the view that you 
couldn’t apply the logic of physics to religion that they were dealing with 
different types of “truth.” (I now think this is baloney, but to continue . . .) 
What astonished me, however, was the realization that the arguments in favor of 
religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the robust arguments of 
something as interpretive and opinionated as history. In fact they were 
embarrassingly childish. They were never subject to the kind of outright 
challenge which was the normal stock in trade of any other area of intellectual 
endeavor whatsoever. Why not? Because they wouldn’t stand up to it. So I became 
an Agnostic. And I thought and thought and thought. But I just did not have 
enough to go on, so I didn’t really come to any resolution. I was extremely 
doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn’t know enough about anything to 
have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the 
universe, and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I kept 
reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon 
evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins’s books The 
Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second 
reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such 
stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and 
baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people 
talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. 
I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: You allude to your Atheism in your speech to your fans (“. . 
. that was one of the few times I actually believed in god”). Is your Atheism 
common knowledge among your fans, friends, and coworkers? Are many people in 
your circle of friends and co-workers Atheists as well?
DNA: This is a slightly puzzling question to me, and I think there is a cultural 
difference involved. In England there is no big deal about being an Atheist. 
There’s just a slight twinge of discomfort about people strongly expressing a 
particular point of view when maybe a detached wishy-washiness might be felt to 
be more appropriate—hence a preference for Agnosticism over Atheism. And making 
the move from Agnosticism to Atheism takes, I think, much more commitment to 
intellectual effort than most people are ready to put in. But there’s no big 
deal about it. A number of the people I know and meet are scientists, and in 
those circles Atheism is the norm. I would guess that most people I know 
otherwise are Agnostics, and quite a few are Atheists. If I was to try and look 
amongst my friends, family, and colleagues for people who believed there was a 
god I’d probably be looking amongst the older and (to be perfectly frank) less 
well-educated ones. There are one or two exceptions. (I nearly put, by habit, 
“honorable exceptions,” but I don’t really think that.)
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: How often have fans, friends, or co-workers tried to “save” 
you from Atheism?
DNA: Absolutely never. We just don’t have that kind of fundamentalism in 
England. Well, maybe that’s not absolutely true. But (and I’m going to be 
horribly arrogant here) I guess I just tend not to come across such people, just 
as I tend not to come across people who watch daytime soaps or read the National 
Enquirer. And how do you usually respond? I wouldn’t bother.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life 
because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? 
How often does this happen?
DNA: Not even remotely. It’s an inconceivable idea.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: There are quite a few lighthearted references to god and 
religion in your books (“. . . two thousand years after some guy got nailed to a 
tree”). How has your Atheism influenced your writing? Where (in which characters 
or situations) are your personal religious thoughts most accurately reflected?
DNA: I am fascinated by religion. (That’s a completely different thing from 
believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. 
What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep 
going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I’ve 
thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill 
over into my writing.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: What message would you like to send to your Atheist fans?
DNA: Hello! How are you?
From The American Atheist 37, No. 1
(interview conducted by David Silverman)
 
*       *       *
What are the benefits of speaking to your fans via e-mail?
 
It’s quicker, easier, and involves less licking.

Predicting the Future
Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game. But increasingly it’s a game we 
all have to play because the world is changing so fast and we need to have some 
sort of idea of what the future’s actually going to be like because we are going 
to have to live there, probably next week.
Oddly, the industry that is the primary engine of this incredible pace of 
change—the computer industry—turns out to be rather bad at predicting the future 
itself. There are two thing in particular that it failed to foresee: one was the 
coming of the Internet, which, in an astonishingly short time, has become what 
the computer industry is now all about; the other was the fact that the century 
would end.
So, as we stand on the brink of a new millennium, peering up at the shiny cliff 
face of change that confronts us, like Kubrick apes gibbering in front of the 
great black monolith, how can we possibly hope to guess what’s to come? 
Molecular computers, quantum computers—what can we dare to say about them? We 
were wrong about trains, we were wrong about planes, we were wrong about radio, 
we were wrong about phones, we wrong about . . . well, for a voluminous list of 
the things have been wrong about, you could do worse than dig out a copy of a 
book called The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky.
It’s a compendium of authoritative predictions made in the past that turned out 
to be wonderfully wrong, usually almost immediately. You know the kind of thing. 
Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale University, said on October 17, 
1929, that “stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” 
Then there was the Decca record executive who said of the Beatles in 1962, “We 
don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out,” and so on. Ah, 
here’s another one: “Bill Clinton will lose to any Republican who doesn’t drool 
on stage,” said The Wall Street Journal, in 1995. It’s a very fat book you can 
read happily in the loo for hours.
The odd thing is that we don’t get any better at it. We smile indulgently when 
we hear that Lord Kelvin said in 1897, “Radio has no future.” But it’s more 
surprising to discover that Ken Olsen, the president of the Digital Equipment 
Corporation, said in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have a 
computer in their home.” Even Bill Gates, who specifically set out to prove him 
completely and utterly wrong, famously said that he couldn’t conceive of anybody 
needing more than 640k of memory in their computers. Try running Word in even 
twenty times that.
It would be interesting to keep a running log of predictions and see if we can 
spot the absolute corkers when they are still just pert little buds. One such 
that I spotted recently was a statement made in February by a Mr. Wayne Leuck, 
vice-president of engineering at USWest, the American phone company. Arguing 
against the deployment of high-speed wireless data connections, he said, 
“Granted, you could use it in your car going sixty miles an hour, but I don’t 
think too many people are going to be doing that.” Just watch. That’s a 
statement that will come back to haunt him. Satellite navigation. Wireless 
Internet. As soon as we start mapping physical location back into shared 
information space, we will trigger yet another explosive growth in Internet 
applications.
At least—that’s what I predict. I could, of course, be wildly wrong. Stewart 
Brand, in his excellent book The Clock of the Long Now, proposes keeping a 
record of society’s predictions and arguments in a ten-thousand-year library, 
but it would also be interesting to see how things work out in the short term. 
At the beginning of each new year the media tend to be full of predictions of 
what is going to happen over the course of the following year. Two days later, 
of course, they’re forgotten and we never get to test them. So I’d like to 
invite readers to submit their own predictions—or any others they come across in 
print—of what is going to happen in the next five years, and when. Will we set 
off to Mars? Will we get peace in Ireland or the Middle East? Will the 
e-commerce bubble burst?
We’ll put them up on the Web, where they will stay for that whole period, so we 
can track them against what actually happens. Predicting the future is a mug’s 
game, but any game is improved when you can actually keep the score.
The Independent on Sunday,
NOVEMBER 1999
 
*       *       *
There’s now a new generation of smarter office chair beginning to arrive that 
makes a virtue of doing away with all the knobs and levers. All the springing 
and bracing we learned about is still there, but it adjusts to your posture and 
movement automatically, without your having to tell it how to. All right, here 
is a prediction for you: when we have software that works like that, the world 
will truly be a better and happier place.

The Little Computer That Could
My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and 
Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it 
could be done.
This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is 
the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms 
and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees. However, this is not 
relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the 
Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and 
doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current 
situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.
I’m a writer and I’m feeling like death, as you would too, if you’d just flown 
into Grand Rapids, Michigan, at some ungodly hour of the morning only to 
discover that you can’t get into your hotel room for another three hours. In 
fact, it’s enough just to have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you are a 
native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, then please assume that I am just kidding. 
Anyone else will surely realise that I am not.
Having nowhere else to go, I am standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece. 
Well, a kind of mantelpiece. I don’t know what it is, in fact. It’s made of 
brass and some kind of plastic and was probably drawn in by the architect after 
a nasty night on the town. That reminds me of another favourite piece of 
information: there is a large kink in the Trans-Siberian Railway because when 
the tsar (I don’t know which tsar it was because I am not in my study at home, 
I’m leaning against something shamefully ugly in Michigan and there are no 
books) decreed that the Trans-Siberian railway should be built, he drew a line 
on a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it.
I’m writing this article leaning against some nameless architectural mistake, 
and I am not writing the article on a Mac. I would, but my PowerBook is fresh 
out of power (funny notion, to name the thing after its only major shortcoming; 
it’s rather like Greenland in that respect). I have the power cable with me but 
I can’t plug it in anywhere. Though the power cable very cleverly has a 
universal power supply, it doesn’t have a universal plug. It has a large, 
clunky, British-style three-pin plug built right into it, which means that if 
you forget to buy an adapter plug before you leave Heathrow, you are completely 
and utterly screwed. You cannot buy an adapter for British plugs outside 
Britain. I know. I tried that when I ran into a similar problem with the old Mac 
Portable. (I am not going to make any Mac Portable jokes. Apple made quite 
enough of them to be getting on with. Damn. I said I wasn’t going to do that.) 
In the end I had to buy a U.S. power cable. Or rather, I had to try to buy one. 
Couldn’t be done. They only came with new Mac Portables. I heaved a dead Mac 
Portable around with me for ten days and occasionally ate my sandwiches off it 
because it was slightly lighter than carrying a table. (Damn, there goes another 
one.)
I don’t have the same problem with my PowerBook, though I am not totally stupid. 
I brought an adapter with me this time. However, I am slightly stupid because 
it’s in my suitcase, which I’ve just checked in with the bellman while I wait 
three hours for my room to be ready.
So what am I doing? Handwriting? You must be joking. After ten years of word 
processing, I can’t even do handwriting anymore. I know I ought to be able to: 
handwriting is supposed to be one of those things like using chopsticks: once 
you get the hang of it, it never really deserts you. The thing is that I’ve had 
much more practice with chopsticks than with pens, so no, I’m not handwriting. 
I’m not talking into one of those horrible little Dictaphones, either, that keep 
on recording relentlessly while you’re desperately trying to think of something 
to say. Pressing the off switch is the thing that turns your brain back on.
No. What I’m doing is sitting on a chair somewhere writing this on a new Psion 
Series 3a palmtop computer. I got one at the duty-free shop at Heathrow, just 
for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, and I have to say it’s good. It works.
May I just say one thing about duty-free shops before I go on to talk about the 
Psion? It’s not that things aren’t cheaper in the duty-free shops. They are. 
Infinitesimally. You do save a very small amount of money if you shop at them. 
Of course you can then lose a very hefty sum of money in fines if you fail to 
realise that you have to declare anything you’ve bought duty-free to customs 
when you come back into the country. The stuff is only really duty-free if you 
intend to spend the rest of your life on an aeroplane. So what happens when you 
buy stuff at the duty-free shop for very slightly less than you would in the 
high street? It means that most of the money saved on duty is going into the 
coffers of the duty-free shops rather than helping to pay for the National 
Health Service (and Trident nuclear submarines). So why did I buy my Psion at 
the duty-free shop? Because I’m a complete idiot, that’s why.
Anyway. Status update. They’ve found me a room. I’ve unpacked my adapter plug. 
My PowerBook is charging, itself up. I’m still not using it, though, because I 
am now lying in the bath. So I’m still using the Psion. I have never ever 
written anything in the bath before. Paper gets damp and steamy, pens won’t 
write upside down, typewriters hurt your tummy, and if you are prepared to use a 
PowerBook in the bath, then I assume that it isn’t your own PowerBook.
So the thing is, it can be done. You can actually write on a palmtop computer, 
which is something I didn’t realise before I had tried to do it on a Sharp 
Wizard, but it wasn’t possible because the keyboard was laid out alphabetically, 
which is hopeless. The principle behind the decision to have an alphabetical 
keyboard is based on a misunderstanding. I believe that the idea is this: not 
everybody knows qwerty (it’s an odd feeling, actually typing qwerty as a word; 
try it and you’ll see what I mean), but everybody knows the alphabet. This is 
true but irrelevant. People know the alphabet as a one-dimensional string, not 
as a two-dimensional array, so you’re going to have to hunt and peck anyway. So 
why not use qwerty and let people who know it have the benefit?
I also tried the larger Sharp Wizard, the 8200, which does have a qwerty 
keyboard, but no word wrap. Can you believe that? Even Etch-a-Sketch has word 
wrap these days.
The other problem with all palmtops is, of course, that the keyboard is too 
small for your fingers. This is a tricky one. You can’t win. If the machine’s 
small enough to go in your pocket it’s too small to type on. Well, I’ve found 
the answer. Forgive me if you knew this already, perhaps I’m the last person in 
the world to find this out. Anyway, the answer is this: you grip the palmtop 
between both hands and you type with your thumbs. Seriously. It works. It feels 
a bit awkward to begin with, and your hands ache a little from using 
unaccustomed muscles, but you get used to it surprisingly quickly. I’ve clocked 
up a the thousand words now.
Now, this raises some interesting questions. (Well, interesting to me. You can 
please yourselves.) What about this input business, then? I am, of course, as 
out of my mind with excitement as the next person about the prospect of voice 
input and pen input, but you know and I know, and anybody who has fooled around 
with a Caere Typist or the like will know that things rarely work as smoothly in 
practice as they do in theory, or at least not yet. Most of the time spent 
wrestling with technologies that don’t quite work yet is just not worth the 
effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us. The days when 
you can say, “Open pod bay number 2, Hal,” and be confident that Hal understands 
that you want to be stranded on the outskirts of Jupiter are still a way away. 
And I suspect that it will be a very long time before I am able to dictate an 
article like this and for the result to be even decipherable, let alone 
accurate. We’ve all seen the old sketch in which a secretary writes down 
absolutely everything the boss says, including the bit where he says, “Don’t 
write this bit down,” or “Cross out that last sentence.” I think there’s going 
to be a lot of stupid-secretary-type grief to go through before we get it 
working smoothly. As for pen input devices, well, as I said above, ten years of 
word processing has meant that my handwriting has deteriorated to the point 
where even I can’t read it, so what chance a computer stands I really don’t 
know. Can I be bothered to tease out the irony involved in all that? No.
So for the moment that leaves us back with the keyboard input, and keyboard 
input, for the moment, means qwerty. But qwerty, as we know, was originally 
designed to slow down typists so the keys wouldn’t jam. It’s deliberately 
inefficient. However, all attempts to replace it with something more efficient, 
like the Dvorak keyboard, have failed. People know qwerty already, and they 
don’t have any pressing incentive to change. Dvorak et al. may be better, but 
qwerty is, or has been till now, good enough. “If it ain’t busted, don’t fix it” 
is a very sound principle and remains so despite the fact that I have slavishly 
ignored it all my life.
I think, though, that we might finally have arrived at point at which there is a 
strong incentive to reinvent the keyboard. Palmtop computers are where all the 
new action is. Apple and Microsoft and everybody are suddenly beginning to get 
revved up about personal digital assistants and stuff, and, having been using 
this Psion Series 3a for a few hours now, so am I. It’s terrific technology, and 
this is just the beginning of that crucial moment at which something stops being 
just an entertaining new toy and starts being something you can seriously use in 
the bath. We’ve all known for years that qwerty isn’t good. I think we’ve now 
got to that important point where it isn’t even good enough. The point where it 
isn’t even good enough. (Yes, this is exact copy typing!) I hope that systems 
designers have not been put off by the failure of the Dvorak keyboard. I hope 
they are carefully studying the way that people hold palmtop computers, where 
their fingers naturally fall and fit and how the whole idea of how a keyboard 
works can be rethought. I would very much like it if my thumb joints were not 
now stiff and aching. I’ve proved it can be done, but, like Branwell Brontë, I’m 
not expecting to do the same trick again tomorrow.
 
*       *       *
We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice 
computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice 
books.

Little Dongly Things
Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things. More of them turned up in 
the post this morning. I’d ordered a new optical disk drive from an American 
mail-order company and, because I live in that strange and remote place called 
“Foreign,” and also because I travel like a pigeon, I was keen to know, when 
ordering it, if it had an international power supply.
An international power supply is the device that means it doesn’t matter what 
country you’re in, or even if you know what country you’re in (more of a problem 
than you might suspect)—you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for 
itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least Microsoft calls it 
that because it hasn’t got it yet. In the Mac world we’ve had it for so long we 
didn’t even think of giving it a name. Nowadays a lot of peripherals come with 
international power supplies as well—but not all. Which is why I asked.
“Yes, it does,” said Scott, the sales assistant.
“You’re sure it has an international power supply?”
“Yes,” repeated Scott. “It has an international power supply.”
“Absolutely sure?”
“Yes.”
This morning it arrived. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t have an 
international power supply. Instead it had a little dongly thing. I have rooms 
full of little dongly things and don’t want any more. Half the little dongly 
things I’ve got, I don’t even know what gizmo they’re for. More importantly, 
half the gizmos I’ve got, I don’t know where their little dongly thing is. Most 
annoyingly, an awful lot of the little dongly things, including the one that 
arrived this morning, are little dongly things that run on 120-volt AC—American 
voltage, which means I can’t use them here in Foreign (state code FN), but I 
have to keep them in case I ever take the gizmo to which they fit—provided I 
know which gizmo it is they fit to—to the U.S.A.
What, you may ask, the hell am I talking about?
The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only 
species of little dongly things with which the microelectronics world is 
infested) are the external power adapters that laptops and palmtops and external 
drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered 
speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the AC supply 
from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts 
DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1,200 milliamps. They 
have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type 
that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these 
different variables together, you end up with a fairly major industry that 
exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things, 
none which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo-pelmanism. The 
usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I 
want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive 
the air from your body.
Now, why is this? Well, there’s one possible theory, which is that just as Xerox 
is really in the business of selling toner cartridges, Sony is really in the 
little dongly power supply business.
Another possible reason is that it is sheer blinding idiocy. It couldn’t 
possibly be that, could it? I mean, could it? It’s hard to imagine that some of 
the mightiest brains on the planet, fueled by some of the finest pizza that 
money can buy, haven’t at some point thought, “Wouldn’t it be easier if we all 
just standardised on one type of DC power supply?” Now, I’m not an electrical 
engineer, so I may be asking for the impossible. Maybe it is a sine qua non of 
the way in which a given optical drive or CD Walkman works that it has to draw 
600 milliamps rather than 500, or have its negative terminal on the tip rather 
than the sleeve, and that it will either whine or fry itself if presented with 
anything faintly different. But I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware 
engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of 
pepperoni, he’d probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo 
(maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I’ve heard such good things about) he’s 
designing work to a standard DC low-power supply.
In fact there already is a kind of rough standard, but it’s rather an odd one. 
Not many people actually smoke in their cars these days, and the aperture in the 
dashboard that used to hold the cigar lighter is now more likely to be powering 
a mobile phone, CD player, fax machine, or, according to a recent and highly 
improbable TV commercial, an instant coffee-making gizmo. Because the socket 
originally had a different purpose, it’s the wrong size and in the wrong place 
for what we now want to do with it, so perhaps it’s time to start adapting it 
for its new job.
The important thing this piece of serendipitous pre-adaptation has given us is a 
possible DC power standard. An arbitrary one, to be sure, but perhaps we should 
probably just be grateful that it was designed by a car mechanic in an afternoon 
and not a computer industry standards committee in a lifetime. Keep the voltage 
level and design a new, small, plug, and you have a new standard.
The immediate advantage of adopting it would be that you would need only one DC 
power adapter! Think of that! Well, not exactly one, you might need a dozen of 
them, but they would all be exactly the same! Just get a box of ’em! They’ll 
just be a commodity item like, um, well, I was going to say lightbulbs, but 
lightbulbs come in all sorts of different wattages and fittings. The great thing 
about having a DC power standard is that it would be much better than 
lightbulbs.
Apart from doing away with endless confusion and inconvenience, the arrival of a 
new standard would encourage all sorts of other new features to emerge. Power 
points in convenient places in cars. DC power points in homes and offices and, 
most important, DC power points in the armrests of airplane seats . . .
I have to own up and say that, much as I love my PowerBook, which now does about 
97.8 percent of what I used to use the lumbering old desktop dinosaurs for, I’ve 
given up trying to use it on planes. Yes, yes, I know that there are sorts of 
power-user strategies you can use to extend your battery life—dimming modes, RAM 
disks, processor-resting, and so on—but the point is that I really can’t be 
bothered. I’m perfectly capable of just reading the in-flight magazine if I want 
to be irritated. However, if there was a DC power supply in my armrest, I would 
actually be able to do some work, or at least fiddle with stuff. I know that the 
airline companies will probably say, “Yes, but if we do that, our aeroplanes 
will fall out of the sky,” but they always say that. I know that sometimes their 
planes do fall out of the sky, but, and here’s the point, not nearly as often as 
the airline companies say they will. I for one would be willing to risk it. In 
the great war against little dongly things, no sacrifice, I think, is too great.
MacUser, SEPTEMBER 1996
 
*       *       *
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. 
How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it 
comes with a manual.

What Have We Got to Lose?
Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to 
leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. The Sony Walkman, for 
instance, added nothing significantly new to the cassette player, it just left 
out the amplifier and speakers, thus creating a whole new way of listening to 
music and a whole new industry. Sony’s new Handycam rather brilliantly leaves 
out the zoom function on the grounds that all a zoom does is cost money, add a 
lot of bulk, and render every amateur video ever made unwatchable. (They might, 
while they’re following this line of thought, consider marketing a record-only 
video player, and video companies might consider releasing movies that are 
actually recorded in fast-forward mode.) The RISC chip works by the brilliant, 
life-enhancing principle of getting on with the easy stuff and leaving all the 
difficult bits for someone else to deal with. (I know it’s a little more 
complicated than that, but you have to admit it’s a damned attractive idea). A 
well-made dry martini works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of 
leaving out the martini.
You also get dramatic advances when you spot that you can leave out part of the 
problem. Algebra, for instance (and hence the whole of computer programming), 
derives from the realisation that you can leave out all the messy, intractable 
numbers. Then there’s the new, improved U.K. directory enquiries service. A 
couple of years or so ago, something radical changed: whe you dialed 192, you 
actually got a civil, helpful answer, usually—and here was the clue—delivered in 
a Scots accent. The whole operation had been rounded up and moved to Aberdeen 
where they had a plentiful supply of civil, helpful people who didn’t have to be 
compensated for living in London. Somebody bright at British Telecom had spotted 
that the location was immaterial—the problem of distance could simply be left 
out of the model (something they have yet to come to terms with in their pricing 
structures). With a little extra cable-laying, it seems to me that they could 
have moved U.K. directory enquiries to St. Helena or the Falklands, thus 
bringing whole new possibilities of employment to areas that were previously 
limited to the things you could do with sheep. The Falklands could, while they 
were about it, put in a bid to run Argentina’s directory enquiry service as 
well, which would give the foreign offices of both countries something to think 
about.
Almost everything to do with the Net involves spotting the things we can now 
leave out of the problem, and location—distance—is one of them. Wandering around 
the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of 
those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of 
the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it. Trying 
to work out all the implications of this is as difficult as it was for early 
filmmakers to work out all the implications of being able to move the camera. 
What else is going to fall out of the model?
Over the last few years I’ve regularly been cornered by nervous publishers or 
broadcasters or journalists or filmmakers and asked about how I think computers 
will affect their various industries. For a long time, most of them were 
desperately hoping for an answer that translated roughly into “not very much.” 
(“People like the smell of books, they like popcorn, they like to see programmes 
at exactly the same moment as their neighbours, they like at least to have lots 
of articles that they’ve no interest in reading,” etc.) But it’s a hard question 
to answer because it’s based on a faulty model. It’s like trying to explain to 
the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the 
Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river 
rules will no longer apply.
Let’s think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a 
river in its own right, but is just a current in the digital ocean. Magazines 
are starting to appear on the Web, but since they are just a number of 
interconnected pages in a world of interconnected pages, the boundaries between 
“magazine” and “not-magazine,” or indeed between “magazine A” and “magazine B” 
are, from the Web browser’s point of view, rather vague. Once we drop the idea 
of discretely bound and sold sheaves of glossily processed wood pulp from the 
model, what do we have left? Anything useful?
From the point of view of readers, it’s useful in much the same way that a paper 
magazine is: it’s a concentration of the cash around the Internet, and that will 
involve readers being billed tiny amounts of money for the opportunity to read 
popular Web pages. Much less than you would, for instance, regularly spend on 
your normal newspapers and magazines because you wouldn’t have to be paying for 
all the trees that have to be pulped, the vans that have to be fueled, and the 
marketing people whose job it is to tell you how brilliant they are. The 
reader’s money goes straight to the writer, with a proportion to the publisher 
of the Web site, and all the wood can stay in the forests, the oil can stay in 
the ground, and all the marketing people can stay out of the Groucho Club and 
let decent folk get to the bar.
Why doesn’t all the money go to the writer, I hear you (and indeed myself) 
asking. Well, maybe it will if he’s happy just to drop his words into the 
digital ocean in the hope that someone out there will find them. But like any 
ocean, the digital one has streams and eddies and currents, and publishers will 
quickly have a role finding good material to draw into those currents where 
readers will naturally be streaming through looking for stuff, which is more or 
less what they do at the moment The difference will lie in the responsiveness of 
the market, the speed with which those streams will shift and surge, and the way 
in which power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing 
something useful rather than just having lunch.
The thing we leave out of the model is, essentially, just a lot of dead wood.
Wired, UK edition; Issue No. 1, 1995

Time Travel
Time travel? I believe there are people regularly travelling back from the 
future and interfering with our lives on a daily basis. The evidence is all 
around us. I’m talking about how every time we make an insurance claim we 
discover that somehow mysteriously the exact thing we’re claiming for is now 
precisely excluded from our policy.

Turncoat
I’m often asked if I’m not a bit of a turncoat. Twenty years (help!) ago in The 
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I made my reputation making fun of science and 
technology: depressed robots, uncooperative lifts, doors with ludicrously 
overdesigned user interfaces (what’s wrong with just pushing them?), and so on. 
Now I seem to have become one of technology’s chief advocates, as is apparent 
from my recent series on Radio 4, The Hitehhiker’s Guide to the Future. (I wish 
we hadn’t ended up with that title, incidentally, but sometimes events have a 
momentum of their own.)
Two things:
First of all, I wonder if we don’t have too much comedy these days. When I was a 
kid I used to hide under the bedclothes with an old radio I’d got from a jumble 
sale, and listen enraptured to Beyond Our Ken, Hancock, The Navy Lark, even the 
Clitheroe Kid, anything that made me laugh. It was like showers and rainbows in 
the desert. Then there was I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and a few short years 
later the full glories of Monty Python. The thing about Python that hit me like 
a thunderbolt, and I really don’t give a toss if this ends up in “Pseud’s 
Corner,” was that comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people 
could express things that simply couldn’t be expressed any other way. From where 
I was sitting in my boarding school in deepest Essex, it was a thrilling beacon 
of light. It’s curious to me that the Pythons came along just as those other 
great igniters of a young imagination, the Beatles, were fading. There was a 
sense of a baton being passed. I think George Harrison once said something 
similar.
But nowadays everybody’s a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity 
announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently anymore, not with sudden 
shock, astonishment, or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly. No more 
rain showers in the desert, just mud and drizzle everywhere, occasionally 
illuminated by the flash of paparazzi.
Creative excitement has gone elsewhere—to science and technology: new ways of 
seeing things, new understandings of the universe, continual new revelations 
about how life works, how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate. So this 
is my second point.
Where, thirty years ago, we used to start up rock bands, we now start up 
start-ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and 
playing with the information we exchange. And when one idea fails, there’s 
another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading out as 
fast as rock albums used to in the sixties.
There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a 
person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself 
years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means 
that things can never be quite the same again. For me it was hearing a stand-up 
comedian make the following observation: “These scientists, eh? They’re so 
stupid! You know those black-box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? And 
you know they’re meant to be indestructible? It’s always the thing that doesn’t 
get smashed? So why don’t they make the planes out of the same stuff?”
The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, couldn’t think 
their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being 
pedantic to feel that the joke didn’t really work because flight recorders are 
made out of titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium rather than 
aluminium, they’d be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place? I 
began to pick away at the joke. Supposing Eric Morecambe had said it? Would it 
be funny then? Well, not quite, because that would have relied on the audience 
seeing that Eric was being dumb—in other words, they would have had to know as a 
matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of titanium and aluminium. 
There was no way of deconstructing the joke (if you think this is obsessive 
behaviour, you should try living with it) that didn’t rely on the teller and the 
audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than 
they did. It sent a chill down my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by 
comedy in the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock 
music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, 
well, ignorant.
My turn toward science came one day in about 1985 when I was walking through a 
forest in Madagascar. My companion on the walk was the zoologist Mark Carwardine 
(with whom I later collaborated on the book Last Chance to See), and I asked 
him, “So come on then, what’s so special about the rain forest that we’re 
supposed to care about it so much?”
And he told me. Took about two minutes. He explained the difference between 
temperate forest and rain forest and how it came to be that the latter produced 
such bewildering diversity of life but was at the same time so terribly fragile. 
I fell silent for a few moments as I began to realise that one simple piece of 
new understanding had just changed the way I saw world. I had just been handed a 
single thread I could now follow into the tangled ball of a bewilderingly 
complex world. For the next few years I hungrily devoured everything I could lay 
my hands on about evolutionary science and realised that nothing I’d ever 
understood about it at school had prepared me the enormity of what was now 
swimming into my view. The thing about evolution is that if it hasn’t turned 
your brain inside out, you haven’t understood it.
Then to my surprise I discovered that it was converging with my growing interest 
in computers. There was nothing particularly profound about that enthusiasm—I 
just unashamedly love playing with gadgets. The connection lies in the 
counterintuitive observation that complex results arise from simple causes, 
iterated many times over. It’s terribly simple to see this happening in a 
computer. Whatever complexities a computer produces—modeling wind turbulence, 
modeling economies or the way light dances in the eye of an imaginary 
dinosaur—it all grows out of simple lines of code that start with adding one and 
one, testing the result, and then doing it again. Being able watch complexity 
blossom out of this primitive simplicity is one of the great marvels of our age, 
greater even than watching man walk on the moon.
It’s much more difficult to see it happening in the case of the evolution of 
life. The time scales are so vast and our perspective so much complicated by the 
fact that it’s ourselves we’re looking at, but our invention of the computer has 
for the first time let us get a real feel for how it works—just as our invention 
of the hydraulic pump first gave us an insight into what the heart was doing and 
how the circulation of the blood worked.
That is also why it’s impossible to divorce pure science from technology: they 
feed and stimulate each other. So the latest software gizmo for transferring an 
mp3 sound file from one computer to another across continents is, when you peer 
into its innards and at the infrastructure that has given rise to it and that 
it, in turn, becomes part of, is, in its way, every bit as interesting as the 
way in which a cell replicates, an idea is formed within a brain, or a beetle 
deep in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest digests its prey. It’s all part 
of the same underlying process that we in turn are part of, it’s where our 
creative energies are being poured, and I’ll happily take it over comedians, 
television, and football any day.
OCTOBER 2000
 
*       *       *
Present somebody with a questionnaire clipboard, and they lie. A friend of mine 
once had a job preparing a questionnaire for people to fill in on the Web. He 
said the information they got back was enormously heartening about the state of 
the world. For instance, did you know that almost 90 percent of the population 
are CEOs of their own companies and earn over a million dollars a year?

Is There an Artificial God?
This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming 
here. I didn’t think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a 
room full of such luminaries, thought, “What could I, as an amateur, possibly 
have to say? So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been 
here for a couple of days, I realised you’re just a bunch of guys! It’s been 
rife with ideas, and I’ve had so many myself through talking with and listening 
to people, that I’d thought what I’d do was stand up and have an argument and 
debate with myself. I’ll talk for a while and hope sufficiently to provoke and 
inflame opinion that there’ll be an outburst of chair-throwing at the end.
Before I embark on what I want to try to tackle, may I warn you that things may 
get a little bit lost from time to time because there’s a lot of stuff that’s 
just come in from what we’ve been hearing today, so if I occasionally sort of go 
. . . I was telling somebody earlier today that I have a four-year-old daughter 
and was very, very interested watching her face when she was in her first two or 
three weeks of life and suddenly realising what nobody would have realised in 
previous ages—she was rebooting!
I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am 
terribly proud of—I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!
The topic I want to introduce to you this evening, the subject of the debate 
that we are about to sort of not have, is a slightly facetious one (you’ll be 
surprised to hear, but we’ll see where we go with it)—“Is there an artificial 
God?” I’m sure most of the people in this room will share the same view, but 
even as an out-and-out atheist, one can’t help noticing that the role of a god 
has had an enormously profound impact on human history over many, many 
centuries. It’s very interesting to figure out where this came from and what, in 
the modern scientific world we sometimes hope against hope that we live in, it 
actually means.
I was thinking about this earlier today when Larry Yaeger was talking about 
“What Is Life?” and mentioned at the end something I didn’t know, about a 
special field of handwriting recognition. The following strange thought went 
through my mind: that trying to figure out what is life and what isn’t, and 
where the boundary is, has an interesting relationship with how you recognise 
handwriting. We all know, when presented with any particular entity, whether 
it’s a bit of mould from the fridge or whatever—we instinctively know when 
something is an example of life and when it isn’t. But it turns out to be 
tremendously hard exactly to define it. I remember once, a long time ago, 
needing a definition of life for a speech I was giving. Assuming there was a 
simple one and looking around the Internet, I was astonished at how diverse the 
definitions were and how very, very detailed each one had to be in order to 
include “this” but not include “that.” If you think about it, a collection that 
includes a fruit fly and Richard Dawkins and the Great Barrier Reef is an 
awkward set of objects to try to compare. When we try to figure out what the 
rules are that we are looking for, trying to find a rule that’s self-evidently 
true, that turns out to be very, very hard.
Compare this with the business of recognising whether something is an A or a B 
or a C. It’s a similar kind of process, but it’s also a very, very different 
process, because you may say of something that you’re “not quite certain whether 
it count as life or not life, it’s kind of there on the edge, isn’t it, it’s 
probably a very low example of what you might call life, it’s maybe just about 
alive or maybe it isn’t.” Or maybe you might say about something that’s an 
example of digital life, “Does that count as being alive?” Is it something, to 
coin someone’s earlier phrase, that’ll go squish if you step on it? Think about 
the controversial Gaia hypothesis; people say, “Is the planet alive?” “Is the 
ecosphere alive or not?” In the end it depends on how you define such things.
Compare that with handwriting recognition. In the end you are trying to say “Is 
this an A or is it a B?” People write As at Bs in many different ways; floridly, 
sloppily, or whatever. Its no good saying, “Well, it’s sort of A-ish but there’s 
a bit of B in there,” because you can’t write the word “apple” with such a 
thing. It is either an A or a B. How do you judge? If you’re doing handwriting 
recognition, what you are trying to do is not to assess the relative degrees of 
A-ness or B-ness of the letter but trying to define the intention of the person 
who wrote it. It’s very clear in the end—is it an A or a B?—ah! it’s an because 
the person writing it was writing the word “apple” and that’s clearly what it 
means. So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say 
what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include 
in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.
I want to pick up on a few other things that came around today. I was fascinated 
by Larry (again), talking about tautology, because there’s an argument that I 
remember being stumped by once, to which I couldn’t come up with a reply, 
because I was so puzzled by the challenge and couldn’t quite figure it out. A 
guy said to me, “Yes, but the whole theory of evolution is based on a tautology: 
That which survives, survives.” This is tautological, therefore it doesn’t mean 
anything. I thought about that for a while and it finally occurred to me that a 
tautology is something that if it means nothing, not only that no information 
has gone into it, but that no consequence has come out of it. So we may have 
accidentally stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it’s the only thing, the only 
force, arguably the most powerful of which we are aware, which requires no other 
input, no other support from any other place, is self-evident, hence 
tautological, but nevertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects. It’s hard 
to find anything that corresponds to that, and I therefore put it at the 
beginning of one of my books. I reduced it to what I thought were the bare 
essentials, which are very similar to the ones you came up with earlier, which 
were “Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something 
else to happen causes something else to happen and anything that in happening 
causes itself to happen again, happens again.” In fact you don’t even need the 
second two because they flow from the first one, which is self-evident and 
there’s nothing else you need to say; everything else flows from that. So I 
think we have in our grasp here a fundamental, ultimate truth, against which 
there is no gainsaying. It was spotted by the guy who said this is a tautology. 
Yes, it is, but it’s a unique tautology in that it requires no information to go 
in, but an infinite amount of information comes out of it. So I think that it is 
arguably therefore the prime cause of everything in the universe. Big claim, but 
I feel I’m talking to a sympathetic audience.
Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point 
of view on an awful lot of things, but let’s try to see where our point of view 
comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved 
creature and he finds himself in a world that he’s begun to take a little charge 
of; he’s begun to be a toolmaker, a changer of his environment with the tools 
that he’s made, and he makes tools when he does, in order to make changes in his 
environment. To give an example of the way man operates compared to other 
animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small 
group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological 
upheaval, population pressure, food shortage, or whatever, and finds itself in a 
new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple 
example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the 
weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes that 
favour a thicker coat will has come to the fore and we’ll come and we’ll find 
that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who’s a toolmaker, 
doesn’t have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of 
habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert—he even manages to live in New 
York, for heaven’s sake—and reason is that when he arrives in a new environment 
he doesn’t have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder 
environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, 
he says, “I’ll have it off him.” Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, 
to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now 
imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day’s 
toolmaking. He looks around and he sees a world that pleases him mightily; 
behind him are mountains with caves in them—mountains are great because you can 
go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can’t get 
you; in front of him there’s the forest—it’s got nuts and berries and delicious 
food; there’s a stream going by, which is full of water—water’s delicious to 
drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here’s 
cousin Ug and he’s caught a mammoth—mammoths are great, you can eat them, you 
can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other 
mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it’s fantastic. But our early man has a 
moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, “Well, this is an interesting world 
that I find myself in,” and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a 
question that is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about 
because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has 
evolved into, and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this 
particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says, “So who made this, 
then?” Who made this?—you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man 
thinks, “Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes 
things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more 
powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me, and because I tend to be the 
strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male.” And so we have the idea 
of a God. Then, because when we make things, we do it with the intention of 
doing something with them, early man asks himself, “If he made it, what did he 
make it for?” Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, “This 
world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me 
and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely,” and he reaches the 
inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 
“This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself 
in—fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must 
have been made to have me in it!” This is such a powerful idea that as the sun 
rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller 
and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s 
going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built 
to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rathejf by surprise. 
I think this may be something we need to be on the watch-out for. We all know 
that at some point in the future the universe will come to an end, and at some 
other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately 
pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about 
that, but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say. Look at what’s 
supposed to be going to happen on first of January 2000—let’s not pretend that 
we didn’t have a warning that the century was going to end! I think that we need 
to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are 
going to survive in the long term.
There are some oddities in the perspective with which see the world. The fact 
that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a 
gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and 
think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our 
perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual 
history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite 
a lot of these have come from sand, so let’s talk about the four ages of sand.
From sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses, and from lenses we make 
telescopes. When the great early astronomers, Copernicus, Galileo, and others, 
turned their telescopes on the heavens and discovered that the universe was an 
astonishingly different place than we expected and that, far from world being 
most of the universe, with just a few little bright lights going around it, it 
turned out—and this took a long, long, long time to sink in—that it is just one 
tiny little speck going round a little nuclear fireball, which is one of 
millions and millions and millions that make up this particular galaxy and our 
galaxy is one of millions or billions that make up the universe, and that then 
we are also faced with the possibility that there may be billions of universes, 
that applied a little bit of a corrective to the perspective that the universe 
was ours.
I rather love that notion, and, as I was discussing with someone earlier today, 
there’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed recently by David Deutsch, who is an 
advocate of the multiple-universe view of the universe, called The Fabric of 
Reality, in which he explores the notion of a quantum multiple-universe view of 
the universe. This came from the famous wave/particle dichotomy about the 
behaviour of light—that you couldn’t measure it as a wave when it behaves as a 
wave, or as a particle when it behaves as a particle. How does this come to be? 
David Deutsch points out that if you imagine that our universe is simply one 
layer and that there is an infinite multiplicity of universes spreading out on 
either side, not only does it solve the problem, but the problem simply goes 
away. This is exactly how you expect light to behave under those circumstances. 
Quantum mechanics has claims to be predicated on the notion that the universe 
behaves as if there were a multiplicity of universes, but it rather strains our 
credulity to think that there actually would be.
This goes straight back to Galileo and the Vatican. In fact, what the Vatican 
said to Galileo was, “We don’t dispute your readings, we just dispute the 
explanation you put on them. It’s all very well for you to say that the planets 
sort of do that as they go round and it is as if we were a planet and those 
planets were all going round the sun; it’s all right to say it’s as if that were 
happening, but you’re not allowed to say that’s what is happening, because we 
have a total lockhold on universal truth and also it simply strains our personal 
credulity.” Just so, I think that the idea that there are multiple universes 
currently strains our credulity, but it may well be that it’s simply one more 
strain that we have to learn to live with, just as we’ve had to learn to live 
with a whole bunch of them in the past.
The other thing that comes out of that vision of the universe is that it turns 
out to be composed almost entirely, and rather worryingly, of nothing. Wherever 
you look there is nothing with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or 
light. But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in 
the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like 
gravity and so forth. So that was, if you like, macroscopic view of the 
universe, which came from the first age of sand.
The next age of sand is the microscopic one. We put glass lenses into 
microscopes and started to look down at the microscopic view of the universe. 
Then we began to understand that when we get down to the subatomic level, the 
solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing 
and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to actually something, 
but only the probability that there may something there.
One way or another, this is a deeply misleading universe. Wherever we look, it’s 
beginning to be extremely alarming and extremely upsetting to our sense of who 
we are—great, strapping, physical people living in a universe that exists almost 
entirely for us—that it just isn’t the case. At this point we still divining 
from this all sorts of fundamental principles, recognising the way that gravity 
works, the way that strong and weak nuclear forces work, recognising the nature 
of matter, the nature of particles and so on, but having got those fundamentals, 
we’re still not very good at figuring out how it works, because the maths is 
really rather tricky. So we tend to come up with almost a clockwork view of the 
way it all works because that’s the best our math can manage. I don’t mean in 
any way to disparage Newton, because I guess he was the first person who saw 
that there were principles at work that were different from anything we actually 
saw around us. His first law of motion—that something will remain in its 
position of either rest or motion until some other force works on it—is 
something that none of us, living in a gravity well, in a gas envelope, had ever 
seen, because everything we move comes to a halt. It was only through very, very 
careful watching and observing and measuring and divining the principles 
underlying what we could all see happening that he came up with the principles 
that we all know and recognise as being the laws of motion, but nevertheless it 
is, by modern terms, still a somewhat clockwork view of the universe. As I say, 
I don’t mean that to sound disparaging in any way at all, because his 
achievements, as we all know, were absolutely monumental, but it still kind of 
doesn’t make sense to us.
Now there are all sorts of entities we are also aware of, as well as particles, 
forces, tables, chairs, rocks, and so on, that are almost invisible to science; 
almost invisible, because science has almost nothing to say about them 
whatsoever. I’m talking about dogs and cats and cows and each other. We living 
things are so far beyond the purview of anything science can actually say, 
almost beyond even recognising ourselves as things that science might be 
expected to have something to say about.
I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his laws of motion and 
figuring out the way the universe works and with him, a cat wandering around. 
The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had 
proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, 
we took them apart. If you try to take a cat apart to see how it works, the 
first thing you have in your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of 
complexity that almost lies outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we 
have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of 
object, a different class of matter; “life,” something that had a mysterious 
essence about it, was God-given—and that’s the only explanation we had. The 
bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes the Origin of Species. It takes a 
long time before we really get to grips with this and begin understand it, 
because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but 
it’s yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the 
centre of universe and we’re not made of anything, but we started out as some 
kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn’t read 
well. But also, we have no opportunity to see this stuff at work. In a sense 
Darwin was like Newton in that he was the first person to see underlying 
principles really were not at all obvious, from the everyday world in which he 
lived. We had to think very hard to understand the nature of what was happening 
around us, and we had no clear obvious everyday examples of evolution to point 
to. Even today that persists as a slightly tricky problem if you’re trying to 
persuade somebody who doesn’t believe in all this evolution stuff and wants you 
to show him an example—they are hard to find in terms of everyday observation.
So we come to the third age of sand. In the third age of sand we discover 
something else we can make out of sand—silicon. We make the silicon chip—and 
suddenly what opens up to us is a universe not of fundamental particles and 
fundamental forces, but of the things that were missing in that picture that 
told us how they work; what the silicon chip revealed to us was the process. The 
silicon chip enables us to do mathematics tremendously fast, to model the—as it 
turns out—very, very simple processes that are analogous to life in terms of 
their simplicity; iteration, looping, branching, the feedback loop that lies at 
the heart of everything you do on a computer and at the heart of everything that 
happens in evolution—that is, the output stage of one generation becomes the 
input stage of the next. Suddenly we have a working model—not for a while, 
because early machines are terribly slow and clunky—but gradually we accumulate 
a working model of this thing that previously we could only guess at or 
deduce—and you had to be a pretty sharp and a pretty clear thinker even to 
divine it happening when it was far from obvious and indeed counterintuitive, 
particularly to as proud a species as we.
The computer forms a third age of perspective, because suddenly it enables us to 
see how life works. Now, that is an extraordinarily important point because it 
becomes self-evident that life, that all forms of complexity, do not flow 
downward, they flow upward, and there’s a whole grammar that anybody who is used 
to using computers is now familiar with, which means that evolution is no longer 
a particular thing, because anybody who’s ever looked at the way a computer 
program works, knows that very, very simple iterative pieces of code, each line 
of which is tremendously straightforward, give rise to enormously complex 
phenomena in a computer—and by enormously complex phenomena, I mean a 
word-processing program just as much as I mean Tierra or Creatures.
I can remember the first time I ever read a programming manual, many, many years 
ago. I’d first started to encounter computers in about 1983, and I wanted to 
know a little bit more about them, so I decided to learn something about 
programming. I bought a C manual and I read through the first two or three 
chapters, which took me about a week. At the end it said, “Congratulations, you 
have now written the letter a on the screen!” I thought, “Well, I must have 
misunderstood something here, because it was a huge, huge amount of work to do 
that, so what if I now want to write a b?” The process of programming, the speed 
and the means by which enormous simplicity gives rise to enormously complex 
results, was not part of my mental grammar at that point. It is now—and it is 
increasingly part of all our mental grammars, because we are used to the way 
computers work.
So, suddenly, evolution ceases to be such a real problem get hold of. It’s 
rather like the following scenario: One Tuesday a person is spotted in a street 
in London, doing something criminal. Two detectives are investigating, trying to 
work out what happened. One of them is a twentieth-century detective and the 
other, by the marvels of science fiction, is a nineteenth-century detective. The 
problem is this: The person who was clearly seen and identified on the street in 
London on Tuesday was seen by someone else, an equally reliable witness, on the 
street in Santa Fe on the same Tuesday. How could that possibly be? The 
nineteenth-century detective could only think it was by some sort of magical 
intervention. Now, the twentieth-century detective may not be able to say, “He 
took BA flight this and then United flight that”—he may not be able to figure 
out exactly which way he did it, or by which route he traveled, but it’s not a 
problem. It doesn’t bother him; he just says, “He got there by plane. I don’t 
know which plane and it may be a little tricky to find out, but there’s no 
essential mystery.” We’re used to idea of jet travel. We don’t know whether the 
criminal flew BA 178, or UA 270, or whatever, but we know roughly how it was 
done. I suspect that as we become more and more conversant with the role a 
computer plays and the way in which the computer models the process of 
enormously simple elements giving rise to enormously complex results, then the 
idea of life being an emergent phenomenon will become easier and easier to 
swallow. We may never know precisely what steps life took in the very early 
stages of this planet, but it’s not a mystery.
So what we have arrived at here—and although the first shock wave of this 
arrival was in 1859, it’s really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates 
it unarguably to us—is “Is there really a universe that is not designed from the 
top downward, but from the bottom upward? Can complexity emerge from lower 
levels of simplicity?” It has always struck me as being bizarre that the idea of 
God as a creator was considered sufficient explanation for the complexity we see 
around us, because it simply doesn’t explain where he came from. If we imagine a 
designer, that implies a design, and that therefore each thing he designs or 
causes to be designed is a level simpler than him- or herself, then you have to 
ask, “What is the level above the designer?” There is one peculiar model of the 
universe that has turtles all the way down, but here we have gods all the way 
up. It really isn’t a very good answer—but a bottom-up solution, on the other 
hand, that rests on the incredibly powerful tautology that “anything that 
happens, happens,” clearly gives you a very simple and powerful answer that 
needs no other explanation whatsoever.
But here’s the interesting thing. I said I wanted to ask, “Is there an 
artificial God?” and this is where I want to address the question of why the 
idea of a God is so persuasive. I’ve already explained where I feel this kind of 
illusion comes from in the first place; it comes from a falseness in our 
perspective, because we are not taking into account that we are evolved beings, 
beings who have evolved into a particular landscape, into a particular 
environment with a particular set of skills and views of the world that have 
enabled us to survive and thrive rather successfully. But there seems to be an 
even more powerful idea than that, and this is the idea I want to propose, which 
is that the spot at the top of the pyramid that we previously said was whence 
everything flowed, may not actually be vacant just because we say the flow 
doesn’t go that way.
Let me explain what I mean by this. We have created in the world in which we 
live all kinds of things; we have changed our world in all kinds of ways. That’s 
very, very clear. We have built the room we’re in, and we’ve built all sorts of 
complex stuff like computers and so on, but we’ve also constructed all kinds of 
fictitious entities that are enormously powerful. So do say, “That’s a bad idea, 
it’s stupid—we should simply get rid of it?” Well, here’s another fictitious 
entity—money. Money is a completely fictitious entity, but it’s very powerful in 
our world we all have wallets, which have got notes in them, but what can those 
notes do? You can’t breed them, you can’t stir-fry them, you can’t live in them, 
there’s absolutely nothing you can with them that’s any use, other than exchange 
them with each other—and as soon as we exchange them with each other, all sorts 
of powerful things happen, because it’s a fiction that we’ve all subscribed to. 
We don’t think this is wrong or right, good or bad; but the thing is that if 
money vanished, the entire cooperative structure that we have would implode, but 
if we were all to vanish, money would simply vanish too. Money has no meaning 
outside ourselves; it is something we have created that has a powerful shaping 
effect on the world, because its something we all subscribe to.
I would like somebody to write an evolutionary history of religion, because the 
way in which it has developed seems to me to show all kinds of evolutionary 
strategies. Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living 
in the same environment—for example, the race between the Amazonian manatee and 
a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, 
the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the 
manatee, and the more silica in the reed, the stronger and bigger the manatee’s 
teeth get. One side does one thing and the other counters it. As we know, 
throughout evolution and history, arms races are something that drive evolution 
in the most powerful ways, and in the world of ideas you can see similar kinds 
of things happening.
Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all 
agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for 
thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us 
that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked 
and if it withstands the attack, then it lives to fight another day and if it 
doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work 
like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy 
or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it 
or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really 
what it means is “Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say 
anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? Because you’re not!” If somebody 
votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as 
much as you like; everybody will have an argument, but nobody feels aggrieved by 
it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down, you are free to have an 
argument about it, but if on the other hand somebody says, “I mustn’t move a 
light switch on a Saturday,” you say, “Fine, I respect that.” The odd thing is, 
even as I am saying that, I am thinking, “Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is 
going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?” but I wouldn’t have 
thought, “Maybe there’s somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right 
wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics,” when I 
was making the other points. I just think, “Fine, we have different opinions.” 
But the moment I say something that something to do with somebody’s (I’m going 
to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become 
terribly protective and terribly defensive and say, “No, we don’t attack that; 
that’s an irrational belief, but no, we respect it.”
It’s rather like, if you think back in terms of animal evolution, an animal 
that’s grown an incredible carapace around it such as a tortoise—that’s a great 
survival strategy because nothing can get through it; or maybe like a poisonous 
fish that nothing will come close to, which therefore thrives by keeping away 
any challenges to what it is it is. In the case of an idea, if we think, “Here 
is an idea that is protected by holiness or sanctity,” what does it mean? Why 
should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour Party or the 
Conservative Party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus 
that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the 
universe began, about who created the universe, no, that’s holy? What does that 
mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we’ve just 
got used to doing so? There’s no other reason at all, it’s just one of those 
things that crept into being, and once that loop gets going, it’s very, very 
powerful. So we are used to not challenging religious ideas, but it’s very 
interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets 
absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet 
when you look at it rationally, there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be 
as open to debate as any other, except we have agreed somehow between us that 
they shouldn’t be.
There’s a very interesting book—I don’t know if anybody here’s read it—called 
Man on Earth, by an anthropologist used to be at Cambridge, called John Reader, 
in which he describes the way that . . . I’m going to back up a little bit and 
tell you about the whole book. It’s a series of studies of different cultures in 
the world that have developed within somewhat isolated circumstances, on islands 
or in a mountain valley or wherever, so it’s possible to treat them to a certain 
extent as a test-tube case. You see therefore exactly the degree to which their 
environment and their immediate circumstances have affected the way in which 
their culture has arisen. It’s a fascinating series of studies. The one I have 
in mind at the moment is the culture and economy of Bali, which is a small, very 
crowded island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly efficient food 
and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively small space, but it’s hugely 
labour-intensive and requires a lot of very, very precise cooperation amongst 
the people there, particularly when you have a large population on a small 
island needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way in which 
rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it, because it is intensely 
religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single 
aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in 
terms of who they are, what their status is, and what their role in life is. 
It’s all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very 
peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined, and, oddly 
enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their 
rice harvest. In the seventies, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest 
was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so 
they said, “Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, 
much more productive than even you’re, very successfully, doing at the moment. 
Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other.” So they 
started, and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but 
the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly 
the rice harvest plummeted again, and the Balinese said, “Screw it, we’re going 
back to the temple calendar!” and they reinstated what was there before and it 
all worked again absolutely perfectly. It’s all very well to say that basing the 
rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is 
stupid—they should be able to work it out more logically than that. They might 
just as well say to us “Your culture and society work on the basis of money and 
that’s a fiction, so why don’t you get rid of it and just cooperate with each 
other.” We know that’s not going to work!
So there is a sense in which we build meta-systems above ourselves to fill in 
the space that we previously populated with an entity that was supposed to be 
the intentional designer, the creator (even though there isn’t one) and because 
we—I don’t necessarily mean we in this room, but we as a species—design and 
create one and then allow ourselves to behave as if there was one, all sorts of 
things begin to happen that otherwise wouldn’t happen.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean. This is very speculative. I’m really going 
out on a limb here, because it’s something I know nothing about whatsoever, so 
think of this more as a thought experiment than a real explanation of something. 
I want to talk about feng shui, which is something I know little about, but 
there’s been a lot of talk about it recently in terms of figuring out how a 
building should be designed, built, situated, decorated, and so on. Apparently 
we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons and look at it in 
terms of how a dragon would move around it. So, if a dragon wouldn’t be happy in 
the house, you have to put a red fishbowl here or a window there. This sounds 
like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be 
nonsense—there aren’t any dragons, so any theory based on how dragons behave is 
nonsense. What are these silly people doing, imagining that dragons can tell you 
how to build your house? Nevertheless, it occurs to me that if you disregard for 
a moment the explanation that’s actually offered for it, it may be there is 
something interesting going on that goes like this: we all know from buildings 
that we’ve lived in, worked in, been in, or stayed in, that some are more 
comfortable, more pleasant, and more agreeable to live in than others. We 
haven’t had a real way of quantifying this, but in this century we’ve had an 
awful lot of architects who thought they knew how to do it, so we’ve had the 
horrible idea of the house as a machine for living in, we’ve had Mies van der 
Rohe and others putting up glass stumps and strangely shaped things that are 
supposed to form some theory or other. It’s all carefully engineered, but 
nonetheless, their buildings are not actually very nice to live in. An awful lot 
of theory has been poured into this, but if you sit and work with an architect 
(and I’ve been through that stressful time, as I’m sure a lot of people have), 
then when you are trying to figure out how a room should work, you’re trying to 
integrate all kinds of things about lighting, about angles, about how people 
move and how people live—and an awful lot of other things you don’t know about 
that get left out. You don’t know what importance to attach to one thing or 
another; you’re trying, very consciously, to figure out something when you 
haven’t really got much of a clue, but there’s this theory and that theory, this 
bit of engineering practice and that bit of architectural practice; you don’t 
really know what to make of them. Compare that to somebody who tosses a cricket 
ball at you. You can sit and watch it and say, “It’s going at seventeen 
degrees,” start to work it out on paper, do some calculus, etc., and about a 
week after the ball’s whizzed past you, you may have figured out where it’s 
going to be and how to catch it. On the other hand, you can simply put your hand 
out and let the ball drop into it, because we have all kinds of faculties built 
into us, just below the conscious level, able to do all kinds of complex 
integrations of all kinds of complex phenomena, which therefore enable us to « 
“Oh look, there’s a ball coming; catch it!”
What I’m suggesting is that feng shui and an awful lot other things are 
precisely of that kind of problem. There are all sorts of things we know how to 
do, but don’t necessarily know what we do, we just do them. Go back to the issue 
of how you figure out how a room or a house should be designed, and instead of 
going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to 
digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what 
may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, “How would a dragon live 
here? We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature 
may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that 
are beyond our ability to resolve, but we know how organic creatures live. We’ve 
never seen a dragon, but we’ve all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we 
can say, “Well, if a dragon went through here, he’d get stuck just here and a 
little bit cross over there because he couldn’t see that and he’d wave his tail 
and knock that vase over.” You figure out how the dragon’s going to be happy 
here, and lo and behold you’ve suddenly got a place that makes sense for other 
organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.
So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it’s 
worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world 
may have some function that it’s worth trying to understand and preserve the 
essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; 
because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in 
the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, 
or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move farther and 
farther into the field of digital or artificial life, we will find more and more 
unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this 
is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and 
shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would 
argue that though there isn’t an actual God, there is an artificial God, and we 
should probably bear that in mind. That is my debating point, and you are now 
free to start hurling the chairs around!
Q. What is the fourth age of sand?
Let me back up for a minute and talk about the way we communicate. 
Traditionally, we have a bunch of different ways in which we communicate with 
each other. One way is one-to-one; we talk to each other, have a conversation. 
Another is one-to-many, which I’m doing at the moment, or someone could stand up 
and sing a song, or announce we’ve got to go to war. Then we have many-to-one 
communication; we have a pretty patchy, clunky, not-really-working version we 
call democracy, but in a more primitive state I would stand up and say, “Okay, 
we’re going to go to war,” and some may shout back, “No, we’re not!”—and then we 
have many-to-many communication in the argument that breaks out afterwards!
In this century (and the previous century) we modelled one-to-one communications 
in the telephone, which I assume we are all familiar with. We have one-to-many 
communication—boy, do we have an awful lot of that—broadcasting, publishing, 
journalism, etc. We get information poured at us from all over the place, and 
it’s completely indiscriminate as to where it might land. It’s curious, but we 
don’t have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the 
information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that 
happened, any news, whether it was about something that’s actually happened to 
us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our 
horizon, it happened in our world, and if we reacted to it, the world reacted 
back. It was all relevant to us, so, for example, if somebody had a terrible 
accident, we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the 
plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we 
may get terribly anxious about it, but our anxiety doesn’t have any impact. 
We’re not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that’s 
happened to somebody a world away and something that’s happened to someone round 
the corner. We can’t really distinguish between them anymore which is why we get 
terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that 
comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it’s happened to our 
sister. We’ve all become twisted and disconnected and its not surprising that we 
feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us 
but we don’t impact the world. Then there’s many-to-one; we have that, but not 
very well yet, and there’s not much of it about. Essentially, our democratic 
systems are a model of that, and though they’re not very good, they will improve 
dramatically.
But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn’t have at all before the coming of the 
Internet, which, of course, runs on fiberoptics. It’s communication between us 
that forms the fourth age of sand. Take what I said earlier about the world not 
reacting to us when we react to it; I remember the first moment, a few years 
ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly 
thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who 
liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of storeys 
away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the 
machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys. 
Eventually he figured out, “Hang on, there’s a chip in there and I’m on a 
computer and there’s a network running around the building, so why don’t I just 
put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal 
whenever I want, and tell if I’m going to have a wasted journey or not?” So he 
connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the 
Internet—so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this 
drinks machine. Now, that may not be vital information but it turned out to be 
curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the 
drinks machine. It began to develop, because the chip in the machine didn’t just 
say, “The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty,” but had all sorts of 
information; it said, “There are seven Cokes and three Diet Cokes, the 
temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was 
that.” There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really 
fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their fifty 
cents in and not pressed the button, i.e., if the machine was pregnant, then you 
could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the 
drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor 
when suddenly, bang!—there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? Well, 
obviously somebody five thousand miles away! Now that was a very, very silly but 
fascinating story, and what it said to me was that this was the first time we 
could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from five 
thousand miles away you can reach into a university corridor and drop a 
Coca-Cola can, but it’s the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new 
way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.
Extemporaneous speech given at Digital
Biota 2, Cambridge, SEPTEMBER 1998

Cookies
This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone 
to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for 
the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong, I went to get myself a 
newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I 
went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important 
that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of 
coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly 
ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t 
look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly 
leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and 
ate it.
Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at 
dealing with. There’s nothing in our background upbringing, or education that 
teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your 
cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. 
There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know 
. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored 
it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in 
the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do?
In the end I thought, Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried 
very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously 
opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it 
hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. 
Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the 
subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice . . .” I 
mean, it doesn’t really work.
We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean 
there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I 
took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up 
and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I 
breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.
A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my 
coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my 
cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that 
somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last 
quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he 
doesn’t have the punch line.
From a speech to Embedded Systems, 2001



AND
EVERYTHING



Interview with the Onion A.V Club
I think the idea of art kills creativity.
—D.N.A.
THE ONION. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on. What do you want to talk about 
first?
DOUGLAS ADAMS. I guess there are two main things. One is that we are imminently 
about to finish this thing that I’ve been laboring over for what seems like two 
years now, called Starship Titanic, which is a CD-ROM. It’s coming out in a 
couple months’ time. The other thing is that I’ve just agreed to the sale of 
Hitchhiker’s Guide to Disney. So I guess over the next couple of years, that’s 
what I’m going to be doing. I’m making that movie.
O. Tell me about Starship Titanic.
D.A. Well, it’s a CD-ROM, and the most important thing is that it started as a 
CD-ROM. People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of Hitchhiker’s, and I thought, “No, 
no.” I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a 
book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough 
in their own right to be worth originating something in. Because, really, the 
moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the 
original idea is “What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it 
a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?” Really, from that 
moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it 
develops. So something will be very, very different if it’s developed as a 
CD-ROM than if it’s developed as a book. Now in fact, I tell a slight lie, 
because the idea as such, in a sort of single-paragraph form, actually was what 
it was in one of the Hitchhiker books—I think Life, the Universe, and 
Everything. Because whenever I’d get sort of stuck on the story line in 
Hitchhiker, I’d always invent a couple of other quick story lines and give them 
to The Guide to talk about. So here was one little idea that was sitting there, 
and a number of people said to me, “Oh, you should turn that into a novel.” It 
just seemed like too much of a good idea, and I tend to resist those. But in 
fact I discovered there was a very good reason why I wasn’t interested in doing 
Starship Titanic as a book, which was that essentially it was a story about a 
thing. I just thought of this idea and didn’t have any people attached to it, 
and you can only really tell stories about people. So, later, when I was 
thinking “Okay, now I want to do a CD-ROM, because I want to justify the fact 
that I spend all my time sitting fiddling around computers,” I actually wanted 
to turn it into proper grown up work. So I was thinking, what would be a good 
thing? Then I suddenly remembered that the problem with turning Starship Titanic 
into a book—that it was about a thing, about a place, about a ship—suddenly 
became very much to its advantage. When you’re doing a CD-ROM, what you’re 
eventually going to create is a place, an environment.
O. And the user becomes the character.
D.A. Yeah, exactly. Once the place begins to develop, you then put characters in 
it. But it isn’t about the characters, it’s about the ship. What I then wanted 
to do was something . . . Well it was either very old-fashioned or very radical, 
depending which way you look at it; I wanted to build a conversation engine into 
the game. Years and years ago, I did a game based on Hitchhiker’s Guide with a 
company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, 
intelligent, literate games based on text. You know, there are several thousand 
years of human culture telling you you can do quite a lot with text, and putting 
in the extra element of interactivity should just add to the possibilities. You 
turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in 
the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather 
than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous 
amount of fun, actually, working on that. I just loved constructing these 
virtual conversations between the player and the machine. So I just thought it’d 
be lovely to try to extend that and do more with it in a modern graphics game. 
Because what I would like to do is see if one can take that old conversation 
technology and make characters really speak. Put them in an environment and see 
where you go from there. So we started to tackle this problem of being able to 
speak to the characters. Of course, everything you do with language just 
balloons as a problem. To begin with, we wanted to do it whereby it would be 
text-to-speech, which gives you the advantage that you have much more 
flexibility in constructing sentences on the fly. On the other hand, all of your 
characters sound like semi-concussed Norwegians, which I felt was a downside. So 
we eventually realized we were going to have to do prerecorded speech. And I 
thought, “That’s terrible, because you only have a limited number of responses. 
It’s just going to be . . . Oh, I’m not sure about that.” So the way we 
eventually solved the problem, or gradually solved the problem, was that the 
amount of prerecorded speech just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and 
bigger. We just did another two-hour recording session this morning. We’ve now 
got something like sixteen hours of little conversational snippets: little 
phrases, sentence half-sentences, and all the things the machine puts together 
on the fly in response to what you type in. For a long time it wasn’t working 
very well. And now, just really in the last two or three weeks, it’s started to 
come together, and it’s started to be spooky. People come in and say, “Yeah, 
yeah, yeah, I don’t see how this is going to work. How ’'bout if you ask it 
this?” and they do, and their jaw drops. It’s just wonderful. People come in and 
spend hours just sitting, locked in conversation with these characters. I hasten 
to add that with the sixteen hours of dialogue, it was a small team of us who 
wrote it. I did part of the dialogue writing, and other people did some, and we 
all pulled it together. It’s pretty remarkable when it works, you suddenly have 
this populated world. Very strange, damaged robots crawling around the place, 
all of whom have a wide range of opinions and attitudes and ideas and strange 
histories, and know about some entirely unexpected things. You can engage them 
all in conversation.
O. Do you feel concerned that after all this work, people won’t treat it with 
the gravity of, say, a movie or a book? That they won’t treat it as an art form?
D.A. I hope that’s the case, yes. I get very worried about this idea of art. 
Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve trying to avoid the idea of doing 
art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. That was one of the 
reasons I really wanted to go and do a CD-ROM: because nobody will take it 
seriously, and therefore you can sneak under the fence with lots of good stuff. 
It’s funny how often it happens. I guess when the novel started, most early 
novels were just sort of pornography. Apparently, most media actually started as 
pornography and sort of grew from there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I 
hasten to add. Before 1962, everybody thought pop music was sort of . . . Nobody 
would have ever remotely called it art, and then somebody comes along and is 
just so incredibly creative in it, just because they love it to bits and think 
it’s the greatest fun you can possibly have. And within a few years, you’ve got 
Sgt. Pepper’s and so on, and everybody’s calling it art. I think media are at 
their most interesting before anybody’s thought of calling them art, when people 
still think they’re just a load of junk.
O. But, say, twenty years from now, would you like to be recognized as one of 
the earliest practitioners of CD-ROM as art?
D.A. Well, I would just like a lot of people to have bought it. One, for the 
extremely obvious reason. But the other is that if it’s popular and people 
really like it and have fun with it, you feel you’ve done a good job. And if 
somebody wants to come along and say, “Oh, it’s art,” that’s as it may be. I 
don’t really mind that much. But I think that’s for other people to decide after 
the fact. It isn’t what you should be aiming to do. There’s nothing worse than 
sitting down to write a novel and saying, “Well, okay, I’m going to do something 
of high artistic worth.” It’s funny. I read something the other day, just out of 
absolute curiosity; I read Thunderball, which is one of the James Bond books 
that I would love to have read when I was, I don’t know, about fourteen, just 
sort of thumbing through it for the bits where he puts his left hand on her 
breast and saying, “Oh my God, how exciting.” But I just thought, Well, James 
Bond has become such an icon in our pop culture of the last forty years, it 
would be interesting to see what it actually was like. And what prompted me to 
do this, apart from the fact that I happened to find a copy lying around, was 
reading someone talking about Ian Fleming and saying that he had aimed not to 
literary, but to be literate. Which is a very, very big and crucial difference. 
So I thought, well, I’ll see if he managed to do that. It’s interesting, because 
it was actually very well written as a piece of craft. He knew how to use the 
language, he knew how to make it work, and he wrote well. But obviously nobobody 
would call it literature. But I think you get most of the most interesting work 
done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art, but are merely 
practicing a craft, and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is 
good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and 
not to damage the tools as you use them. I find when I read literary novels—you 
know, with a capital “L”—I think an awful lot is nonsense. If I want to know 
something interesting about a way human beings work, how they relate to each 
other and how they behave, I’ll find an awful lot of women crime novelists who 
do it better, Ruth Rendell for instance. If I want to read something that’s 
really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the 
human condition, if I like, or what we’re all doing here, or what’s going on, 
then I’d rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard 
Dawkins. I feel that the agenda of life’s important issues has moved from 
novelists to science writers, because they know more. I tend to get very 
suspicious of anything that thinks it’s art while it’s being created. As far as 
being a CD-ROM is concerned, I just wanted to do the best thing I could and have 
as much fun as I could doing it. I think it’s pretty good. There are always bits 
that you fret over for being less than perfect, but you can keep on worrying 
over something forever. The thing is pretty damn good.
O. You’ve got the movie, too. I’d heard rumors of a Hitchhiker’s Guide movie 
kicking around for decades.
D.A. Oh, well, yeah. Although it sort of bubbles under, there have been two 
previous sources of rumors. One was when I originally sold the rights about 
fifteen years ago to Ivan Reitman, who was not as well-known then as he is now. 
It really didn’t work out, because once we got down to it, Ivan and I didn’t 
really see eye-to-eye. In fact, it turned out he hadn’t actually read the book 
before he bought it. He’d merely read the sales figures. I think it really 
wasn’t his cup of tea, so he wanted to make something rather different. 
Eventually, we agreed to differ and went our respective ways, and by this time 
the ownership had passed from him to Columbia, and he went on to make a movie 
called Ghostbusters, so you can imagine how irritated I was by that. It sat 
there owned by Columbia for many years. I think Ivan Reitman then got somebody 
else to write a script based on it, which is, I think, the worst script I’d ever 
read. Unfortunately, it has my name on it and the other writer’s, whereas I did 
not contribute a single comma to it. I’ve only just discovered that that script 
has been sitting in script city, or whatever it is, for a long time, and that 
everyone assumes I wrote it and am therefore a terrible screenwriter. Which is 
rather distressing to me. So then, a few years ago, I was introduced to someone 
who became a great friend of mine, Michael Nesmith, who has done a number of 
different things in his career: In addition to being a film producer, he was 
originally one of the Monkees. Which is kind of odd when you get to know him, 
because he’s such a serious, thoughtful, quiet chap, but with quiet reserves of 
impish glee. So his proposal was that we go into partnership together to make 
this. He’s the producer, and I do the scripts and so on. We had a very good time 
working on it for quite a while, but I just think Hollywood at that point saw 
the thing as old. It’s been around the block. And basically, what I was being 
told an awful lot was essentially, “Science-fiction comedy will not work as a 
movie, and here’s why not: If it could work, somebody would have done it 
already.”
O. That logic seems kind of flawed.
D.A. So what happens, of course, is that Men in Black came out this past year, 
so suddenly somebody has done it already. And Men in Black is . . . How can I 
put this delicately? There were elements of it I found quite familiar, shall we 
say? And suddenly a comedy science-fiction movie that was very much in the same 
vein as Hitchhiker’s became one of the most successful movies ever made. So that 
kind of changed the landscape a little bit. Suddenly people kind of wanted it. 
The project with Michael . . . In the end, we hadn’t gotten it take, so we 
parted company very good friends, and still are, I just hope that there will be 
other projects in the future that he and I will work on together, because I like 
him enormously and we got on very well together. And also, the more time I get 
to spend in Santa Fe, the better. So now the picture’s with Disney—or, more 
specifically, with Caravan, which is one of the major independent production 
companies, but it’s kind of joined at the hip to Disney. It’s been very 
frustrating not to have made it in the last fifteen years; nevertheless, I feel 
extremely buoyed by the fact that one can make a much, much, much better movie 
out of it now than one could have fifteen years ago. That’s in technical terms; 
in terms of how it will look and how it will work. Obviously the real quality of 
the picture is in the writing and the acting and the directing and so on and so 
forth, and those skills have neither risen nor sunk in fifteen years. But at 
least one substantial area, in how it can be made to look, has improved a great 
deal.
O. And Jay Roach [Austin Powers] is directing it, right?
D.A. That’s right. He’s a very interesting fellow. I’ve now spent quite a lot of 
time talking to him. The key to the whole thing, in many ways, was when I met 
Jay Roach, because I hit it off very well with him, and thought, “Here’s a very 
bright, intelligent guy.” Not only is he a bright, intelligent guy, but here’s a 
measure of how bright and intelligent he is: he wants me to work very closely on 
his movie. Which is always something that endears a writer to a director. In 
fact, when I was making the original radio series, it was unheard of to do what 
I did. Because I’d just written it. But I kind of inserted myself in the whole 
production process. The producer/director was a little surprised by this, but in 
the end took it in very good grace. So I had a huge amount to do with the way 
the program developed, and that’s exactly what Jay wants me to do on this movie. 
So I felt, “Great, here’s somebody I can do business with.” Obviously I’m saying 
that at the beginning of a process that’s going to take two years. So who knows 
what’s going to happen? All I can say is that at this point in the game, things 
are set as fair as they possibly could be. So I feel very optimistic and excited 
about that.
O. It’s been nearly twenty years since the radio program, right?
D.A. Well, it’s almost exactly twenty years. It’ll be twenty years next month.
O. What’s the enduring appeal of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
D.A. Well, I don’t know. All I know is that I worked very hard at it, and I 
worried very much about it, and I think I made things very difficult for myself 
doing it. And if ever there was an easy way of doing something, I would find a 
much harder way to do it. And I suspect that the amount that people have liked 
it is not unrelated to the amount of work I put into it. That’s a simplistic 
thing to say, but it’s the best I can come up with.
O. Is the idea that the movie will cover the first book?
D.A. Yeah. It’s funny, because I’ve been looking around the Web at what people 
have been saying. I’ve seen, “He’s going to put all five books into it.” People 
just don’t understand the way a book maps onto a movie. Somebody said, and I 
think quite accurately, that the best source material for a movie is a short 
story. Which effectively means, yes, it’s going to be the first book. Having 
said that, whenever I sit down and do another version of Hitchhiker, it highly 
contradicts whichever version went before. The best thing I can say about the 
movie is that it will be specifically contradicting the first book.
O. Which version of Hitchhiker are you happiest with?
D.A. Not the TV version, that’s for sure. In different moods I will feel either 
the radio or the book, which are the two other versions left, so it’s got to be 
one of those, hasn’t it? I feel differently about each of them. On the one hand, 
the radio series was where it originated; that’s where it grew; that’s where the 
seed grew. Also, that’s where I felt that myself and the other people working on 
it—the producer and the sound engineers and so on, and, of course, the 
actors—all created something that really felt groundbreaking at the time. Or 
rather, it felt like we were completely mad at the time. I can remember sitting 
in the subterranean studio, auditioning the sound of a whale hitting the ground 
at three hundred miles an hour for hours on end, just trying to find ways of 
tweaking the sound. After hours of that, day after day, you do begin to doubt 
your sanity. Of course, you have no idea if anybody’s going to listen to this 
stuff. But, you know, there was a real sense that nobody had done this before. 
And that was great; there’s a great charge that comes with that. On the other 
hand, the appeal of the books to me is that that it’s just me. The great appeal 
of a book to any writer is that it is just them. That’s it. There’s nobody else 
involved. That’s not quite true, of course, because the thing developed out of a 
radio series in the first place, and there is a sense in there of all the people 
who have contributed, in one way or another, to the radio show that it grew out 
of. But, nevertheless, there is a this-is-all-my-own-work feel about a book. And 
I’m pleased with the way it reads. I feel it flows nicely. It feels as if it 
were easy to write, and I know how difficult that was to achieve.
O. Do you ever get tired of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
D.A. There was a period where I got heartily sick of it, and I really never 
wanted to hear anything more about it again, and I would almost scream at 
anybody who used the words to me. But since then, I went off and did other 
things. I did the Dirk Gently books. My favorite thing that I’ve ever done was a 
thing I did about ten years ago: I went around the world with a zoologist friend 
of mine, and looked for various rare and endangered species of animals, and 
wrote a book about that called Last Chance to See, which is my own personal 
favorite Hitchhiker now is something from the past that I feel very fond of; it 
was great, it was terrific, and it’s being very good to me. I had a conversation 
a little while ago with Pete Townshend of The Who, and I think at that point I 
was saying, “Oh God, hope I’m not just remembered as the person who wrote 
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” And he kind of reprimanded me a little bit. 
He said, “Look, I have the same thing with Tommy, and for a while I thought like 
that. The thing is, when you’ve got something like that in your history, it 
opens an awful lot of doors. It allows you to do a lot of other things. People 
remember that. It’s something one should be grateful for.” And I thought that 
was quite right.
O. Have you put Dirk Gently aside?
D.A. Well, I started to write another Dirk Gently book, and just lost it. For 
some reason I couldn’t get it going, so I had put it aside. I didn’t know what 
to do with it. I looked at the material again about a year later, and suddenly 
thoug “Actually, the reason is that the ideas and the character don’t match. 
I’ve tried to go for the wrong kind of ideas, and these ideas would actually fit 
much better in a Hitchhiker book, but I don’t want to write another Hitchhiker 
book at the moment. So I sort of put them on one side. And maybe one day I will 
write another Hitchhiker book, because there’s an awful lot of material sitting 
around waiting to go in it. But going back to Dirk Gently, I sort of put Dirk 
aside, really. There was a student production of Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective 
in Oxford two or three months ago, so I went along to see it. And it’s an 
enormously complicated plot . . . Part of the complexity is there to disguise 
the fact that the plot doesn’t really quite work . . . It was funny watching it 
on stage, because I suddenly began to think about it again, and think, “Well, 
they did this well, but what they should have done was this, and they should’ve 
done that.” You know, it starts the whole ball rolling in your head. What was 
also interesting to me was that while I was sitting there being quite critical 
of the production, I was astonished by how much the audience was enjoying it. It 
was rather sort of a peculiar situation. I suddenly thought, “I would love to 
see this happen as a film, because I can now see, having thought about it 
freshly in this context, what kind of a movie it could be, and it could be 
great.” So maybe, once the Hitchhiker movie has gotten to the stage where I can 
turn my attention to other things as well, that’s what I’d like to do next. And 
with that movie under way, I hope more doors will open as far as filmmaking is 
concerned. I would love to do movies, but this is a man saying this innocently 
who’s never done one.
Interview conducted
with Keith Phipps, 1998
 
*       *       *
 
 
 
 
 
 
April 14, 1999
David Vogel
Walt Disney Pictures
Dear David,
 
I’ve tried to reach you by phone a couple of times. Perhaps it would have helped 
if I’d explained why I was calling: I was in the States for a few days and 
thought it might be helpful if I came across to L.A. so that you and I could 
have a meeting. I didn’t hear from you, so I’m on a plane back to England, where 
I’m typing this.
We seem to have gotten to a place where the problems appear to loom larger than 
the opportunities. I don’t know if I’m right in thinking this, but I only have 
silence to go on, which is always a poor source of information.
It seems to me that we can either slip into the traditional stereotypes—you’re 
the studio executive who has a million real-world problems to worry about, and 
I’m the writer who only cares about seeing his vision realised and hang the cost 
and consequences—or we can recognise that we both share the same goal, which is 
to make the most successful movie we possibly can. The fact that we may have 
different perspectives on how this can best be achieved should be a fertile 
source of debate and iterative problem solving. It’s not clear to me that a 
one-way traffic of written “notes” interspersed with long, dreadful silences is 
a good substitute for this.
You have a great deal of experience nursing major motion pictures into 
existence. I have a great deal of experience of nursing The Hitchhiker’s Guide 
to the Galaxy into existence in every medium other than motion pictures. I’m 
sure you must feel frustrated that I don’t seem to understand the range of 
problems you have to contend with, just as I feel frustrated that I haven’t had 
any real creative dialogue with Disney about this project yet. I have a 
suggestion to make: Why don’t we actually meet and have a chat?
I could be in L.A. for next Monday (4/19) or early the following week. I would 
invite Disney to bear the cost of this extra trip over. I’ve appended a list of 
numbers you can reach me on. If you manage not to reach me, I shall know you’re 
trying not to, very, very hard indeed.
Best wishes,
Douglas Adams
Email: dna@tdv.com
Assistant (Sophie Astin) (and voicemail): 555 171 555 1700
   (between 10 A.M. and 6:00 P.M. British Summertime)
Office fax: 555 171 555 1701
Home (no voicemail): 555 171 555 3632
Home fax: 555 171 555 5601
UK cell phone (and voicemail): 555 410 555 098
US cellphone (and voicemail): (310) 555 555 6769
Other home. (France): 555 4 90 72 39 23
Jane Belson (wife) (office): 555 171 555 4715
Film agent (US) Bob Bookman: (310) 5554545
Book agent (UK) Ed Victor (office): 555 171 555 4100
   (UK office hours)
Book agent (UK) Ed Victor (office): 555 171 555 4112
Book agent (UK) Ed Victor (home): 555 171 555 3030
Producer: Roger Birnbaum: (818) 555 2637
Director: Jay Roach (Everyman Pictures): (323) 555 3585
Jay Roach (home): (310) 555 5903
Jay Roach (cellphone): (310) 555 0279
Shauna Robertson (Everyman Pictures): (323) 555 3585
Shauna Robertson, home: (310) 555 7352
Shauna Robertson, cellphone: (310) 555 8357
Robbie Stamp, Executive Producer (UK) (office): 555 171
   555 1707
Robbie Stamp, Executive Producer (UK) (home): 555 181
   555 1672
Robbie Stamp, Executive Producer (UK) (cell phone): 555
   7885 55 8397
Janet Thrift (mother) (UK): 555 19555 62527
Jane Garnier (sister) (UK) (work): 555 1300 555 684
Jane Garnier (sister) (UK) (home): 555 1305 555 034
Jakki Kelloway (daughter’s nanny) (UK): 555 171 555
   5602
Angus Deayton & Lise Meyer (next-door neighbours who
   can take a message) (UK): Work: 555 (145) 555 0464
   Home: 555 (171) 555 0855
Restaurants I might conceivably be at:
   The Ivy (UK): 555 171 555 4751
   The Groucho Club (UK): 555 171 555 4685
   Granita (UK): 555 171 555 3222
   Sainsbury’s (supermarket where I shop; they can always
   page me): 555 171 555 1789
Website forum www.douglasadams.com/forum
 
*       *       *
[Editor’s Note: This letter had the desired effect. David Vogel responded, 
resulting in a productive meeting that pushed the movie forward.]

Young Zaphod Plays It Safe
A large flying craft moved swiftly across the surface of an astoundingly 
beautiful sea. From mid-morning onwards it plied back and forth in great 
widening arcs, and at last attracted the attention of the local islanders, a 
peaceful, sea-food loving people who gathered on the beach and squinted up into 
the blinding sun, trying to see what was there.
Any sophisticated knowledgeable person, who had knocked about, seen a few 
things, would probably have remarked on how much the craft looked like a filing 
cabinet—a large and recently burgled filing cabinet lying on its back with its 
drawers in the air and flying.
The islanders, whose experience was of a different kind, were instead struck by 
how little it looked like a lobster.
They chattered excitedly about its total lack of claws, its stiff unbendy back, 
and the fact that it seemed to experience the greatest difficulty staying on the 
ground. This last feature seemed particularly funny to them. They jumped up and 
down on the spot a lot to demonstrate to the stupid thing that they themselves 
found staying on the ground the easiest thing in the world.
But soon this entertainment began to pall for them. After all, since it was 
perfectly clear to them that the thing was not a lobster, and since their world 
was blessed with an abundance of things that were lobsters (a good half a dozen 
of which were now marching succulently up the beach towards them) they saw no 
reason to waste any more time on the thing but decided instead to adjourn 
immediately for a late lobster lunch.
At that exact moment the craft stopped suddenly in mid-air then upended itself 
and plunged headlong into the ocean with a great crash of spray which sent them 
shouting into the trees.
When they re-emerged, nervously, a few minutes later, all they were able to see 
was a smoothly scarred circle of water and a few gulping bubbles.
That’s odd, they said to each other between mouthfuls of the best lobster to be 
had anywhere in the Western Galaxy, that’s the second time that’s happened in a 
year.
The craft which wasn’t a lobster dived direct to a depth of two hundred feet, 
and hung there in the heavy blueness, while vast masses of water swayed about 
it. High above, where the water was magically clear, a brilliant formation of 
fish flashed away. Below, where the light had difficulty reaching the colour of 
the water sank to a dark and savage blue.
Here, at two hundred feet, the sun streamed feebly. A large, silk skinned 
sea-mammal rolled idly by, inspecting the craft with a kind of half-interest, as 
if it had half expected to find something of this kind round about here, and 
then it slid on up and away towards the rippling light.
The craft waited here for a minute or two, taking readings, and then descended 
another hundred feet. At this depth it was becoming seriously dark. After a 
moment or two the internal lights of the craft shut down, and in the second or 
so that passed before the main external beams suddenly stabbed out, the only 
visible light came from a small hazily illuminated pink sign which read The 
Beeblebrox Salvage and Really Wild Stuff Corporation.
The huge beams switched downwards, catching a vast shoal of silver fish, which 
swiveled away in silent panic.
In the dim control room which extended in a broad bow from the craft’s blunt 
prow, four heads were gathered round a computer display that was analysing the 
very, very faint and intermittent signals that emanating from deep on the sea 
bed.
“That’s it,” said the owner of one of the heads finally.
“Can we be quite sure?” said the owner of another of the heads.
“One hundred per cent positive,” replied the owner of the first head.
“You’re one hundred per cent positive that the ship which is crashed on the 
bottom of this ocean is the ship which you said you were one hundred per cent 
positive could one hundred per cent positively never crash?” said the owner of 
the two remaining heads. “Hey,” he put up two of his hands, “I’m only asking.”
The two officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration responded 
to this with a very cold stare, but the man with the odd, or rather the even 
number of heads, missed it. He flung himself back on the pilot couch, opened a 
couple of beers—one for himself and the other also for himself—stuck his feet on 
the console and said “Hey, baby” through the ultra-glass at a passing fish.
“Mr. Beeblebrox . . .,” began the shorter and less reassuring of the two 
officials in a low voice.
“Yup?” said Zaphod, rapping a suddenly empty can down on some of the more 
sensitive instruments, “you ready to dive? Let’s go.”
“Mr. Beeblebrox, let us make one thing perfectly clear . . .”
“Yeah let’s,” said Zaphod, “How about this for a start. Why don’t you just tell 
me what’s really on this ship.”
“We have told you,” said the official. “By-products.”
Zaphod exchanged weary glances with himself.
“By-products,” he said. “By-products of what?”
“Processes.” said the official.
“What processes?”
“Processes that are perfectly safe.”
“Santa Zarquana Voostra!” exclaimed both of Zaphod’s heads in chorus, “so safe 
that you have to build a zarking fortress ship to take the by-products to the 
nearest black hole and tip them in! Only it doesn’t get there because the pilot 
does a detour—is this right?—to pick up some lobster . . .? OK, so the guy is 
cool, but . . . I mean own up, this is barking time, this is major lunch, this 
is stool approaching critical mass, this is . . . this is . . . total vocabulary 
failure!”
“Shut up!” his right head yelled at his left, “we’re flanging!”
He got a good calming grip on the remaining beer can.
“Listen guys,” he resumed after a moment’s peace and contemplation. The two 
officials had said nothing. Conversation at this level was not something to 
which they felt they could aspire. “I just want to know,” insisted Zaphod, “what 
you’re getting me into here.”
He stabbed a finger at the intermittent readings trickling over the computer 
screen. They meant nothing to him but he didn’t like the look of them at all. 
They were all squiggly with lots of long numbers and things.
“It’s breaking up, is that it?” he shouted. “It’s got a hold full epsilonic 
radiating aorist rods or something that’ll fry this whole space sector for 
zillions of years back and it’s breaking up. Is that the story? Is that what 
we’re going down to find? Am I going to come out of that wreck with even more 
heads?”
“It cannot possibly be a wreck, Mr. Beeblebrox,” insisted the official, “the 
ship is guaranteed to be perfectly safe. It cannot possibly break up”
“Then why are you so keen to go and look at it?”
“We like to look at things that are perfectly safe.”
“Freeeooow!”
“Mr. Beeblebrox,” said on official, patiently, “may I remind you that you have a 
job to do?”
“Yeah, well maybe I don’t feel so keen on doing it all of a sudden. What do you 
think I am, completely without any moral whatsits, what are they called, those 
moral things?”
“Scruples?”
“Scruples, thank you, whatsoever? Well?”
The two officials waited calmly. They coughed slightly to help pass the time. 
Zaphod sighed a “what is the world coming to” sort of sigh to absolve himself 
from all blame, and swung himself round in his seat.
“Ship?” he called.
“Yup?” said the ship.
“Do what I do.”
The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double 
checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, 
in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths.
Five hundred feet.
A thousand.
Two thousand.
Here, at a pressure or nearly seventy atmospheres, in the chilling depths where 
no light reaches, nature keeps its most heated imaginings. Two foot long 
nightmares loomed wildly into the bleaching light, yawned, and vanished back 
into the blackness.
Two and a half thousand feet.
At the dim edges of the ship’s lights guilty secrets flitted by with their eyes 
on stalks.
Gradually the topography of the distantly approaching ocean bed resolved with 
greater and greater clarity on the computer displays until at last a shape could 
be made out that was separate and distinct from its surroundings. It was like a 
huge lopsided cylindrical fortress which widened sharply halfway along its 
length to accommodate the heavy ultra-plating with which the crucial storage 
holds were clad, and which were supposed by its builders to have made this the 
most secure and impregnable spaceship ever built. Before launch the material 
structure of this section had been battered, rammed, blasted and subjected to 
every assault its builders knew it could withstand in order to demonstrate that 
it could withstand them.
The tense silence in the cockpit tightened perceptibly as it became clear that 
it was this section that had broken rather neatly in two.
“In fact it’s perfectly safe,” said one of the officials, “it’s built so that 
even if the ship does break up, the storage holds cannot possibly be breached.”
Three thousand, eight hundred and twenty five feet.
Four Hi-Presh-A SmartSuits moved slowly out of the open hatchway of the salvage 
craft and waded through the barrage of its lights towards the monstrous shape 
that loomed darkly out of the sea night. They moved with a sort of clumsy grace, 
near weightless though weighed on by a world of water.
With his right-hand head Zaphod peered up into the black immensities above him 
and for a moment his mind sang with a silent roar of horror. He glanced to his 
left and was relieved to see that his other head was busy watching the Brockian 
Ultra-Cricket broadcasts on the helmet vid without concern. Slightly behind him 
to his left walked the two officials from the Safety and Civil Reassurance 
Administration, slightly in front of him to his right walked the empty suit, 
carrying their implements and testing the way for them.
They passed the huge rift in the broken backed Starship Billion Year Bunker, and 
played their flashlights up into it. Mangled machinery loomed between torn and 
twisted bulkheads, two feet thick. A family of large transparent eels lived in 
there now and seemed to like it.
The empty suit preceded them along the length of the ship’s gigantic murky hull, 
trying the airlocks. The third one it tested ground open uneasily. They crowded 
inside it and waited for several long minutes while the pump mechanisms dealt 
with the hideous pressure that the ocean exerted, and slowly replaced it with an 
equally hideous pressure of air and inert gases. At last the inner door slid 
open and they were admitted to a dark outer holding area of the Starship Billion 
Year Bunker.
Several more high security Titan-O-Hold doors had to be passed through, each of 
which the officials opened with a selection of quark keys. Soon they were so 
deep within the heavy security fields that the UltraCricket broadcasts were 
beginning to fade, and Zaphod had to switch to one of the rock video stations, 
since there was nowhere that they were not able to reach.
A final doorway slid open, and they emerged into a large sepulchral space. 
Zaphod played his flashlight against the opposite wall and it fell full on a 
wild-eyed screaming face.
Zaphod screamed a diminished fifth himself, dropped his light and sat heavily on 
the floor, or rather on a body which had been lying there undisturbed for around 
six months and which reacted to being sat on by exploding with great violence. 
Zaphod wondered what to do about all this, and after a brief but hectic internal 
debate decided that passing out would be the very thing.
He came to a few minutes later and pretended not to know who he was, where he 
was or how he had got there, but was not able to convince anybody. He then 
pretended that his memory suddenly returned with a rush and that the shock 
caused him to pass out again, but he was helped unwillingly to his feet by the 
empty suit—which he was beginning to take a serious dislike to—and forced to 
come to terms with his surroundings.
They were dimly and fitfully lit and unpleasant in a number of respects, the 
most obvious of which was the colourful arrangement of parts of the ship’s late 
lamented Navigation Officer over the floor, walls and ceiling, and especially 
over the lower half of his, Zaphod’s, suit. The effect of this was so 
astoundingly nasty that we shall not be referring to again at any point in this 
narrative—other than to record briefly the fact that it caused Zaphod to throw 
up inside his suit, which he therefore removed and swapped, after suitable 
headgear modifications, with the empty one. Unfortunately the stench of the 
fetid air in the ship, followed by the sight of his own suit walking around 
casually draped in rotting intestines was enough to make him throw up in the 
other suit as well, which was a problem that he and the suit would simply have 
to live with.
There. All done. No more nastiness.
At least, no more of that particular nastiness.
The owner of the screaming face had calmed down very slightly now and was 
bubbling away incoherently in a large tank of yellow liquid—an emergency 
suspension tank.
“It was crazy,” he babbled, “crazy! I told him we could always try the lobster 
on the way back, but he was crazy. Obsessed! Do you ever get like that about 
lobster? Because I don’t. Seems to me it’s all rubbery and fiddly to eat, and 
not that much taste, well I mean is there? I infinitely prefer scallops, and 
said so. Oh Zarquon, I said so!”
Zaphod stared at this extraordinary apparition, flailing in its tank. The man 
was attached to all kinds of life-support tubes, and his voice was bubbling out 
of speakers that echoed insanely round the ship, returning as haunting echoes 
from deep and distant corridors.
“That was where I went wrong!” the madman yelled, “I actually said that I 
preferred scallops and he said it was because I hadn’t had real lobster like 
they did where his ancestors came from, which was here, and he’d prove it. He 
said it was no problem, he said the lobster here was worth a whole journey, let 
alone the small diversion it would take to get here, and he swore he could 
handle the ship in the atmosphere, but it was madness, madness!” he screamed, 
and paused with his eyes rolling, as if the word had rung some kind of bell in 
his mind, “The ship went right out of control! I couldn’t believe what we were 
doing and just to prove a point about lobster which is really so overrated as a 
food, I’m sorry to go on about lobsters so much, I’ll try and stop in a minute, 
but they’ve been on my mind so much for the months I’ve been in this tank, can 
you imagine what it’s like to be stuck in a ship with the same guys for months 
eating junk food when all one guy will talk about is lobster and then spend six 
months floating by yourself in a tank thinking about it. I promise I will try 
and shut up about the lobsters, I really will. Lobsters, lobsters, 
lobsters—enough! I think I’m the only survivor. I’m the only one who managed to 
get to an emergency tank before we went down. I sent out the Mayday and then we 
hit. It’s a disaster isn’t it? A total disaster, and all because the guy liked 
lobsters. How much sense am I making? It’s really hard for me to tell.” He gazed 
at them beseechingly, and his mind seemed to sway slowly back down to earth like 
a falling leaf . He blinked and looked at them oddly like a monkey peering at a 
strange fish. He scrabbled curiously with his wrinkled up fingers at the glass 
side of the tank. Tiny, thick yellow bubbles loosed themselves from his mouth 
and nose, caught briefly in his swab of hair and strayed on upwards.
“Oh Zarquon, oh heavens,” he mumbled pathetically to himself, “I’ve been found. 
I’ve been rescued . . .”
“Well,” said one of the officials, briskly, “you’ve been found at least.” He 
strode over to the main computer bank in the middle of the chamber and started 
checking quickly through the ship’s main monitor circuits for damage reports.
“The aorist rod chambers are intact,” he said.
“Holy dingo’s dos,” snarled Zaphod, “there are aorist rods on board . . .!”
Aorist rods were devices used in a now happily abandoned form of energy 
production. When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got 
particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place 
which had never used up all its available energy was—the past. And with the 
sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented 
a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the 
past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who 
claimed that the past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulging in an 
extremely expensive form of sentimentality. The past provided a very cheap, 
plentiful and clean source of energy, there could always be a few Natural Past 
Reserves set up if anyone wanted to pay for their upkeep, and as for the claim 
that draining the past impoverished the present, well, maybe it did, slightly, 
but the effects were immeasurable and you really had to keep a sense of 
proportion.
It was only when it was realised that the present really was being impoverished, 
and that the reason for it was that those selfish plundering wastrel bastards up 
in the future were doing exactly the same thing, that everyone realised that 
every single aorist rod, and the terrible secret of how they were made would 
have to be utterly and forever destroyed. They claimed it was for the sake of 
their grandparents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of their 
grandparent’s grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandparents.
The official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration gave a 
dismissive shrug.
“They’re perfectly safe,” he said. He glanced up at Zaphod and suddenly said 
with uncharacteristic frankness, “there’s worse than that on board. At least,” 
he added, tapping at one of the computer screens, “I hope it’s on board.”
The other official rounded on him sharply.
“What the hell do you think you’re saying?” he snapped.
The first shrugged again. He said “It doesn’t matter. He can say what he likes. 
No one would believe him. It’s why we chose to use him rather than do anything 
official isn’t it? The more wild the story he tells, the more it’ll sound like 
he’s some hippy adventurer making it up. He can even say that we said this and 
it’ll make him sound like a paranoid.” He smiled pleasantly at Zaphod who was 
seething in a suit full of sick. “You may accompany us,” he told him, “if you 
wish.”
“You see?” said the official, examining the ultra-titanium outer seals of the 
aorist rod hold. “Perfectly secure, perfectly safe.”
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing chemical weapons so 
powerful that a teaspoonful could fatally infect an entire planet.
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing zeta-active compounds so 
powerful that a teaspoonful could blow up a whole planet.
He said the same thing as they passed holds containing theta-active compounds so 
powerful that a teaspoonful could irradiate a whole planet.
“I’m glad I’m not a planet,” muttered Zaphod.
“You’d have nothing to fear,” assured the official from the Safety and Civil 
Reassurance Administration, “planets are very safe. Provided,” he added—and 
paused. They were approaching the hold nearest to the point where the back of 
the Starship Billion Year Bunker was broken. The corridor here was twisted and 
deformed, and the floor was damp and sticky in patches.
“Ho hum,” he said, “ho very much hum.”
“What’s in this hold?” demanded Zaphod.
“By-products,” said the official, clamming up again.
“By-products . . .” insisted Zaphod, quietly, “of what?”
Neither official answered. Instead, they examined the hold door very carefully 
and saw that its seals were twisted apart by the forces that had deformed the 
whole corridor. One of them touched the door lightly. It swung open to his 
touch. There was darkness inside, with just a couple of dim yellow lights deep 
within it.
“Of what?” hissed Zaphod.
The leading official turned to the other.
“There’s an escape capsule,” he said, “that the crew were to use to abandon ship 
before jettisoning it into the black hole,” he said. “I think it would be good 
to know that it’s still there.” The other official nodded and left without a 
word.
The first official quietly beckoned Zaphod in. The large dim yellow lights 
glowed about twenty feet from them.
“The reason,” he said, quietly “why everything else in this ship is, I maintain, 
safe, is that no one is really crazy enough to use them. No one. At least no one 
that crazy would ever get near them. Anyone that mad or dangerous ring very deep 
alarm bells. People may be stupid but they’re not that stupid.”
“By-products,” hissed Zaphod again,—he had to hiss in order that his voice 
shouldn’t be heard to tremble—“of what.”
“Er, Designer People.”
“What?”
“The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were awarded a huge research grant to design 
and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly 
disastrous. All the “people” and “personalities” turned out to be amalgams of 
characteristics which simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life 
forms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, 
deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn’t ring alarm bells in other 
people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through 
walls, because no one spotted the danger.
“The most dangerous of all were three identical ones—they were put in this hold, 
to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe. They are not evil, in 
fact they are rather simple and charming. But they are the most dangerous 
creatures that ever lived because there is nothing they will not do if allowed, 
and nothing they will not be allowed to do . . .”
Zaphod looked at the dim yellow lights, the two dim yellow lights. As his eyes 
became accustomed to the light he saw that the two lights framed a third space 
where something was broken. Wet sticky patches gleamed dully on the floor. 
Zaphod and the official walked cautiously towards the lights. At that moment, 
four words came crashing into the helmet headsets from the other official.
“The capsule has gone,” he said tersely.
“Trace it,” snapped Zaphod’s companion. “Find exactly where it has gone. We must 
know where it has gone!”
Zaphod slid aside a large ground glass door. Beyond it lay a tank full of thick 
yellow liquid, and floating in it was a man, a kindly looking man with lots of 
pleasant laugh lines round his face. He seemed to be floating quite contentedly 
and smiling to himself.
Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The planet 
towards which the escape capsule had headed had already been identified. It was 
in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
The kindly looking man in the tank seemed to be babbling gently to himself, just 
as the co-pilot had been in his tank. Little yellow bubbles beaded on the man’s 
lips. Zaphod found a small speaker by the tank and turned it on. He heard the 
man babbling gently about a shining city on a hill.
He also heard the Official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration 
issue instructions that the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha must be made “perfectly 
safe.”
From The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic
Relief Christmas Book, 1986

Excerpts from an Interview
conducted by Matt Newsome
D.N.A. The thing with Dirk Gently was that I felt I had lost contact with that 
character, I couldn’t make that book viable, which is why I said, “Okay, let’s 
go off and do something else.” Then, looking back at all the ideas that were 
there in Salmon of Doubt, I looked at it again about a year later and suddenly 
realised what it was that I’d been getting wrong, which was that these are 
essentially much more like Hitchhiker ideas and not like Dirk Gently ideas.
So, there will come a point I suspect at some point in the future where I will 
write a sixth Hitchhiker book. But I kind of want to do that in an odd kind of 
way because people have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless is a very 
bleak book. And it was a bleak book. The reason for that is very simple—I was 
having a lousy year, for all sorts of personal reasons that I don’t want to go 
into, I just had a thoroughly miserable year, and I was trying to write a book 
against that background. And, guess what, it was a rather bleak book!
I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems 
to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number. I think that a lot 
of the stuff which was originally in Salmon of Doubt, was planned into Salmon of 
Doubt, and really wasn’t working, I think could be yanked out and put together 
with some new thoughts.
M.N. Yes, because certainly some people have heard that Salmon of Doubt was now 
going to be a new Hitchhiker book.
D.N.A. Well, in a sense, because I shall be salvaging some of the ideas I 
couldn’t make work within a Dirk Gently framework and putting them in a 
Hitchhiker framework, undergoing necessary changes on the way. And, for old 
time’s sake, I may call it Salmon of Doubt, I may call it—well, who knows!

THE
SALMON
OF
DOUBT

[Editor’s Note: The version of The Salmon of Doubt presented here has been 
assembled from various versions of this work-in-progress. Please read the 
Editor’s Note at the beginning of this book for a detailed description of how 
this was put together. On the next page I have placed Douglas’s fax to his 
longtime London editor, which describes his overall scheme for the novel, giving 
us some inkling as to where the story might have gone from here.]
 
*       *       *
Fax
To: Sue Freestone
From: Douglas Adams
Re: The Salmon of Doubt description
Dirk Gently, hired by someone he never meets, to do a job that is never 
specified, starts following people at random. His investigations lead him to Los 
Angeles, through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future 
dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos. Jokes, lightly poached 
fish, and the emergent properties of complex systems form the background to Dirk 
Gently’s most baffling and incomprehensible case.
 
 
 
 

Chapter 1
EARLY MOST MORNINGS Dave climbed up to this isolated spot on the hill and 
brought small offerings to leave in the shrine of St. Clive, the patron saint of 
real-estate agents. Today what he’d brought was, so far as he could make out, 
part of a swimming-pool cleaning device, a sort of large, plastic, sucking 
lobsterish thing.
He laid the thing down carefully and stood back to admire the effect.
The shrine was just a small heap of rocks, really, with a little array of things 
that had got dug up from time to time. There was a remote-control garage opener, 
something that was probably part of a juice extractor, and a small, illuminated 
Kermit the Frog. The pool-cleaning lobsterish thing was a pretty good addition, 
and he arranged it so that its two feet of broken ribbed plastic tubing hung 
down like an elephant’s trunk over Kermit.
His morning trips up to the shrine were partly just to amuse himself, but also a 
chance to be alone and reflect on things. This whole place had started just as 
somewhere to fool around by himself, but it had rapidly turned into something 
kind of bigger than he meant, and he needed somewhere to get away from it all 
and think about things. Sometimes he’d even worry. When he was worried he would 
start to giggle slightly, and when he was really worried he would start to hum 
old Carpenters tunes till the worry went away.
But today he wasn’t going to worry. Today he was going to have fun. He unslung 
the canvas bag he'd brought up with him and dropped it on the ground for a 
moment.
From up here, the view was stupendous. Lush forest surrounded DaveLand in every 
direction, forest of extraordinary richness and diversity, teeming with life and 
colour. Through it wound the river Dave, which then meandered on through the 
hills till it met, five hundred miles away, the immense ocean which, until 
recently, he had called the Dave Ocean, but which in a fit of modest 
embarrassment he had now renamed the Karen Ocean. He had always thought that 
Pacific was a really dumb name. He had been on it. It wasn’t Pacific at all. 
He’d fixed that.
DaveLand itself was now a pretty impressive affair. Astonishing, really, when he 
thought about it. He brushed his hand through his lank hair and stared out at 
it, suppressing a very very small giggle.
DaveLand lightly covered about ninety acres of hillside with new outcrops 
already beginning to appear on nearby hills. Beautiful homes. Much more 
beautiful than any of the ones that his imaginary St. Clive would have sold or 
even understood. None of your split-level ranch-style crap with stupid 
conversation pits that anyone with half a brain would probably kill themselves 
rather than converse in. Dave’s houses of a different kind altogether.
Apart from anything else, they were smart houses. Just simple stuff, like they 
faced the right way. They had glass in the right places, stone in the right 
places, water in the right places, plants in the right places, so the air moved 
through them properly and was warm where you wanted it and cool where you wanted 
it. It was just physics. Most architects didn’t know any physics, he decided. 
They just knew dumb stuff. In Dave’s houses, prisms and fibres moved sunlight 
where you wanted it. Heat exchangers took heat from the food in the fridge and 
gave it to the food in the oven. Simple. People went into Dave’s houses and 
would say, “Hey! This is really neat! How come other people don’t build houses 
like this?” Answer? Because they’re dumb.
And telephones. Dave had given people here much neater, smarter, altogether more 
fabulous telephones than they’d ever had before. Now they wanted television as 
well, which Dave thought was pretty dumb in the first place, and monumentally 
dumb in the circumstances; but that in turn had been a pretty interesting 
problem and Dave, of course, had solved it. But Dave had solved so many problems 
that he had inadvertently created a new one. DaveLand was now a community of 
nearly a thousand people, which made him kind of responsible. He hadn’t expected 
to be responsible.
He pulled up a bunch of long grass and swished it around fretfully. The 
early-morning sunlight glinted off Dave’s Place. Dave’s Place was easily the 
largest and most gracious of all the buildings in, well, in the world. It ringed 
the summit of the hill opposite with elegant sweeping white stone walls and 
seeming acres of glass. The summit itself was laid out as a Japanese garden. 
Streams ran down through the house from it.
Just beneath Dave’s Place, on the same hillside and contained within the same 
security compound (he couldn’t believe he had to have stuff like security 
compounds now; and forty—forty—of the nine-hundred-plus inhabitants of DaveLand 
were now lawyers) was The Way of the Nostril.
The Way of the Nostril was probably the single smartest thing that Dave had ever 
thought of. Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were 
pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart. It was the single 
reason that all of this was here, and it had become the single thing that made 
Dave hum old Carpenters tunes most, except maybe the lawyers.
The sun was now gleaming brilliantly over all of DaveLand. It was pretty neat, 
Dave had to admit, but he also had to admit that he had kind of liked DaveLand 
when it was just his own funny stupid place to come to because only he was smart 
enough to get there. But one thing had led to another, and now all this. Here he 
was, only twenty-five and already beginning to feel like he was almost thirty.
Well, screw all that. Today he was going to have some fun. He picked up the 
large canvas bag and slung it back over his shoulders. Sam would have a fit. The 
lawyers would go nuts. Good. He turned and climbed farther on up the hill. The 
was called Top of the World, and was named after the tune by the Carpenters. One 
of the great things about having your own world was that you could just go ahead 
and like the Carpenters on it.
The hill got pretty rocky and craggy higher up, and Dave had to do a bit of 
rock-scrambling to get to where he was going.
Within about twenty minutes he was pretty hot and a sweaty, but he’d made it to 
the top, or at least the last significant flat bit, a solid slab of deeply 
rutted rock on which he sat, and dumped the bag. He gathered his breath for a 
few moments and then started to unpack it. He pulled out aluminium struts, he 
pulled out orange strings, he pulled out little purple sheets of Kevlar.
After about ten minutes of assembly the thing was ready. A large, 
gossamer-winged insect of a contraption. The scraps Kevlar strung between the 
struts of the frame were surprisingly small and oddly shaped. Dave had worked 
out that most of the cloth used in conventional hang gliders was redundant, and 
had got rid of it.
He examined the assembled frame systematically and satisfied himself that it was 
all as it should be, that it was Daveworthy.
He looked out nervously, but only just for a moment. He was going to do it 
anyway, so it was dumb to be nervous. Carefully picking up the hang glider, he 
carried it out to the edge of the rock, till he was standing on a ledge looking 
out over the whole extent of DaveLand. He noticed with satisfaction that 
although his glider looked like nothing more than a kind of drying frame for 
silk bikinis, it was very stiff and he had to pull it forcefully through the air 
to move it.
From here to Dave’s Place was about a mile horizontally and a couple of hundred 
feet vertically. He could just see, glinting in the sun, his large blue swimming 
pool, neatly secluded within the Japanese garden on the top of Dave’s Hill. The 
distance and the direction of the sun made details a little difficult, but he 
was confident that Sam would be waiting for him there beside the pool. He 
reckoned he could drop himself pretty neatly into that. He glanced at his watch. 
It was just after eight o’clock, and he’d scheduled the meeting for eight. Sam 
would be there.
Sam’s view was that a lot of Dave’s plans and schemes were reckless, crazy, 
irresponsible, occasionally bordering on the just plain dumb. Dropping into the 
pool would be something better than dumb guys could do. How tough could it be to 
do it if you were Dave?
He checked the wind direction, stepped into a lightweight harness belt, 
tightened it, clipped the belt to the glider, passed his hands through two 
loops, gripped the main struts, and he was ready.
All he had to do now was throw himself off into space.
Wow. Okay. Go.
No fuss, no dumb stuff. With a light heart he threw himself out forward, and 
sailed into empty space. The air supported him immediately, with a little rough 
buffeting. He braced himself against the frame, then tried to relax a little, 
then relaxed a little more, trying to find a good balance that was easy but 
responsive. He got it. He was out there. He was flying. He was just some kind of 
a bird.
Hey, this was good. The empty air was kind of a shock, but a good shock, like a 
swimming pool in the morning. And the air wasn’t empty. It was like falling into 
enormous invisible pillows, with fingers that came out and tugged and pulled at 
you, ruffling your hair, rattling your T-shirt. As his brain got to grips with 
the huge openness around him, he felt like a little toy hanging from the end of 
an immense mobile slowly turn over Dave World. He was turning in a big, easy 
arc, a little bit to the right and then, in response to a small shift in his 
weight, a little bit to the left, but still, it seemed, moving as an arc within 
an arc, a wheel within a wheel. The world, his world turned slowly around 
beneath him, green, rich, lush and vivid.
It was about 1.2 million years since the human race had suddenly gone extinct, 
and the world had really perked up a lot in that time. In geological terms it 
was but a fleeting moment, of course, but the forces of evolution had suddenly 
had tons of space to play in, huge gaps to fill, and everything had started to 
thrive like crazy. Everybody used to talk about saving the world—well, Dave had 
done it. Now it was great. The whole place was really neat now. DaveWorld. Yay.
He was riding the air pretty well now, not fighting it, but flowing along it. He 
was beginning to get a sense, though, that just dropping himself in his own 
swimming pool might be a little tougher than he had expected. But that was how 
he liked things to be—a little tougher than he expected.
Maybe it was even going to be a lot tougher, he began to realise. It was one 
thing to be staying comfortably aloft, following the currents, riding gradually 
down, it was quite another thing to steer in any meaningful kind of way. When he 
tried to turn too sharply, the delicate structure around him would start to 
rattle and bang in quite an alarming way.

Chapter 2
“I DON’T DO CATS,” said Dirk Gently.
His tone was sharp. He felt he had come up in the world. He had no evidence to 
support this view, he just felt it was about time. He also had indigestion, but 
that had nothing whatever to do with it.
The woman—what was her name? Melinda something, he had it written on a piece of 
paper somewhere but had lost it, possibly under the pile of unopened bank 
statements on the far corner of his desk—was standing in front of his desk with 
her left eyebrow raised indignantly.
“Your advertisement says . . .”
“The advertisement is out of date,” snapped Dirk. “I don’t do cats.” He waved 
her away and pretended to be busy with some paperwork.
“Then what do you do?” she persisted.
Dirk looked up curtly. He had taken against this woman as soon as she walked in. 
Not only had she caught him completely off guard, but she was also irritatingly 
beautiful. He didn’t like beautiful women. They upset him, with their grace, 
their charm, their utter loveliness, and their complete refusal to out to dinner 
with him. He could tell, the very instant this Melinda woman walked into the 
room, that she wouldn’t out to dinner with him if he was the last man on earth 
and had a pink Cadillac convertible, so he decided to take preemtive action. If 
she was not going to not go out to dinner with him, then she would not go out to 
dinner with him on his terms.
“None of your business,” he snapped. His gut gurgled painfully.
She raised her other eyebrow as well.
“Has the appointment I made with you caught you at a bad time?”
“Yes,” thought Dirk, though he didn’t say it. It was one of the worst months he 
could remember. Business had been slow, but not merely slow. What was normally a 
trickle had first slowed to a dribble and then dried up completely. Nothing. 
Nobody. No work whatever, unless you included the batty old woman who had come 
in with a dog whose name she couldn’t remember. She had suffered, she said, a 
minor blow to the head and had forgotten her dog’s name, as a result of which he 
would not come when she called. Please could he find out what his name was? 
Normally she would ask her husband, she explained, only he had recently died 
bungee jumping which he shouldn’t have been doing at his age only it was his 
seventieth birthday and he said he’d do exactly what he wanted even if it killed 
him which of course it did, and though she had of course tried contacting him 
through a medium the only message she’d got from him was that he didn’t believe 
in all this stupid spiritualist nonsense, it was all a damned fraud, which she 
thought was very rude of him, and certainly rather embarrassing for the medium. 
And so on.
He had taken the job. This was what it had come to.
He didn’t say any of this, of course. He just gave the Melinda woman a cold look 
and said, “This is a respectable private investigation business. I . . .”
“Respectable,” she said, “or respected?”
“What do you mean?” Dirk usually produced much sharper retorts than this, but, 
as the woman said, she had caught him at a bad time. After a weekend dominated 
by the struggle to identify a dog, nothing at all had happened yesterday, except 
for one thing that had given him a very nasty turn and made him wonder if he was 
going mad.
“Big difference,” the Melinda woman continued. “Like the difference between 
something that’s supposedly inflatable and something that’s actually inflated. 
Between something that’s supposedly unbreakable and something that will actually 
survive a good fling at the wall.”
“What?” said Dirk.
“I mean that however respectable your business may be, it was actually respected 
you’d probably be able to afford a carpet, some paint on the walls, and maybe 
even another chair in here for a person to sit on.”
Dirk had no idea what had happened to the other chair in his office, but he 
certainly wasn’t going to admit it.
“You don’t need a chair,” he said. “I’m afraid you are he under a 
misapprehension. We have nothing to discuss. Good day to you, dear lady, I am 
not going to look for your lost cat
“I didn’t say it was a lost cat.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Dirk. “You distinctly . . .”
“I said it was a sort of lost cat. It’s half lost.”
Dirk looked at her expressionlessly. Apart from being extremely good-looking in 
a blondish, willowyish kind of way, she was dressed well in an “I don’t care 
what I wear, just any old thing that’s lying around” kind of way that relies on 
extremely careful about what you leave lying around. She was obviously pretty 
bright, probably had a pretty good job, like running some sort of major textile 
or telecommunications company despite being clearly only thirty-two. In other 
words, she was exactly the sort of person who didn’t mislay cats, and certainly 
didn’t go running off to poky little private detective agencies if she did. He 
felt ill at ease.
“Talk sense, please,” he said sharply. “My time is valuable.”
“Oh yes? How valuable?”
She looked scornfully around his office. He had to admit to himself that it was 
grim, but he was damned if he was just going to sit there and take it. Just 
because he needed the work, needed the money, had nothing better to do with his 
time, there was no reason for anybody to think that he was at the beck and call 
of every good-looking woman who walked into his office offering to pay for his 
services. He felt humiliated.
“I’m not talking about my scale of fees, though it is, I promise you, awesome. I 
was merely thinking of time passing. Time that won’t pass this way again.”
He leaned forward in a pointed manner.
“Time is a finite entity, you know. Only about four billion years to go till the 
sun explodes. I know it seems like a lot now, but it will soon go if we just 
squander it on frivolous nonsense and small talk.”
“Small talk! This is half of my cat we’re talking about!”
“Madam, I don’t know who this ‘we’ is that you are referring to, but . . .”
“Listen. You may choose, when you’ve heard the details of this case, not to 
accept it because it is, I admit, a little odd. But I made an appointment to see 
you on the basis of what it said in your advertisement, to whit, that you find 
lost cats, and if you turn me down solely on the basis that you do not find lost 
cats, then I must remind you that there is such a thing as the Trades 
Descriptions Act. I can’t remember exactly what it says, but I bet you five 
pounds it says you can’t do that.”
Dirk sighed. He picked up a pencil and pulled a pad of paper towards him.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll take down the details of the case.”
“Thank you.”
“And then I’ll turn it down.”
“That’s your business.”
“The point I’m trying to make,” said Dirk, “is that it isn’t. So. What is this 
cat’s name?”
“Gusty.”
“Gusty.”
“Yes. Short for Gusty Winds.”
Dirk looked at her. “I won’t ask,” he said.
“You’ll wish you had.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
She shrugged.
“Male?” said Dirk. “Female?”
“Male.”
“Age?”
“Four years.”
“Description?”
“Well, um. That’s a bit tricky.”
“How hard can a question be? What is he, black? White? Ginger? Tabby?”
“Oh. Siamese.”
“Good,” said Dirk, writing down “Siamese.” “And when did you last see him?”
“About three minutes ago.”
Dirk laid his pencil down and looked at her.
“Maybe four, in fact,” she added.
“Let me see if I understand you,” said Dirk. “You say you lost your cat, er, 
‘Gusty,’ while you’ve been standing here talking to me?”
“No. I lost him—or sort of half-lost him—two weeks ago. But I last saw him, 
which is what you asked, just before I came into your office. I just checked to 
see he was okay. Which he was. Well, sort of okay. If you can call it okay.”
“And . . . er, where was he, exactly, when you checked to see that he was okay?”
“In his basket. Shall I bring him in? He’s just out here.”
She went out of the room and returned with a medium-sized wickerwork cat box. 
She put it down on Dirk’s desk. Its contents mewed slightly. She closed the door 
behind her.
Dirk frowned.
“Excuse me if I’m being a little obtuse,” he said, looking round the basket at 
her. “Tell me which bit of this I’ve got wrong. It seems to me that you are 
asking me if I will exercise my professional skills to search for and if 
possible find and return to you a cat . . .”
“Yes.”
“. . . which you already have with you in a cat basket?”
“Well, that’s right up to a point.”
“And which point is that?”
“Have a look for yourself.”
She slid out the metal rod that held the lid in place, reached into the basket, 
lifted out the cat, and put him down on Dirk’s desk, next to the basket.
Dirk looked at him.
He—Gusty—looked at him.
There is a particular disdain with which Siamese cats regard you. Anyone who has 
accidentally walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will be familiar with 
this feeling.
Gusty looked at Dirk and clearly found him reprehensible in some way. He turned 
away, yawned, stretched, groomed his whiskers briefly, licked down a small patch 
of ruffled fur, then leapt lightly off the table and started carefully to 
examine a splinter of floorboard, which he found to be far more interesting than 
Dirk.
Dirk stared wordlessly at Gusty.
Up to a point, Gusty looked exactly like a normal Siamese cat. Up to a point. 
The point up to which Gusty looked like a normal Siamese cat was his waist, 
which was marked by a narrrow, cloudy grey band.
“The front half looks quite well,” said Melinda whatever-her-name-was in a small 
voice. “Quite sleek and healthy, really.”
“And the back half?” said Dirk.
“Is what I want you to look for.”
Beyond the grey, cloudy band there was nothing. The cat’s body simply stopped 
dead in midair. Everything below approximately the ninth rib was, well, absent.
The odd thing about this was that the cat seemed quite unaffected. This is not 
to suggest that he had learnt to live with his sad affliction, or that he was 
courageously making the best things. He was, quite simply, unaffected. He didn’t 
seem to notice. Not content with ignoring the normal requirements of biology, 
the cat was also in clear breach of the laws of physics. He moved, jumped, 
promenaded, sat, in exactly the same way as if his rear half were present.
“It isn’t invisible,” said Melinda, picking the cat up, awkwardly. “It’s 
actually not there.” She passed her hand back and forth through clear air, where 
the cat’s hindquarters should have been. The cat twisted and turned in her grip, 
mewling crossly, then leapt nimbly to the ground and stalked about in an 
affronted manner.
“My, my,” said Dirk, steepling his fingers under his chin. “That is odd.”
“You’ll take the case?”
“No,” said Dirk. He pushed the pad of paper away from him. “I’m sorry, but I 
just can’t be doing this sort of stuff. If there’s anything I want less than to 
find a cat, it’s to find half a cat. Suppose I was unfortunate enough to find 
it. What then? How am I supposed to go about sticking it on? I’m sorry, but I’m 
through with cats, and I am definitely through with anything that even smacks of 
the supernatural or paranormal. I’m a rational being, and I . . . excuse me.” 
The phone was ringing. Dirk answered it. He sighed. It was Thor, the ancient 
Norse God of Thunder. Dirk knew immediately it was him from the long, portentous 
silence and the low grumblings of irritation followed by strange, distant 
bawling noises. Thor did not understand phones very well. He would usually stand 
ten feet away and shout godlike commands at them. This worked surprisingly well 
as far as making the connection was concerned, but made actual conversation 
well-nigh impossible.
Thor had moved in with an American girl of Dirk’s acquaintance, and Dirk 
understood from the strange Icelandic proclamations echoing over the line that 
he, Dirk, was supposed to be turning up for tea that afternoon.
Dirk said that, yes, he knew that, that he would be there at about five, was 
looking forward to it and would see him later; but Thor, of course, could hear 
none of this from where he was standing, and was beginning to get angry and 
shout a lot.
Dirk had at last to give up and hesitantly put the phone down, hoping that Thor 
would not do too much damage in Kate’s small flat. She had, he knew, managed to 
persuade the big god to try to crush packets of crisps in his rages rather than 
actual sofas and motorbikes, but it was sometimes touch-and-go when he really 
couldn’t get the hang of what was going on.
Dirk felt oppressed. He looked up. Oh yes.
“No,” he said. “Go away. I can’t deal with any more of this stuff.”
“But, Mr. Gently, I hear you have something of a reputation in this area.”
“And that’s precisely what I want to get rid of. So please get out of here and 
take your bifurcated feline with you.”
“Well, if that’s your attitude . . .”
She picked up the cat basket and sauntered out. The half-cat made a pretty good 
go of sauntering out as well.
Dirk sat at his desk and simmered for a minute or two, wondering why he was so 
out of sorts today. Looking out of his window, he saw the extremely attractive 
and intriguing client he had just rudely turned away out of sheer grumpiness. 
She looked particularly gorgeous and alluring as she hurried across the road 
towards a black London taxicab.
He hurried to the window and wrenched it up. He leant out
“I suppose dinner’s out of the question, then?” he yelled.

Chapter 3
“YOU JUST MISSED THOR, I’m afraid,” said Kate Schechter. “He suddenly went off 
in a fit of Nordic angst about something or other.”
She waved a hand vaguely at the gaping, jagged hole in the window that 
overlooked Primrose Hill. “Probably gone to the zoo to stare at elks again. 
He’ll turn up again in a few hours, full of beer and remorse and carrying a 
large pane of glass that won’t fit. So he’ll then get upset about that and break 
something else.”
“We had a bit of a misunderstanding on the phone, I’m afraid,” said Dirk. “But I 
don’t really know how to avoid them.”
“You can’t,” said Kate. “He’s not a happy god. It’s not his world. Never will 
be, either.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Oh, there’s plenty to do. Just repairing things keeps me busy.”
It wasn’t what Dirk meant, but he realised she knew that and didn’t probe. She 
went into the kitchen to fetch the tea at that point anyway. He subsided into an 
elderly armchair and peered around the small flat. He noticed that there was now 
quite a collection of books on Norse mythology stacked on Kate’s desk, all 
sprouting numerous bookmarks and annotated record cards. She was obviously doing 
her best to master the situation. But one book, buried about four inches into 
the wall, and obviously flung there by superhuman force, gave some idea of the 
sort of difficulties she was up against.
“Don’t even ask,” she said, when she returned bearing tea. “Tell me what’s going 
on with you instead.”
“I did something this afternoon,” he said, stirring the pale, sickly tea and 
suddenly remembering that, of course, Americans had no idea how to make it, 
“that was incredibly stupid.”
“I thought you seemed a bit grim.”
“Probably the cause rather than the effect. I’d had an appalling week, plus I 
had indigestion, and I suppose it made me a bit . . .”
“Don’t tell me. You met a very attractive and desirable woman and were 
incredibly pompous and rude to her.”
Dirk stared at her. “How did you know that?” he breathed.
“You do it all the time. You did it to me.”
“I did not!” protested Dirk.
“You certainly did!”
“No, no, no.”
“I promise you, you . . .”
“Hang on,” interrupted Dirk. “I remember now. Hmm. Interesting. And you’re 
saying I do that all the time?”
“Maybe not all the time. Presumably you have to get some sleep occasionally.”
“But you claim that, typically, I’m rude and pompous to attractive women?”
He wrestled his way up out of the armchair and fished around in his pocket for a 
notebook.
“I didn’t mean you to get quite so serious about it, it’s not exactly a major . 
. . well, now I come to think about it I suppose it probably is a major 
character flaw. What are you doing?”
“Oh, just making a note. Odd thing about being a private detective—you spend 
your time finding out little things about other people that nobody else knows, 
but then you discover that there are all sorts of things that everybody else 
knows about you, which you don’t. For instance, did you know that I walk in an 
odd way? A kind of strutting waddle, someone described it as.”
“Yes, of course I do. Everybody who knows you knows that.”
“Except me, you see,” said Dirk. “Now that I know I’ve been trying to catch 
myself at it as I walk past shop windows. Doesn’t work, of course. All I ever 
see is myself frozen mid-stride with one foot in the air and gaping like a fish. 
Anyway, I’m drawing up a little list, to which I have now added, ‘Am always 
extremely rude and pompous to attractive women.’ ”
Dirk stood and looked at the note for a second or two.
“You know,” he said, thoughtfully, “that could explain an astonishing number of 
things.”
“Oh come on,” said Kate. “You’re taking this a bit literally. I just meant I’ve 
noticed that when you’re not feeling good, or you’re on the spot in some way, 
you tend to get defensive, and that’s when you . . . are you writing all this 
down as well?”
“Of course. It’s all useful stuff. I might end up mounting a full-scale 
investigation into myself. Damn all else to do at the moment.”
“No work?”
“No,” said Dirk, gloomily.
Kate tried to give him a shrewd look, but he was staring out of the window.
“And is the fact that you don’t have any work connected in any way to the fact 
that you were very rude to an attractive woman?”
“Just barging in like that,” muttered Dirk half to himself.
“Don’t tell me,” said Kate, “She wanted you to look for a lost cat.”
“Oh no,” said Dirk. “Not even as grand as that. Gone are the days when I used to 
have entire cats to look for.”
“What do you mean?”
Dirk described the cat. “See what I have to contend with?” he added.
Kate stared at him. “You’re not serious!”
“I am,” he said.
“Half a cat?”
“Yes. Just the back half.”
“I thought you said the front half?”
“Oh no, she’s got that. That was there alright. She only wanted me to look for 
the back half.” Dirk stared thoughtfully at London over the raised rim of his 
china teacup.
Kate looked at him suspicously. “But isn’t that . . . very, very, very weird?”
Dirk turned and faced her. “I would say,” he declared, “that it was the single 
most weird and extraordinary phenomenon I have witnessed in a lifetime of 
witnessing weird and extraordinary phenomena. Unfortunately,” he added, turning 
away again “I wasn;t in the mood for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had indigestion. I’m always bad tempered when I’ve got indigestion.”
“And just because of that you—”
“It was more than that. I’d lost the piece of paper, too.”
“What piece of paper?”
“That I wrote down her appointment on. Turned up under a pile of bank 
statements.”
“Which you never open or look at.”
Dirk frowned and opened his notebook again. “Never open bank statements” he 
wrote thoughtfully. “So, when she arrived,” he continued after he put the book 
back in his pocket, “I wasn’t expecting her, so I wasn’t in command of the 
situation. Which meant that . . .” he fished out his notebook and wrote in it 
again.
“Now what are you putting?” asked Kate.
“Control freak,” said Dirk. “My first instinct was to make her sit down, then 
pretend to get on with something while I composed myself. I looked around and I 
noticed there wasn’t a chair—God knows where it had gone—which meant that she 
had to stand over me, which I also hate. Thats when I turned really ratty.” He 
peered at his notebook again and flipped through it.
“Strange convergence and tiny little events, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here was a case of the most extraordinary kind. A beautiful, intelligent, 
and obviously well-off woman arrives and offers to pay me to investigate a 
phenomenon that challenges the very foundation of everything that we know of 
physics and biology, and I . . . turn it down. Astonishing. Normally, you’d have 
to nail me to the floor to keep me away from a case like that. Unless—” he added 
thoughtfully, waving his notebook slowly in the air, “unless you knew me this 
well.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Well, I don’t know. The whole sequence of little obstacles would have been 
completely invisible except for one thing. When I eventually found the piece of 
paper I’d written her details on, the phone number was missing. The bottom of 
the sheet of paper had been torn off. So I have no easy way of finding her.”
“Well, you could try calling directory information. What’s her name?”
“Smith. Hopeless. But don’t you think it odd that the number had been torn off?”
“No, not really, if you want an honest answer. People tear off scraps of paper 
all the time. I can see you’re probably in the mood to construct some massive 
space/time bending conspiracy theory out of it, but I suspect you just tore off 
a strip of paper to clean your ears out with.”
“You’d worry about space/time if you’d seen that cat.”
“Maybe you just need to get your contact lenses cleaned.”
“I don’t wear contact lenses.”
“Maybe it’s time you did.”
Dirk sighed. “I suppose there are times when my imaginings do get a little 
overwrought,” he said. “I’ve just had too little to do recently. Business has 
been so slow, I’ve even been reduced to looking up to see if they’d got my 
number right in the Yellow Pages and then calling it myself just to check that 
it was working. Kate . . . ?”
“Yes, Dirk?”
“You would tell me if you thought I was going mad or anything, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s what friends are for.”
“Are they?” mused Dirk. “Are they? You know, I’ve often wondered. The reason I 
ask is that when I phoned myself up . . .”
“Yes?”
“I answered.”
“Dirk, old friend,” said Kate, “you need a rest.”
“I’ve had nothing but rest,” grumbled Dirk.
“In which case you need something to do.”
“Yes,” said Dirk. “But what?”
Kate sighed. “I can’t tell you what to do, Dirk. No one can ever tell you 
anything. You never believe anything unless you’ve worked it out for yourself.”
“Hmmm,” said Dirk, opening his notebook again. “Now that is an interesting one.”

Chapter 4
“JOSH,” said a voice in a kind-of Swedish-Irish accent.
Dirk ignored it. He unloaded his small bag of shopping into bits of his badly 
disfigured kitchen. It was mostly frozen pizza, so it mostly went into his small 
freezer cabinet, which mostly filled with old, white, clenched things that he 
was now too frightened to try to identify.
“Jude,” said the Swedish-Irish voice.
“Don’t make it bad,” hummed Dirk to himself. He turned on the radio for the 
six-o’clock news. It featured mostly gloomy stuff. Pollution, disaster, civil 
war, famine, etc., and, just as an added bonus, speculation as to whether the 
Earth was going to be hit by a giant comet or not.
“Julian,” said the Swedish-Irish voice, tinnily. Dirk shook his head. Surely 
not.
More on the comet story: there was a wide range of views about precisely what 
was going to happen. Some authorities said that it was going to hit Sheridan, 
Wyoming, on the seventeenth of June. NASA scientists said that it would burn up 
in the upper atmosphere and not reach the surface. A team of Indian astronomers 
said that it would miss the Earth altogether by several million miles before 
going on to plunge into the sun. The British authorities said it would do 
whatever the Americans said it would do.
“Julio,” said the voice. No response.
Dirk missed the next thing the radio said because of the noise of his front wall 
flapping. His front wall was made of large, thick sheets of polythene these 
days, because of an incident a few weeks earlier when, in a radical departure 
from the sort of behaviour that Dirk’s neighbours liked to see, a Tornado jet 
fighter had exploded out of the front of Dirk’s house and then plunged screaming 
into Finsbury.
There was, of course, a perfectly logical explanation for this, and Dirk was 
tired of giving it. The reason that Dirk had had a Tornado jet fighter in his 
hallway was that he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. Of course he 
hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. As far as he was concerned, it was 
merely a large and bad-tempered eagle that he had trapped in his hallway the 
same way anybody would to stop it dive-bombing him the whole time. That a large 
Tornado jet fighter had, for a brief while, taken on the shape of an eagle was 
on account of an unfortunate airborne encounter with the Thunder God, Thor, of 
legend, and . . .
This was the part of the story where Dirk usually had to struggle a little to 
sustain his audience’s patient attention, which he would, if successful, further 
strain by explaining that the Thunder God, Thor, had then thought better of his 
fit of temper and decided to put things right by returning the Tornado to its 
proper shape. Unfortunately, Thor, being a god, had had his mind on higher or at 
least other things, and hadn’t called up, as any mere mortal might have done, to 
check if this was a convenient moment. He had just decreed it done and it was 
done, bang.
Devastation.
And also the insurance problem from hell. The insurance companies involved had 
all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk 
had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic 
state, and therefore any “act of God” defined in a legal document must refer to 
the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from 
Norway. And so on.
Meanwhile, Dirk’s house—not an especially grand place to start with—was propped 
up with scaffolding and tented with polythene, and Dirk had no idea when he was 
going to be able to get it repaired. If the insurance company failed to pay 
up—which seemed increasingly likely in light of the strategy that insurance 
companies had adopted in recent years, of merely advertising their services 
rather than actually providing them—Dirk was going to have to . . . well, he 
didn’t quite know what. He had no money. None of his own, at least. He had some 
of the bank’s money, but how much he had no idea.
“Justin,” intoned the little voice. There was no answering response.
Dirk tipped his unopened bank statements on to the kitchen table, and stared at 
them with loathing. It seemed to him for a moment that the envelopes were 
vibrating slightly, and even that the whole of space and time was beginning to 
revolve slowly around them and get sucked into their event horizon, but he was 
probably imagining it.
“Karl.” Nothing. “Karel. Keir.” Nothing. Nothing.
Dirk made some coffee, taking the long route round his kitchen, in order to 
avoid coming too close to his bank statements, now that he had put them down. 
Viewed in a certain light, the entire structure of his adult life could be seen 
as a means of avoiding opening his bank statements. Someone else’s bank 
statements—now that was a different matter. He was rarely happier than when 
poring over someone else’s bank statements: he always found them to be rich in 
colour and narrative drive, particularly if he’d had to steam them open. But the 
prospect of opening his own gave him the screaming heebie-jeebies.
“Keith,” said the voice, hopefully, nasally. Nothing.
“Kelvin.” No.
Dirk poured his coffee as slowly as he could, for he realised that the time had 
finally come. He had to open the statements and learn the worst. He selected the 
largest knife he could find and advanced on them, theateningly.
“Kendall.” Silence.
In the end he did it almost nonchalantly, with a sadistic little flick-slit 
movement. He quite enjoyed it, in fact, and even felt fashionably vicious. In a 
few seconds the four envelopes—his financial history of the last four 
months—were open. Dirk laid their contents out before him.
“Kendrick.” Nothing.
“Kennedy.” The tinny little voice was beginning to get on Dirk’s nerves. He 
glanced at the corner of the room. Two mournful eyes looked at him in silent 
bewilderment.
As Dirk at last looked at the figures at the bottom of the last sheet of paper, 
a kind of swimmy feeling assailed him. He gasped sharply. The table began to 
bend and sway. He felt as if the hands of fate had started kneading his 
shoulders. He had imagined it was bad, in fact for the last few weeks he had 
imagined little else other than how bad it might be, but even in his worst 
imaginings he had no idea it might be this bad.
Clammy things happened in his throat. He could not possibly, possibly be over 
£22,000 overdrawn. He pushed his chair back from the kitchen table, and for a 
few moments just sat there, throbbing. £22,000 . . .
The word “Kenneth” floated mockingly through the room.
As he rapidly cast his mind back over what he could remember of his expenditures 
over the last few weeks—an ill-considered shirt here, a reckless bun there, a 
wild weekend in the Isle of Wight—he realised that he must be right. He could 
not possibly be £22,000 overdrawn.
He took a deep breath and looked at the figures once more.
There it was again. £22,347.43.
There must be some mistake. Some terrible, terrible mistake. The chances were, 
of course, that he had made it, and as he stared, trembling, at the paper he 
realised, quite suddenly, that he had.
He had been looking for a negative number and had therefore assumed that that 
was what he was looking at. In fact his account stood at £22,347.43. In credit.
Credit . . .
He’d never known such a thing. Didn’t even know what it looked like. Hadn’t 
recognised it. Slowly, carefully, almost as if the figures might fall off the 
page and get lost on the floor, he sifted through the sheets one by one to try 
to find out where on earth all this money had come from. “Kenny,” “Kentigern,” 
and “Kermit” slipped by unheard.
It was immediately clear that it was regular amounts that had been coming in, 
once a week. There had been seven of them—so far. The most recent one had come 
in the Friday before last, which was as far as these statements went. The odd 
thing was that though the amounts were regular, they were untidy amounts, 
similar each week, but not exactly the same. The previous Friday’s payment was 
£3,267.34. The previous Thursday’s (they had each come in at the end of the 
week, three of them on a Thursday, four on a Friday) was for £3,232.57. The week 
before it had been £3,319.14. And so on.
Dirk stood up and took a deep breath. What the hell was going on? He felt that 
his whole world was spinning very slowly in what was, as far as he could judge, 
an anticlockwise direction. That prompted a vague recollection that the last 
time he had drunk any tequila, it had made his world spin slowly in a clockwise 
direction. That was obviously what he needed if he was going to be able to think 
about this clearly. He rummaged hurriedly through a cupboard full of dusty 
nine-tenths empty bottles of half-forgotten rums and whiskies and found some. A 
half-full bottle of mezcal. He poured himself a finger in the bottom of a teacup 
and hurriedly returned to his statements, suddenly panicking in case the figures 
vanished while he wasn’t looking.
They were still there. Irregularly large sums regularly paid in. His head began 
to swim again. What were they? Interest payments that had been accidentally 
credited to the wrong account? If they were interest payments, that would 
account for the fluctuations in the amounts. But it still didn’t make sense for 
the simple reason that over £3,000 interest a week represented the interest on 
two or three million pounds and was not the sort of thing that the owner of such 
an amount of money was going to allow to be misplaced, let alone for seven weeks 
in a row. He took a pull on the mezcal. It marched around his mouth waving its 
fists, waited a moment or two, and then started to beat up his brain.
He wasn’t thinking rationally about this, he realised. The problem was that they 
were his own accounts, and he was used to reading other people’s. Since they 
were his own, it was in fact possible for him just to phone up the bank and ask. 
Except that, of course, they’d be closed now. And he had a horrible feeling that 
if he phoned them up, the response would be “Whoops, sorry, wrong account. Thank 
you for bringing this error to our attention. How stupid of us to imagine that 
this money could possibly belong to you.” Obviously he had to try to work out 
where it was from before he asked the bank. In fact he had to get the money out 
of the bank before he asked them. He probably had to get to Fiji or somewhere 
before he asked them. Except—suppose the money continued to come in?
On reapplying his attention to the papers, he realised something else that would 
have occurred to him straightaway if he hadn’t been so flustered. There was, of 
course, a code next to each entry. The purpose of the code was to tell him what 
kind of entry it was. He looked the code up. Easy. Each payment had reached his 
account by international transfer.
Hmmm.
That would also account for the fluctuations. International exchange rates. If 
the same amount of a foreign currency was being transferred each week, then the 
variations in the rate would ensure that a slightly differing amount actually 
arrived on each occasion. It would also explain why it didn’t arrive on exactly 
the same day each week. Although it only took less than a second to make a 
computerised international transfer of money, the banks liked to make as much 
fuss as they possibly could about it so that the funds would swill around 
profitably in their system for a while.
But which country were the payments coming from? And why?
“Kevin,” said the Irish-Swedish voice. “Kieran.”
“Oh, shut up!” shouted Dirk suddenly.
That provoked a response. The small border terrier lying, perplexed, in a basket 
in the corner of the room looked up excitedly and yipped with pleasure. It had 
not reacted at all to any of the names that the elderly computer on the table 
next to it had been reciting from a text file of babies’ names, but the creature 
obviously just enjoyed being told to shut up and was keen for more.
“Kimberly,” said the computer. Nothing. The dog with no name looked 
disappointed.
“Kirby.”
“Kirk.” The dog slowly settled back down into its basket of old newspapers and 
resumed its previous posture of baffled distress.
Old newspapers. That was what Dirk needed.
A couple of hours later he had the answer, or at least some kind of an answer. 
Nothing that went so far as to make any kind of actual sense, but enough to make 
Dirk feel an encouraging surge of excitement: he had managed to unlock a part of 
the puzzle. How big a part he didn’t know. As yet he had no idea how big a 
puzzle he was dealing with. No idea at all.
He had collected a representative sample of the newspapers of the last few weeks 
from under the dog, under the sofa, under his bed, scattered around the 
bathroom, and, crucially, had managed to secure two damp but vital copies of the 
Financial Times from an old tramp in return for a blanket, some cider, and a 
copy of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. An 
odd request, he thought, as he walked back from the tiny scrap of park, but 
probably no odder than his. He was constantly reminded of how startlingly 
different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the 
left.
Using the figures from the papers, he was able to construct a map of the 
movements of each of the world’s major currencies over the last few weeks and 
see how they compared with the fluctuations in the amounts that had been paid 
into his account every week. The answer sprang into focus immediately. U.S. 
dollars. Five thousand of them, to be precise. If $5,000 had been transferred 
from the U.S. to the U.K. every week, then it would have arrived as more or less 
exactly the amounts that had been showing up in his account. Eureka. Time for a 
celebratory fridge raid.
Dirk hunkered down in front of the TV with three slices of cold pizza and a can 
of beer, put on the radio as well, and also a ZZ Top CD. He needed to think.
Someone was paying him $5,000 a week, and had been doing so for seven weeks. 
This was astounding news. He ruminated on his pizza. Not only that, but he was 
being paid by someone in America. He took another bite, rich in cheese, 
pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and egg. He hadn’t spent much time in 
America and didn’t know anyone there—or indeed anywhere else on the Earth’s 
crust—who would be wantonly shoveling unsolicited bucks at him like this.
Another thought struck him, but this time it wasn’t about the money. A ZZ Top 
song about TV dinners made him think for a moment about his pizza, and he looked 
at it with sudden puzzlement. Cheese, pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and 
egg. No wonder he’d had indigestion today. The other three slices were what he’d 
had for breakfast. It was a combination to which he, probably uniquely in all 
the world, was addicted, and which he had some months ago forsworn because his 
gut couldn’t cope with it anymore. He hadn’t thought twice about it when he’d 
blundered across it in the fridge this morning because it was exactly the sort 
of thing a person liked to find in a fridge. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask 
who had put it there. But it hadn’t been him.
Slowly, disgustingly, he removed the half-chewed portion from his mouth. He 
didn’t believe in the pizza fairy.
He disposed of the half-masticated gungey bits and then examined the two 
remaining slices. There was nothing unusual or suspicious about them at all. It 
was exactly the pizza he regularly used to eat until he made himself give it up. 
He phoned his local pizza restaurant and asked them if anybody else had been in 
to buy a pizza with that particular combination of toppings.
“Ah, you’re the bloke who has the gastricciana, are you?” said the pizza chef.
“The what?”
“It’s what we call it. No, mate, nobody else has ever bought that wonderful 
combination, believe me.”
Dirk felt somewhat dissatisfied with aspects of this conversation, but he let it 
pass. He put the phone down thoughtfully. He felt that something very strange 
was going on and he didn’t know what.
“No one knows anything.”
The words caught his attention and he glanced up at the TV. A breezy Californian 
in the sort of Hawaiian shirt that could serve, if needed, as a distress signal 
was standing in the bright sunshine and answering questions, Dirk quickly worked 
out, about the approaching meteor. He called the meteor Toodle Pip.
“Toodle Pip?” asked his interviewer, the BBC’s California correspondent.
“Yeah. We call it Toodle Pip because anything it hits, you could pretty much say 
good-bye to.”
The Californian grinned.
“So you’re saying it is going to hit?”
“I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.” “Well, the scientists at NASA are 
saying . . .”
“NASA,” said the Californian genially, “is talking shit. They don’t know. If we 
don’t know, they sure as hell don’t know. Here at Similarity Engines we have the 
most massively powerful parallel computers on Earth, so when I say we don’t 
know, I know what I’m talking about. We know that we don’t know, and we know why 
we don’t know. NASA doesn’t even know that.”
The next item on the news was also from California, and was about a lobby group 
called Green Shoots, which was attracting a lot of support. Its view, and it was 
one that spoke to the battered psyches of many Americans, was that the world was 
much better able to take care of itself than we were, so there was no point in 
getting all worked up about it or trying to moderate our natural behaviour. 
“Don’t worry,” said their slogan, quoting the title of a popular song. “Be 
happy.”
“Great Balls of Fire,” thought Dirk to himself, quoting another.
“Scientists in Australia,” said someone on the radio “are trying to teach 
kangaroos to speak.” Dirk decided that what he most needed was a good night’s 
sleep.
In the morning, things suddenly seemed wonderfully clear and simple. He didn’t 
know the answer to anything, but he knew what to do about it. A few phone calls 
to the bank had established that tracing the money back to its origins was going 
to be hideously difficult, partly because it was an inherently complicated 
business anyway, partly because it quickly became clear that whoever had been 
paying the money to him had taken some trouble to cover his or her tracks, but 
mostly because the man on the foreign desk at his bank had a cleft palate.
Life was too short, the weather too fine, and the world too full of interesting 
and exciting pitfalls. Dirk would go sailing.
Life, he was fond of telling himself, was like an ocean. You can either grind 
your way across it like a motorboat or you can follow the winds and the 
currents—in other words, go sailing. He had the wind: he was being paid by 
someone. Presumably that someone was paying him to do something, but what he had 
omitted to say. Well, that was a client’s privilege. But Dirk felt that he 
should respond to this generous urge to pay him, that he should do something. 
But what? Well, he was a private detective, and what private detectives did when 
they were being paid was mostly to follow people.
So that was simple. Dirk would follow someone.
Which meant that now he had to find a good current: someone to follow. Well, 
there was his office window, with a whole world surging by outside it—or a few 
people at least. He would pick one. He began to tingle with excitement that his 
investigation was finally under way, or would be as soon as the next person—no, 
not the next person, the . . . fifth next person walked around the corner that 
he could see on the other side of the road.
He was immediately glad that he had decided to build in a brief period of mental 
preparation. Almost immediately number one, a large duvet of a woman, came 
around the corner with numbers two and three being dragged unwillingly along 
with her—her children, whom she nagged and scolded with every step. Dirk 
breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t going to be her.
He stood by the side of his window, quiet with anticipation. For a few minutes 
no one further came round the corner. Dirk watched as the large woman bullied 
her two children into the newsagent opposite, despite their wails that they 
wanted to go home and watch TV. A minute or two later she bullied them back out 
into the sunshine again despite the their wails that they wanted an ice cream 
and a Judge Dredd comic.
She yanked them away up the road, and the scene fell quiet.
The scene was a triangular-shaped one, because of the angle at which two roads 
collided with each other. Dirk had recently moved to this new office—new to him, 
that was; the actual building was old and dilapidated and remained standing more 
out of habit than from any inherent structural integrity—and much preferred it 
to his previous one, which was miles from anywhere. In his old one he could have 
waited all week for five people to walk around a corner.
Number four appeared.
Number four was a postman with a pushcart. A small bead of perspiration appeared 
on Dirk’s forehead as he began to realise how badly wrong his plan could go.
And here was number five.
Number five almost lurched into sight. He was in his late twenties, tallish, 
with ginger hair and a black leather bomber jacket. Having arrived round the 
corner, he then stopped and stood still for a moment. He looked around as if 
half-expecting to meet somebody. Dirk started to move, when suddenly number six 
walked round the corner.
Number six was a different proposition altogether: a rather delicious-looking 
woman in jeans, with short, thick black hair. Dirk swore to himself and wondered 
if he hadn’t secretly meant six instead of five. But no. An undertaking was an 
undertaking, and he was being paid a lot of money. He owed it to whoever was 
paying the money to stick to whatever agreement it was that they hadn’t actually 
got. Number five was still standing there dithering on the street corner, and 
Dirk hurried quickly downstairs to take up the chase.
As he opened the cracked front door he was met by number four, the postman with 
the pushcart, who handed him a small bundle of letters. Dirk pocketed them and 
hurried out into the street and the spring sunshine.
He hadn’t followed anybody for quite a while, and discovered that he had lost 
the knack. He set off so enthusiastically in pursuit of his quarry that he 
realised he was walking far too quickly and would in fact have to walk straight 
past him. He did so, paused for a few confused seconds, turned, round, and 
started to walk back, which caused him to collide directly with his quarry. Dirk 
was so flummoxed to find that he had actually physically hit the person he was 
supposed to be stealthily tailing that in order to allay any suspicion he jumped 
onto a passing bus and headed off down Rosebery Avenue.
This, he felt, was not an auspicious beginning. He sat on the bus for a few 
seconds, completely stunned at his own ineptness. He was being paid $5,000 a 
week for this. Well, in a sense he was. He became aware that people were looking 
at him slightly oddly. But not nearly as oddly, he reflected, as they would do 
if they had the slightest idea about what he was actually doing.
He twisted round in his seat and squinted back down the road, wondering what 
would be a good next move. Normally, if you were tailing somebody, it was a 
problem if they unexpectedly jumped onto a bus, but it was almost more of a 
problem if you unexpectedly jumped on one yourself. It was probably best if he 
just got off again and tried to resume the trail, though how on earth he was 
going to look unobtrusive now, he didn’t know. As soon as the bus next came to a 
halt, he jumped off again and started walking back up Rosebery Avenue. Before he 
had gone very far, he noticed his quarry walking down the road in his direction. 
He reflected that he had managed to pick a remarkably helpful and cooperative 
subject, and better than he deserved. Time to get a grip and be a little more 
circumspect. He was almost at the door of a small café, so he ducked inside it. 
He stood at the counter pretending to dither for a moment over the sandwiches 
until he sensed that the subject had passed.
The subject didn’t pass. The subject walked in and stood behind him at the 
counter. In a panic, Dirk ordered a tuna and sweetcorn roll, which he hated, and 
a cappuccino, which went particularly badly with fish, and hurried off to sit at 
one of the small tables. He wanted to be able to bury himself in a newspaper, 
but he didn’t have one, so he had to make do with his post. He pored over it 
intently. Various bills of the usual preposterous and wildly overoptimistic 
kind. Various circulars of the strange type that private detectives tended to 
receive—catalogues full of tiny electronic gadgets all designed to counteract 
each other; ads for peculiar grades of film or revolutionary new types of thin 
plastic strips. Dirk couldn’t be bothered with any of it, though he did pause 
for a moment over a flyer for a newly published book on advanced surveillance 
techniques. He screwed it up crossly and threw it on the floor.
The last envelope was another bank statement. His bank had long ago got into the 
habit of sending them to him on a weekly basis, just to make the point, really. 
They hadn’t yet adjusted to his new sheen of solvency, or didn’t trust it. 
Probably hadn’t even noticed it, in fact. He opened the statement, still only 
half-believing.
Yes.
Another £3,253.29. Last Friday. Incredible. Inexplicable. But there.
There was also something else odd, though. It took him a moment or two to spot 
it, because he was keeping half an eye expertly trained on his subject, who was 
buying coffee and a doughnut and paying for it out of a fan of twenties.
The last entry on Dirk’s statement was for a cash withdrawal on his debit card: 
£500. Yesterday. The statement had obviously been sent out at close of business 
yesterday, and it had the day’s transactions up to date. That was all very 
excellent and efficient and a fine testimony to the efficacy of modern computer 
technology, of course, but the fact was that Dirk hadn’t withdrawn £500 
yesterday, or any other day for that matter. His card must have been stolen. 
Hell’s bells! He fished anxiously for his wallet.
No. His cards were there. Safe.
He thought about it. He couldn’t envisage any way in which a fraudster could 
make an actual cash withdrawal without the actual card. A horrible clammy 
thought suddenly grabbed his stomach. These were his own bank statements he’d 
been getting, weren’t they? He checked in alarm. Yes. His name, his address, his 
account number. He had double-checked the other ones last night, several times. 
Definitely his statements. They just didn’t seem to be his financial 
transactions, that was all.
Time to concentrate on the job in hand. He looked up. His quarry was sitting two 
tables away, patiently munching his bun and staring into the middle distance.
After a moment or two he stood up, brushed some crumbs off his leather jacket, 
turned, and walked to the door. He paused for a moment, as if considering which 
way to go, and then set off the way he had been going, strolling casually. Dirk 
slipped his mail into his pocket and quietly followed.
He had picked a good subject, he soon realised. The man’s ginger hair shone like 
a beacon in the spring sunshine, so whenever he was briefly swallowed up in a 
crowd, it would only be a matter of seconds before Dirk would catch sight of him 
again, meandering idly along the street.
Dirk wondered what he did for a living. Not a lot, it seemed—or at least, not a 
lot today. A pleasant walk through Holborn and into the West End. Loafing around 
in a couple of bookshops for half an hour (Dirk made a note of the titles his 
quarry browsed through), stopping for (another) coffee in an Italian café to 
glance through a copy of The Stage (which probably explained why he had so much 
free time for loafing around in bookshops and Italian cafés), and then a long, 
leisurely amble up through Regent’s Park and then across Camden and back toward 
Islington—Dirk began to think that this business of following people was really 
a rather congenial one. Fresh air, exercise—he was feeling in such tremendously 
good spirits by the end of the day that as soon he strode back in through his 
front door—or rather, his front polythene flap—it was instantly clear to him 
that the dog’s name was Kierkegaard.

Chapter 5
SOLUTIONS NEARLY ALWAYS come from the direction you least expect, which means 
there’s no point trying to look in that direction because it won’t be coming 
from there.
This was an observation that Dirk mentioned a lot to people, and he mentioned it 
again to Kate that evening when he phoned her.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,” she said, trying to wedge a 
phrase into his monologue and wiggle it about. “Are you telling me . . .”
“I’m telling you that the late husband of the woman who’s forgotten her dog’s 
name was a biographer.”
“But . . .”
“And I expect you know that biographers often name their pets after their 
subjects.”
“No. I . . .”
“It’s so they’ve got someone to shout at when they get fed up. You spend hours 
wading through someone banging on about the teleological suspension of the 
ethical or whatever and sometimes you just need to be able to shout ‘Oh, shut 
up, Kierkegaard, for Christ’s sake.’ Hence the dog.”
“Dir . . .”
“Some biographers use a small wooden ornament or a potted plant, but most prefer 
something you can get a good yap out of. Feedback, you see. Speaking of which, 
do I sense that you have an observation to make?”
“Dirk, are you telling me that you spent all day following a total stranger?”
“Absolutely. And I intend to do the same tomorrow. I shall be skulking near his 
front door bright and early. Well, bright at least. No point in being early. 
He’s an actor.”
“You could get locked up for that!”
“Occupational hazard. Kate, I’m being paid $5,000 a week. You have to be 
prepared to . . .”
“But not to follow a total stranger!”
“Whoever is employing me knows my methods. I am applying them.”
“You don’t know anything about the person who’s employing you.”
“On the contrary, I know a great deal.”
“All right, what’s his name?”
“Frank.”
“Frank what?”
“No idea. Look, I don’t know that his name is Frank. His—or her—name has nothing 
to do with it. The point is that they have a problem. The problem is serious, or 
they wouldn’t be paying me a substantial amount of money to solve it. And the 
problem is ineffable or they’d tell me what it is. Whoever it is knows who I am, 
where I am, and precisely how best to reach me.”
“Or maybe the bank’s just made an error. Hard to believe, I know, but . . .”
“Kate, you think I’m talking nonsense, but I’m not. Listen. In the past, people 
would stare into the fire for hours when they wanted to think. Or stare at the 
sea. The endless dancing shapes and patterns would reach far deeper into our 
minds than we could manage by reason and logic. You see, logic can only proceed 
from the premises and assumptions we already make, so we just drive round and 
round in little circles like little clockwork cars. We need dancing shapes to 
lift us and carry us, but they’re harder to find these days. You can’t stare 
into a radiator. You can’t stare into the sea. Well, you can, but it’s covered 
with plastic bottles and used condoms, so you just sit there getting cross. All 
we have to stare into is the white noise. The stuff we sometimes call 
information, but which is really just a babble rising in the air.”
“But without logic . . .”
“Logic comes afterwards. It’s how we retrace our steps. It’s being wise after 
the event. Before the event you have to be very silly.”
“Ah. So that’s what you’re doing.”
“Yes. Well, it’s solved one problem already. I’ve no idea how long it would have 
taken me to work out that the wretched dog was called Kierkegaard. It was only 
by the happiest of chances that my surveillance subject happened to pick out a 
biography of Kierkegaard, which I then discovered, when I checked it out myself, 
had been written by the man who subsequently threw himself off a crane with 
elastic round his legs.”
“But the two cases had nothing to do with each other.”
“Have I mentioned that I believe in the fundamental connectedness of all things? 
I think I have.”
“Yes.”
“Which is why I must now go and investigate some of the other books he was 
interested in before getting myself ready for tomorrow’s expedition.”
“. . .”
“I can hear you shaking your head in sorrow and bewilderment. Don’t worry. 
Everything is getting nicely out of control.”
“If you say so, Dirk. Oh, by the way, what does ‘ineffable’ actually mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Dirk tersely, “but I intend to find out.”

Chapter 6
THE FOLLOWING MORNING the weather was so foul it hardly deserved the name, and 
Dirk decided to call it Stanley instead.
Stanley wasn’t a good downpour. Nothing wrong with a good downpour for clearing 
the air. Stanley was the sort of thing you needed a good downpour to clear the 
air of. Stanley was muggy, close, and oppressive, like someone large and sweaty 
pressed up against you in a tube train. Stanley didn’t rain, but every so often 
he dribbled on you.
Dirk stood outside in the Stanley.
The actor had kept him waiting for over an hour now, and Dirk was beginning to 
wish that he had stuck by his own opinion that actors never got up in the 
morning. Instead of which he had turned up rather eagerly outside the actor’s 
flat at about 8:30 and then stood behind a tree for an hour.
Nearly an hour and a half now. There was a brief moment of excitement when a 
motorcycle messenger arrived and delivered a small package, but that was about 
it. Dirk lurked about twenty yards from the actor’s door.
The Motorcycle Messenger Arrival Incident had surprised him a bit. The actor 
didn’t seem to be a particularly prosperous one. He looked as if he were more in 
the still-knocking-on-people’s-doors bit of his career than in the 
having-scripts-biked-round-to-him bit.
Time dragged by. Dirk had read through the small collection of newspapers he’d 
brought with him twice, and checked through the contents of his wallet and 
pockets several times: the usual collection of business cards for people he had 
no recollection of meeting, unidentifiable phone numbers on scraps of paper, 
credit cards, cheque book, his passport (he had suddenly remembered that he had 
left it in another jacket when his quarry had paused for a longish time at the 
window of a travel agent yesterday), his toothbrush (he never travelled without 
his toothbrush, with the result that it was completely unusable), and his 
notebook.
He even consulted his own horoscope in one of the papers, the one written by a 
disreputable friend of his who toiled unscrupulously under the name of The Great 
Zaganza. First he glanced at some of the entries under other birth signs, just 
to get a feel for the kind of mood the GZ was in. Mellow, it seemed, at first 
sight. “Your ability to take the long view will help you though some of the 
minor difficulties you experience when Mercury . . .,” “Past weeks have strained 
your patience, but new possibilities will now start to emerge as the sun . . . 
,” “Beware of allowing others to take advantage of your good nature. Resolve 
will be especially called for when . . .” Boring, humdrum stuff. He read his own 
horoscope. “Today you will meet a three-ton rhinoceros called Desmond.”
Dirk clapped the paper shut in irritation, and at that moment the door suddenly 
opened. The actor emerged with purposeful air. He was carrying a small suitcase, 
a shoulder bag, and a coat. Something was happening. Dirk glanced at his watch. 
Three minutes past ten. He made a quick note in his book. His pulse quickened.
A taxi was coming down the street towards them. The actor hailed it. Damn! 
Something as simple as that. He was going to get away. The actor climbed into 
the cab and it drove off down the street, past Dirk. Dirk swivelled to watch it, 
and caught a momentary glimpse of the actor looking back through the rear 
window. Dirk watched helplessly and then glanced up and down the street in the 
vain hope that . . .
Almost miraculously a second taxi appeared suddenly at the top of the street, 
heading towards him. Dirk shot out an arm, and it drew to a halt beside him.
“Follow that cab!” exclaimed Dirk, clambering into the back.
“I been a cabbie over twenty years now,” said the cabbie as he slid back into 
the traffic. “Never had anybody actually say that to me.”
Dirk sat perched on the edge of his seat, watching the cab in front as it 
threaded its way through the slow, agonising throttle of the London traffic.
“Now that may seem like a little thing to you, but it’s interesting, innit?”
“What?” said Dirk.
“Anytime you see anything on the telly where someone jumps in a cab, it’s always 
‘Follow that cab,’ innit?”
“Is it? I’ve never noticed,” said Dirk.
“Well, you wouldn’t,” said the cabbie. “You’re not a cabbie. What you notice 
depends on who you are. If you’re a cabbie, then what you especially notice when 
you watch the telly,” continued the cabbie, “is the cabbies. See what the 
cabbies are up to. See?”
“Er, yes,” said Dirk.
“But on the telly you never actually see the cabbies, see? You only see the 
people in the back of the cab. Like, the cabbie’s never of any interest.”
“Er, I suppose so,” said Dirk. “Um, can you still see the cab we’re supposed to 
be following?”
“Oh Yeah, I’m following him OK. So, the only time you ever actually ever see the 
cabbie is when the fare says something to him. And when a fare says something to 
a cabbie in a drama, you know what invariably it is.”
“Let me guess,” said Dirk. “Its ‘follow that cab’.”
“Exactly my point! So if what you see on the telly is to be believed, all 
cabbies ever do,” continued the cabbie, “is follow other cabbies.”
“Hmmm,” said Dirk, doubtfully.
“Which leaves me in a very strange position, as being the one cabbie that never 
gets asked to follow another cabbie. Which leads me to the unmistakeable 
conclusion that I must be the cabbie that all the other cabbies are following.”
Dirk squinted out of the window trying to spot if there was another cab he could 
switch to.
“Now I’m not saying thats whats actually happening, but you can see how someone 
might get to thinking that way, can’t you. Its the power of the media, innit?”
“There was,” said Dirk, “an entire television series about taxi drivers. It was 
called, as I recall, Taxi.”
“Yeah. Well. I’m not talking about that, am I?” said the cabbie irrefutably. 
“I’m talking about the power of the media to selectively distort reality. That’s 
what I’m talking about. I mean, when it comes down to it, we all live in our own 
different reality, don’t we? I mean, when it comes down to it.”
“Well. Yes. I think you’re right, as a matter of fact,” said Dirk uneasily.
“I mean, you take these kangaroos they’re trying to teach language to. What does 
anone think we’re going to talk about? What are we gonna say then, eh? ‘So, hows 
the hopping life treating you then?’ ‘Oh fine. Musn’t grumble. This pocket down 
me front is a bit of a pain though. Always full of fluff and paperclips.’ It 
isn’t going to be like that. These kangaroos have got brains the size of a 
walnut whip. They live in a different world, see. It will be like trying to talk 
to John Selwing Gummer. You see what I’m saying?”
“Can you see the cab we’re following?”
“Clear as a bell. Probably be there before him.”
Dirk frowned. “Be where before him?”
“Heathrow.”
“How on earth do you know he’s going to Heathrow?”
“Any cabbie can tell if another cabbie’s going to Heathrow.”
“What do you mean?”
“You read the signs. Okay, so theres certain obvious thinks like the fare’s 
carrying luggage. Then theres the route he’s taking. Thats easy. But you say he 
may just be saying with friends in Hammersmith. All I can say is that the fare 
didn;t get into the cab in the manner of someone going to stay with friends in 
Hammersmith. So, what else do you look for. Well, here’s where you need to be a 
cabbie to know.
“Normal life for a cabbie is lots of little bits here an’ there. You don’t know 
from minute to minute what’s gonna happen. What work you’re gonna get, how the 
day’s gonna go. You kind of prowl around in a restless kind of way. But if you 
get a fare to Heathrow, you’re away. Good solid journey, good solid fare. Wait 
in line for an hour or so. Get a good solid fare back to town. Thats your whole 
morning taken care of. You drive in a completely different way. You’re higher up 
on the road. You take better lines through corners. Your’re on your way, you’re 
going somewhere. Its called doing the Heathrow hop. Any cabbie’ll spot it.
“Hmmm,” said Dirk. “Thats remarkable.”
“What you notice depends on who you are.”
“You couldn’t happen to tell which flight he’s catching, could you?” asked Dirk.
“Who do you think I am, mate,” retorted the cabbie, “a bloody private 
detective?” Dirk sat back in his seat and stared out of the window, 
thoughtfully.

Chapter 7
THERE MUST BE some kind of disease that causes people to talk like that, and the 
name for it must be something like Airline Syllable Stress Syndrome. It’s the 
disease that seems to kick in at about ten thousand feet and becomes more and 
more pronounced, if that’s a good word to use in this context, with altitude 
until it levels out at a plateau of complete nonsense at about 35,000 feet. It 
makes otherwise rational people start saying things like “The captain has now 
turned off the seatbelt sign,” as if there were someone lurking around the 
cockpit attempting to deny that the captain has done any such thing, that he is 
indeed the captain and not an impostor, and that there aren’t a whole bunch of 
second-rate and inferior seatbelt signs that he mightn’t have been fiddling 
about with.
Another thing that Dirk reflected on as he settled back into his seat was the 
curious coincidence that not only does the outside of an aircraft look like the 
outside of a vacuum cleaner, but also that the inside of an aircraft smells like 
the inside of a vacuum cleaner.
He accepted a glass of champagne from the cabin steward. He supposed that most 
of the words that airline staff used, or rather most of the sentences into which 
they were habitually arranged, had been worked so hard that they had died. The 
strange stresses that cabin stewards continually thumped them with were like 
electric shocks applied to heart-attack victims in an attempt to revive them.
Well.
What a strange and complicated hour and a half that had been. Dirk was still by 
no means sure that something somewhere had not gone terribly wrong, and he was 
tempted, now that the seatbelt sign had been turned off by the captain, to go 
and take a bit of a casual stroll through the aircraft to have a look for his 
quarry. But no one was going to be getting on or off the aircraft for a little 
while now, so he would probably be wiser to restrain himself for an hour. Or 
even longer. It was, after all, an eleven-hour flight to Los Angeles.
He had not been expecting to go to Chicago today, and the sight of his quarry 
making a beeline for the check-in desk for the 1330 flight to Chicago had made 
him lurch. However, a resolution was a resolution, so after a brief pause to 
make sure that his quarry hadn’t merely gone up to the check-in desk to ask 
directions to the tie shop, Dirk had made his way light-headedly to the ticket 
sales desk and slammed plastic.
Overwhelmed with his sudden solvency, he had even booked himself business class. 
His anonymous employer was obviously someone of means who was not going to 
quibble over a few minor expenses. Suppose his quarry was travelling business 
class? Dirk would not be able to keep tabs on him from a seat stuck in the back 
of the plane. There was almost an argument there for travelling first class, but 
not, Dirk reluctantly admitted to himself, a sane one.
But, an hour and a half after the plane had taken off, Dirk was beginning to 
wonder. As a business-class passenger he was denied access to the first-class 
section up in the nose of the plane, but could wander freely wherever else he 
liked. He had wandered freely up and down each aisle three times now, 
surreptitiously watched each of the toilet doors, and seen his quarry nowhere. 
He returned to his seat and pondered the situation. Either his quarry was in the 
first-class cabin or he was not on the plane.
First class? He just didn’t look it. The fare would be quite a few months rent 
on his flat. But who knows? Maybe he had caught the eye of a Hollywood casting 
director who was whisking him over for a screen test. It wouldn’t be difficult 
to slip into the first-class cabin and have a quick look around, but it would be 
difficult to do it without attracting attention.
Not on the plane? Dirk had seen him heading in towards passport control, but 
there had been a moment when he had suddenly looked round and Dirk had ducked 
quickly into the bookshop.
A few seconds later, when Dirk next glanced up, his quarry had gone—into, Dirk 
had assumed, passport control. Dirk had lingered for a decent interval, bought 
some newspapers and books, and then made his way through passport control and 
into the departure area himself.
It had not especially surprised him that he had not spotted his quarry anywhere 
in the departure area: it was a shining maze of pointless shops, cafés, and 
lounges, and Dirk felt that there was nothing to be gained by rushing around 
hunting for him. They were being funnelled inexorably in the same direction 
anway. They’d be on the same plane.
Not on the plane? Dirk sat stock still. Thinking back, he had to admit that the 
last time he had actually physically seen his quarry was before he had even gone 
through passport control, and that everything else was based on the assumption 
that his quarry was going to do what he, Dirk, had decided he was going to do. 
This, he now realised, was actually quite a large assumption. Cold air trickled 
down his neck from the nozzle above him.
Yesterday he had inexpertly boarded a bus while tailing this man. Today, it 
seemed, he had inadvertently boarded a plane to Chicago. He put his hand to his 
brow and asked himself, honestly, how good a private detective he really was.
He summoned a cabin steward and ordered a glass of whisky, and nursed it as if 
it were very ill indeed. After a while he reached into his plastic bag of books 
and newspapers. He might as well just pass the time. He sighed. He drew out of 
the bag something he had no recollection of putting there.
It was a courier delivery packet, which had already been opened. With a slow 
frown developing on his forehead, he pulled out its contents. There was a book 
inside. He turned it over, wonderingly. It was called Advanced Surveillance 
Techniques. He recognised it. He’d had a flyer for it yesterday in the post. 
He’d screwed it up and thrown it to the floor. Folded between a couple of pages 
of the book was the exact same flyer, flattened and smoothed out. With a deep 
sense of foreboding, Dirk slowly unfolded it. Scrawled across it in felt tip, in 
handwriting that was oddly familiar, were the words “Bon Voyage!” The cabin 
steward leaned across him. “Can I freshen your drink, sir?” he said.

Chapter 8
THE SUN STOOD high above the distant Pacific. The day was bright, the sky blue 
and cloudless, the air, if you liked the smell of burnt carpets, perfect. Los 
Angeles. A city I have never visited.
A car, a blue convertible, sleek and desirable, came sweeping west out of 
Beverly Hills along the, as I understand it, gracious curves of Sunset 
Boulevard. Anybody seeing such a car would have wanted it. Obviously. It was 
designed to make you want it. If people had turned out not to want it very much, 
the makers would have redesigned it and redesigned it until they did. The world 
is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a 
permanent state of want.
The driver was a woman, and I can tell you for a fact that she was very 
beautiful. She had fine dark hair cut in a bob, and as she drove, her hair 
riffled in the warm breeze. I would tell you about what she wore, but I’m very 
bad at clothes and if I started telling you that it was an Armani this or a 
what’s-her-name Farhi that, you would know instinctively that I was faking it, 
and since you are taking the trouble to read what I have written, I intend to 
treat you with respect even if I do, occasionally and in a friendly and 
well-meaning kind of way, lie to you. So I’ll just say that the clothes she was 
wearing were exactly the sort of clothes that someone who knew vastly more about 
clothes than I do would admire enormously, and were blue. Impossibly tall palm 
trees towered above her, silent Mexicans moved over impossibly perfect lawns.
The gates of Bel Air went by—and behind them, perfect houses nestling in perfect 
bouquets of shrubbery. I’ve seen exactly those houses on television and even I, 
sceptical and sarcastic old me, have felt that I really, really wanted one of 
them. Luckily, the sort of the things that people who live in such houses say to 
each other make me giggle until tea squirts out of my nose and so the moment 
passes.
The sleek, desirable blue convertible swept on. There is a set of traffic 
lights, I understand, on the borders of Bel Air and Brentwood, and as the car 
approached them, they turned red. The car drew to a halt. The woman shook her 
hair and adjusted her sunglasses in the mirror. As she did so, she caught sight 
of a brief flicker of movement in the mirror as a small, dark-haired figure 
emerged quietly from the shade of the roadside and snuck round the back of the 
car. A moment later he was leaning right over her, pointing a small handgun into 
her face. I know even less about handguns than I do about clothes. I’d be 
completely hopeless in Los Angeles. I’d be laughed at not only for my lack of 
dress sense but also my pitiful inability to tell a Magnum .38 from a Walther 
PPK or even, for heaven’s sake, a derringer. I do know, however, that the gun 
was also blue, or at least blue-black, and that the woman was startled out of 
her wits to have it pointed into her left eye from a range of just under one 
inch. Her assailant gave her to understand that now would be an excellent moment 
for her to vacate her seat and, no, not to take the key out of the car or even 
to attempt to pick up her bag, which was lying on the seat next to her, but just 
to be very cool, move very easily, very gently, and just get the fuck out of the 
car.
The woman tried to be very cool, to move very easily and very gently, but was 
hampered by the fact that she was shaking with uncontrollable fear as the gun 
bobbed about just an inch or so from her face like a mayfly in the summer. She 
did, however, get the fuck out of the car. She stood trembling in the middle of 
the road as the thief jumped into the car in her place, gunned the engine in a 
quick roar of triumph, and careered sharply off along Sunset Boulevard, around 
the bend, and away. She twisted around on the spot in an agony of shocked 
helplessness. Her world had turned abruptly upside down and tipped her out of 
it, and she was now, suddenly and unexpectedly, that most helpless of all people 
in Los Angeles, a pedestrian.
She tried to wave down one or two of the other cars on the road, but they 
manoeuvred politely past her. One of them was an open-topped Mustang with the 
radio playing loudly. I’d love to be able to say that it was tuned to an oldies 
station and that the words “How does it feeeeel? How does it feeeeeel?” snarled 
out at this moment, but there are limits even to fiction. It was an oldies 
station, but the old song it was playing was “Sunday Girl” by Blondie, and so 
wasn’t even remotely appropriate, seeing as this was a Thursday. What could she 
do?
Another perfect crime. Another perfect day in the City of Angels. And only one 
tiny little lie.
Forgive me.

Chapter 9
IF THERE is an uglier building in England than Ranting Manor, then I haven’t 
seen it. It must be hiding somewhere and not, like Ranting Manor, squatting in 
the middle of a hundred acres of rolling parkland. The original estate consisted 
of many more hundreds of acres that were the pride of Oxfordshire, but 
generations of syphilitic idiocy and blitheringness have reduced it to its 
current decrepit state—an ill-kempt bunch of woods, fields, and lawns littered 
with the results of various failed attempts to raise money by whatever means 
seemed to someone like a good idea at the time: a godforsaken fun fair, a once 
quite well-stocked zoo, and, of more recent provenance, a small high-technology 
business park, current occupant one faltering computer games company, now cast 
adrift by its American parent and believed to be the only such company in the 
world making a loss. You could find a billion-barrel oilfield in the grounds of 
Ranting Manor and you could pretty much guarantee that within a couple of years 
it would be operating at a loss, and would require the selling of the family tin 
to keep it going. The family silver has long since gone, of course, along with 
most of the family. Disease, alcohol, drugs, sexual imbecility, and poorly 
maintained road vehicles have combined to cut vicious swathes through the ranks 
of the Rantings and reduced them to almost none.
How much history would you like? Maybe just a very little. The Manor itself 
dates back to the thirteenth century, or at least bits of it do. The bits are 
all that remain of the original monastery, inhabited for a couple of centuries 
or so by a devout order of calligraphers and pederasts. Then Henry VIII got his 
mitts on it and handed it over to a courtly scumbag called John Ranting, in 
return for some spectacular piece of loyal villainy. He knocked it down and 
rebuilt it after his own pleasure, which was probably pleasing enough, seeing as 
the architects of the Tudor period pretty much knew what they were doing: stout 
beams, nice plasterwork and leaded windows, all the things we now value 
enormously but that John Ranting’s descendants, unfortunately, did 
not—especially the Victorian rubber magnate Sir Percy Ranting, who, in the 
1860s, tore much of it down and rebuilt it as a hunting lodge. These Victorian 
“hunting lodges” were built because the immensely wealthy merchants of the age 
were not supposed to parade their actual penises around in public, instead of 
which vast tracts of pretty and innocent English countryside had their erections 
inflicted upon them. Big, bulbous, ruddy buildings with vast ballrooms, grand, 
angular staircases, and as many turrets and crenellations as a recreational 
condom.
The nineteenth century was, in aesthetic terms, disastrous enough for Ranting 
Manor, but right slap-bang after it, of course, came the twentieth, with all its 
architectural theories and double glazing. The main additions during this period 
were, in the thirties, a sort of large Nazi billiard room and in the sixties an 
indoor swimming pool, tiled in orange and purple, to which were now added 
various clumps of brightly coloured fungus.
The thing that binds all these different styles together is a general air of 
dampness and decay and a sense that if a public-spirited citizen tried to set 
the place alight, it would go out well before the fire brigade arrived. What 
else? Oh yes. It’s haunted.
Enough of the wretched building.
At about ten-thirty in the evening, which would make it roughly the same time 
that the car was being stolen on Sunset Boulevard, a small perimeter gate 
squeaked open. The main iron gates to the estate were kept locked at night, but 
the side gate was usually to be found unfastened. A reputation for being an 
unwholesome and troublesome place was usually enough to deter any intruders. An 
old sign on the main gate said BEWARE OF THE DOG, beneath which someone had 
scrawled, “Why single out the dog particularly?”
The figures of, respectively, a large dog and a small man slipped in through the 
side gate. Both walked with a pronounced limp. The dog limped on its left 
foreleg, the man on his right leg or, to be more accurate, not on his right leg 
because he didn’t have one. It was missing beneath the knee. Instead, the man 
limped on a wooden leg that was a full inch longer than his left leg and made 
walking not merely difficult, but actually rather a trial.
The night was dull. The moon was up, or at least half of it was, but for the 
most part it was shrouded in clouds. The two shadowy figures limped their way in 
unison along the driveway, resembling, from a distance, a child’s pulling toy 
with a couple of off-centre wheels. They were taking the long way to the house. 
This wound a circuitous route through the estate, passing some of its failed or 
failing business enterprises on the way.
The dog whined and grumbled a little until its master bent down stiffly and let 
it off its leash, whereupon it gave a gruff yelp of pleasure, lurched forward a 
couple of paces, and then resumed its hobbling plod, in unison with, but now a 
good two of yards ahead of, its master. From time to time it glanced back to 
check that its master was still there, that all was well, and that nothing was 
going to jump out and bite them.
Moving thus, they slowly rounded a long bend in the drive, the man hunched 
inside a long dark coat, despite the easy temperature of the evening. After a 
few minutes they passed on their left the entrance to the zoo that had been such 
a drain on the estate’s limited resources. There were very few animals left in 
it now: a couple of goats, a chicken, and a capybara, the world’s largest 
rodent. There was also a special guest animal in the zoo at the moment, being 
housed temporarily while its normal quarters in Chatsfield Zoo were being 
rebuilt. Desmond—the animal’s name was Desmond—had only been in residence for a 
couple of weeks so far, but his presence had, not surprisingly, caused a bit of 
a stir in the village of Little Ranting.
As the man and his dog passed the entrance to the zoo, they paused for a moment, 
and then turned and looked at it again. The low, wooden gate, which should have 
been secured at this time of night, was standing open. The dog whimpered, and 
snuffled around on the ground, which seemed to have been scuffed and churned up 
a little. The man hobbled up to the open gate and peered into the darkness 
beyond. Among the low huddle of buildings, all was darkness, except for a single 
dim light that glowed from the hut where Roy Harrison, Desmond’s keeper from 
Chatsfield, was staying. Nothing untoward. No sign of movement. So why was the 
gate open? It probably meant nothing. Most things, the man would have told you 
if you had asked him, probably meant nothing. Nevertheless, he summoned his dog 
with a gruff syllable and limped crossly through the gate, closing it behind 
them. Slowly, grindingly, they made their way along the gravel path to the 
single source of light: Roy Harrison’s temporary abode.
The place seemed quiet.
The man rapped sharply on the door and listened. No answer. He knocked again. 
Still, nothing. He opened the door. It wasn’t locked, but then, there was 
probably no reason for it to be. As he pushed his way into the tiny, dark 
hallway, his nose twitched at an odd smell. Zookeepers’ lodgings were exactly 
where you would expect to find a vast and rich range of odd smells, but not 
necessarily this particular sweet, cloying one. Hmmph. The dog let out a very, 
very slight little yelp.
On the right side of the hallway was a door, the source of both the light that 
could be seen from outside and the fragrance that could be smelt within. Still, 
all was quiet. Carefully the man pushed the door open.
At first glance he thought that the figure slumped over the kitchen table might 
be dead, but after a long, drawn-out moment of silence it emitted a light, 
riffling snore.
The dog whimpered again, and sniffed around the floor nervously. The dog always 
seemed oddly nervous for its size, and kept on glancing round to its master for 
reassurance. In fact it was altogether an odd dog, of uncertain breed, or 
breeds. It was large and black, but its hair was tufty, its body scrawny and 
clumsy, and its manner edgy, anxious, verging on the completely neurotic. 
Whenever it came to a halt for a moment or so, the business of starting up again 
often seemed to cause it trouble, as if it had difficulty in remembering where 
it had left each of its legs. It looked as if something very nasty had happened 
to it, or was about to.
The sleeping keeper continued to snore. Next to him was a collection of crumpled 
beer cans, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and a couple of glasses. In the 
ashtray lay the butts of three joints, and scattered around were bits of a 
ripped-up cigarette packet, a packet of cigarette papers, and a piece of silver 
foil twisted up in the traditional manner. The source of the smell. Roy had 
clearly shared a big evening with somebody, and that somebody had clearly then 
pushed off. The visitor tried gently to shake him by the shoulder, but to no 
avail. He tried again, but this time the keeper slowly slid sideways and 
collapsed in an untidy, slobbering heap on the floor. The dog was so startled by 
this that it leapt wildly for cover behind the sofa. Unfortunately the dog was 
larger and heavier than the sofa and knocked it backwards as he jumped over it, 
causing it to topple over on top of him. The dog yelped again, scrabbled briefly 
at the linoleum, and then leapt for cover once more behind a small coffee table, 
breaking it. Having run out of places to leap to, the dog cowered back in a 
corner, quivering with fright.
Its master satisfied himself that Roy was merely in a temporary state of 
chemical imbalance and not in any actual danger and, coaxing his dog with a few 
soothing words, left again. Together they followed the path back towards the 
gate and let themselves back out onto the main driveway, heading on the way they 
had been going, hobbling towards the main house. There were heavy scuff marks on 
the driveway.
Desmond suddenly felt bewildered. In an instant everything he had always smelt 
about the world had gone all swimmy and peculiar on him. There were some lights 
flashing around him, but he didn’t mind that. Lights weren’t of any real concern 
to him. Blink blink. So what? But this was most peculiar. He would have said 
that he was hallucinating, except that he didn’t know the word, or indeed any 
word. He didn’t even know that his name was Desmond, but, again, it wasn’t the 
sort of thing that bothered him. A name was just a sound you heard, and didn’t 
have that rich, heady reek of really being something. A sound didn’t well up 
inside your head and go woomph the way a smell did. Smell was real, smell was 
something you could trust.
At least it had been up till now. But now he felt as if the whole world were 
tipping backwards over his head, and this, he couldn’t help feeling, was a very 
worrying thing for the world to do.
He took a deep breath to try to steady his huge bulk. He drew billions of rich 
little molecules over the sensitive membranes of his nostrils. Not that rich, in 
fact. The smells here were mean little smells—flat, stale, and bitter smells 
with an acrid undertow of something nasty being burnt. None of the large, 
generous smells of hot, grassy air and day-old dung that haunted his 
imagination, but at least these paltry little local smells should steady him and 
root him on the ground.
They didn’t.
Hhrrphraaah! Now he seemed to have two different and completely contradictory 
worlds in his head. Graaarphhh! What was all this? Where had the horizon gone?
That was it. That was why the world seemed to be tilting up above his head. 
Where there was usually a perfectly normal horizon, there now wasn’t one. There 
was more world instead. A lot more. It just went on and on and on into a strange 
and hazy distance. Desmond felt big weird fears welling up inside him. He had a 
sudden instinct to charge at something, but you couldn’t charge at a worrying 
uncertainty. He nearly stumbled.
He drew in another deep breath. He blinked, slowly.
Haaarh! The new bit of the world had vanished! Where was it? Where had it gone? 
There it was again! It unfolded itself blotchily into place and he felt as if he 
were tipping over again, but this time he was able to steady himself more 
quickly. Stupid little lights. Blink blink blink. This new bit of the world—what 
was it? He peered forward uncertainly into it, letting his mind’s nostril play 
over it. Those lights were beginning to distract him. He shut his eyes to let 
him concentrate on his exploration, but when he did, the new world vanished! 
Again! He wondered for a dizzying moment if there was any connection between 
these two things, but making logical connections between things was not really 
one of Desmond’s strengths. He let it pass. As he opened his wrinkly little eyes 
again, the unearthly new world slowly unfurled itself in his mind. Once more he 
peered into it.
It was a wilder world than the one he was used to, a world of paths and hills. 
The paths forked, divided, and deepened into valleys, the ridges reared into 
high hills. The far distance was completely broken up into massive mountain 
ranges and dizzying canyons shrouded in shifting mists. He was filled with 
apprehension. Just as making logical connections between things was not one of 
Desmond’s strengths, neither was mountaineering.
The flattest, broadest path lay straight ahead of him, but as he turned his 
attention to it, worrying things began to become apparent.
Something nasty lay down that path. Something big and nasty. Something even 
bigger and nastier, Desmond ventured to think, than Desmond himself. For a 
moment he blinked again, and annoyingly the whole thing vanished once more. When 
it reassembled itself in his mind’s nostril a second or two further on, the 
sense of impending disaster intensified.
Was that thunder?
Desmond didn’t usually mind thunder, scarcely noticed lightning, but this 
thunder he did mind. There was no uplifting swirl of heavy air dancing, just 
bad, cracking explosions of blackness. Desmond began to feel very fearful. His 
enormous bulk began to quake and shudder, and suddenly he began to run. The 
strange new world shattered and vanished. He ran like a truck. He hurtled 
through a flurry of small, feeble lights and brought a whole ton of some kind of 
stuff, he didn’t know what, banging down around him. It crashed noisily and 
flashed a bit, but Desmond ploughed straight through it. He was out of there, 
fleeing like a locomotive, smashing through a flimsy door, maybe even a wall, it 
was all the same to him. He hurtled out into the night air, pounding the ground 
with hammer blows from his enormous feet.
Things around him scattered from him. Things shouted. Distant, plaintive 
exclamations of alarm and despondency welled up in his wake, but Desmond didn’t 
care. He just wanted some night air in his lungs. Even this night air, stale and 
acrid as it was, was good. It was cool and rushed over him and into him as he 
charged. There was hard pavement beneath his feet, then, briefly, bits of 
fencing around his neck, and then rough, scrubby grass beneath his pounding, 
churning feet.
He was near the top of a low hill. A real, earthy hill, not some fearsome 
hallucination rearing up in his mind like the approach of death. Just a hill, 
surrounded by other low, sloping hills. The sky was clear of clouds, but hazy 
and murky. Desmond was not interested in stars. You couldn’t get a good whiff 
off a star, but here you could scarcely even see them, either. He didn’t care, 
he was just getting up a good heavy speed going down this hill, waking up some 
sleepy muscles and getting them going. Braaarrrm! Run! Hurtle! Charge! Crash! 
Bang! There seemed to be more bits of fencing round his neck again, and suddenly 
his progress was rather less free than it had been, and he was all encumbered 
with stuff. He ploughed on heavily. Suddenly he found himself in a sea of 
scattering creatures squealing as his huge bulk careered through them. The air 
was full of the sound of cries and bellows and little tinkly crashes. 
Bewildering odours danced around him—a surge of burning meat, heady wafts of 
some kind of woozy-making stuff, big stabs of viciously sweet musk. He was 
confused and tried to fix on things by sight. He didn’t trust vision very much, 
it didn’t tell him very much. He could just about tell when things were blinking 
or lurking or running around. He tried to get a fix on the hollering, scurrying 
shapes, and then saw a big hazy rectangle of light. That was something. He 
heaved himself round and charged at it.
Crash!
And also some nasty, rainy, itchy sensations all over his flank. He didn’t like 
that. He stumbled as he barged into a large room and was immediately assaulted 
with a suffocating splurge of smell, screamy noises, and splashy lights. He 
charged into a huddle of screaming creatures, which roared and screeched and 
then went all cracked and squidgy. One of them got stuck on him and Desmond had 
to shake his head to dislodge it. Before him now was another large glinting 
rectangle, and a little way beyond it the ground shimmered with a pale blue 
light. Desmond lunged forward again. There was another crash, and another shower 
of sharp and worrying pain. He hurtled onwards and out into the open air once 
more.
The light in the ground was a strange pool of water, with screaming things in 
it. He had never seen water glow like that. And then there were some more 
blinking lights in front of him. He didn’t pay any attention to the little 
lights. He didn’t even pay any attention to the banging noises that went with 
each blink. Bang bang, so what? But what did catch his attention was the sudden 
acrid smell and the flowers of pain that started to bloom in his body. A flower 
was planted in his shoulder, and another. His leg began to move oddly. A flower 
was planted in his flank, which felt very odd and worrying. Another flower was 
planted in his head, and gradually the whole world started to become more 
distant and less important. It began to roar. He felt himself tipping forward 
with enormous slowness, and gradually found himself enveloped in great waves of 
warm, glowing blueness.
As the world ebbed from him he heard a gabbling, hysterical voice making sounds 
that made no sense to him, but they sounded like this:
“Get the paramedics! Get the police! Not just Malibu, get the LAPD. Now! Tell 
them to get a helicopter up here! We’ve got dead and wounded! And tell them . . 
. I don’t know how they’re gonna deal with this, but tell them we’ve got a dead 
rhinoceros in the swimming pool.”

Chapter 10
THOUGH IT WAS now embarrassingly clear to Dirk that only he and not his actual 
quarry was aboard the flight, that he had been thrown four thousand miles and a 
couple of thousand crucial pounds off course by a childishly simple ruse, he 
nevertheless determined to make one final check. He stationed himself right by 
the exit as everyone started to disembark at O’Hare Airport. He was watching so 
intently that he nearly missed hearing his own name being called over the 
aircraft’s PA, directing him to go to the airline’s information desk.
“Mr. Gently?” said the woman at the desk, brightly.
“Yes . . .” said Dirk warily.
“May I see your passport, sir?”
He passed it over. He stayed poised on the balls of his feet, expecting trouble.
“Your ticket through to Albuquerque, sir.”
“My—?”
“Ticket through to Albuquerque, sir.”
“My ticket to—?”
“Albuquerque, sir.”
“Albuquerque?”
“Albuquerque, New Mexico, sir.”
Dirk looked at the proffered ticket folder as if it were a piece of trick 
rhubarb. “Where did this come from?” he demanded. He took it and peered at the 
flight details.
The woman gave him a huge airline smile and a huge airline shrug. “Out of this 
machine, I guess. Just prints those tickets out.”
“What does it say on your computer?”
“Just says prepaid ticket for Mr. Dirk Gently to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be 
collected. Were you not expecting to go to Albuquerque today, sir?”
“I was expecting to end up somewhere I didn’t expect, I just wasn’t expecting it 
to be Albuquerque, that’s all.”
“Sounds like it’s an excellent destination for you, Mr. Gently. Enjoy your 
flight.”
He did. He sat and ruminated quietly to himself over the events of the last 
couple of days, arranging them in his mind not in such a way that they made any 
kind of sense yet, but in suggestive little arrays. A meteor here, half a cat 
there, the electronic threads of invisible dollars and unexpected airline 
tickets that connected them. Before touching down in Chicago, his 
self-confidence had been in tatters, but now he felt a thrilling tingle of 
excitement. There was something or someone out there that he had engaged with, 
something that he uniquely had found and that he was being drawn towards. The 
fact that he still had no idea who or what it was no longer troubled him. It was 
there, he had found it, and it had found him. He had felt its pulse. Its face 
and its name would emerge in their proper times.
At Albuquerque airport he stood silently for a while under the high painted 
beams, surrounded by the dark, staring eyes of the drunk-driving lawyers peering 
from their billboards. He breathed deeply. He felt calm, he felt good, he felt 
able to meet with the wild, thrashing improbabilities that lie an atom’s depth 
beneath the dull surface of the narrated world, and to speak their language. He 
walked unhurriedly to the long escalators, and sailed slowly downwards like an 
invisible king.
His man was waiting for him.
He could tell him immediately—another still point in the scurrying airport. He 
was a large, fat, sweaty man with an ill-fitting black suit and a face like a 
badly laid table. He stood a few feet back from the foot of the escalator, 
gazing up it with an inert but complicated expression. It was as well that Dirk 
had been ready to spot him because the sign he held, which read D. JENTTRY, was 
one he might otherwise easily have missed.
Dirk introduced himself. The man said his name was Joe and that he would go and 
get the car. And that, rather anticlimactically, Dirk felt, was that.
The car drew up at the curbside, a slightly elderly, black stretch Cadillac, 
gleaming dully in the airport lighting. Dirk regarded it with satisfaction, 
climbed into it, and settled into the backseat with a small grunt of pleasure.
“The client said you’d like it,” said Joe distantly from his driving coop as he 
quietly rolled the thing forward and out on to the airport exit road. Dirk 
looked around him at the scuffed and threadbare velveteen blue upholstery and 
the tinted plastic film peeling from the windows. The TV, when Dirk tried it, 
was tuned to nothing but noise, and the asthmatic air conditioning wheezed out a 
musty wind that was in no way preferable to the warm evening desert air through 
which they were moving.
The client was dead right.
“The client,” said Dirk, as the great rattling thing cruised out onto the dimly 
lit freeway through the city. “Who exactly is the client?”
“An Australian gentleman, he sounded like,” said Joe. His voice was rather high 
and whiny.
“Australian?” said Dirk, in surprise.
“Yes sir, Australian. Like you.”
Dirk frowned. “I’m from England,” he said.
“But Australian, right?”
“Why Australian, exactly?”
“Australian accent.”
“Well, not really.”
“Well, where’s that place?”
“What place?” asked Dirk.
“New Zealand,” said Joe. “Australia’s in New Zealand, right?”
“Well, not precisely, but I can see what you’re . . . well, I was going to say I 
can see what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure I can.”
“What part of New Zealand you from, then?”
“Well, more sort of England, in fact.”
“Is that in New Zealand?”
“Only up to a point,” said Dirk.
The car headed north on the freeway in the direction of Santa Fe. Moonlight lay 
magically on the high desert. The evening air was crisp.
“You been to Santa Fe before?” Joe nasaled.
“No,” said Dirk. He had abandoned trying to engage him in any kind of 
intelligible conversation and began to wonder if he had been deliberately chosen 
for his shortcomings in this area. Dirk was trying hard to stay sunk in thought, 
but Joe kept yanking him back to the surface.
“Beautiful place,” said Joe. “Beautiful. If it doesn’t get ruined by all the 
Californians moving in. Californication they call it. Hur-hur. You know what 
they call it?”
“Californication?” hazarded Dirk.
“Fanta Se,” said Joe. “All the Hollywood types moving in from California. 
Ruining it. Especially since the earthquake. You heard about the earthquake?”
“Well, I did, as a matter of fact,” said Dirk. “It was on the news. Rather a 
lot.”
“Yeah, it was a big earthquake. And now all the Californians are moving out here 
instead. To Santa Fe. Ruining it. Californians. You know what they call it?”
Dirk could feel the whole conversation wheeling round and coming at him again. 
He tried to deflect it.
“Have you always lived in Santa Fe, then?” he said feebly.
“Oh yeah,” said Joe. “Well, nearly always. Over a year now. Feels like always.”
“So where did you live before?”
“California,” said Joe. “Moved out after my sister was hit in a drive-by 
shooting. You have drive-by shootings in New Zealand?”
“No,” said Dirk. “Not in New Zealand so far as I know. Nor even yet in London, 
which is where I live. Look, I’m sorry about your sister.”
“Yeah. Standing on a streetcorner down on Melrose, couple of guys drive by in a 
Mercedes, one of those new ones, you know, with the double glazing, and pow, 
they blew her away—500 SEL, I think it was. Midnight blue. Real smart. They 
musta jacked it. You have carjacking back in old England?”
“Carjacking?”
“People walk up to you, steal your car.”
“No, but thanks for asking. We have people who clean your windscreen against 
your will, but, er . . .”
Joe barked with contempt.
“The thing is,” explained Dirk, “in London you could certainly walk up to 
someone and steal their car, but you wouldn't be able to drive it away.”
“Some kinda fancy device?”
“No, just traffic,” said Dirk. “But, er . . . your sister,” he asked nervously. 
“Was she okay?”
“Okay?” shouted Joe. “You shoot someone with a Kalashnikov and they’re okay, 
you’re gonna want your money back. Hur-hur.”
Dirk tried to make sympathetic noises, but they wouldn’t form properly in his 
throat. The car was slowing down, so he lowered the peeling window to look at 
the desert night.
A passing road sign flared briefly in the car’s headlights.
“Stop the car!” shouted Dirk suddenly.
He leant out of the car window, straining to look back as the car gradually 
wallowed to a halt. In the distance the dim shape of a road sign was silhouetted 
in the moonlight.
“Can you reverse back down the road?” said Dirk urgently.
“It’s a freeway,” protested Joe.
“Yes, yes,” said Dirk. “There’s no one behind us. The road’s empty. Only a few 
hundred yards.”
Grumbling to himself, Joe put the big barge into reverse, and slowly they weaved 
their way back down the freeway.
“This is what they do in New Zealand, isn’t it?” he whined.
“What?”
“Drive backwards.”
“No,” said Dirk. “But I know what you’re thinking of. Just like us British, they 
do drive on the other side of the road.”
“Suppose it’s safer that way,” said Joe, “if everyone’s driving backwards.”
“Yes,” said Dirk. “Much safer.” He leaped out of the car as soon as it drew to a 
halt.
Highlighted in the pool of the car’s lights, five thousand miles from Dirk’s 
ramshackle office in Clerkenwell, was a square yellow road sign that said, in 
large letters, GUSTY WINDS, and, in smaller letters underneath it, MAY EXIST. 
The moon hung high in the sky above it.
“Joe!” shouted Dirk to the driver. “Who put this here?”
“What?” said Joe.
“This sign!” said Dirk.
“You mean this sign?” said Joe.
“Yes!” shouted Dirk. “ ‘Gusty Winds May Exist.’ ”
“Well, I suppose,” said Joe, “the State Highway Authority.”
“What?” said Dirk, bewildered again.
“The State Highway Authority,” said Joe, a bit flummoxed. “You see ’em all 
over.”
“ ‘Gusty Winds May Exist’?” said Dirk. “You mean this is just a regular road 
sign?”
“Well, yeah,” said Joe. “Just means it’s a bit windy here. You know, wind comes 
across the desert. Can blow you around a bit. Especially in one of these.”
Dirk blinked. He suddenly felt rather foolish. He had been imagining, a little 
wildly, that someone had specially painted the name of a bisected cat on a 
signpost on a New Mexican road especially for his benefit. This was absurd. The 
cat in question had obviously been named after a perfectly commonplace American 
road sign. Paranoia, he reminded himself, was one of the normal by-products of 
jet lag and whisky.
Chastened, he walked back toward the car. Then he paused and thought for a 
second. He went up to Joe’s window and peered in.
“Joe,” he said. “You slowed the car down just as we were approaching the sign. 
Was that deliberately so that I would see it?” He hoped it wasn’t just the 
whisky and the jet lag talking.
“Oh no,” said Joe. “I was slowing down for the rhinoceros.”

Chapter 11
“PROBABLY THE JET LAG,” Dirk said. “I thought for a moment you said a 
rhinoceros.”
“Yeah,” said Joe, disgustedly. “Got held up by it earlier. As it was leaving the 
airport.”
Dirk tried to think this through before he said anything that might expose him 
to ridicule. Presumably there must be a local football team or rock band called 
the Rhinoceroses. Must be. Coming from the airport? Driving to Santa Fe? He was 
going to have to ask.
“What exact type of rhinoceros are we discussing here?” he said.
“Dunno. I’m not as good at breeds of rhinoceros,” said Joe, “as I am at accents. 
If it was an accent, I could tell you what exact type it was, but since it’s a 
rhinoceros I can only tell you that it’s one of the big grey type, you know, 
with the horn. From Irkutsk or one of those kinda places. You know, Portugal or 
somewhere.”
“You mean Africa?”
“Could be Africa.”
“And you say it’s up there on the road ahead of us?”
“Yup.”
“Then let’s get after it,” said Dirk. “Quickly.”
He climbed back into the car, and Joe eased it out onto the highway once more. 
Dirk hunched himself up at the front of the passenger compartment and peered 
over Joe’s shoulder as they sped on through the desert. In a few minutes the 
shape of a large truck loomed up ahead in the Cadillac’s headlights. It was a 
green low-loader with a large, slatted crate roped down on to it.
“So. You’re pretty interested in rhinoceroses, then,” said Joe conversationally.
“Not especially,” said Dirk. “Not till I read my horoscope this morning.”
“That right? Don’t believe in them myself. You know what mine said this morning? 
It said that I should think long and hard about my personal and financial 
prospects. Pretty much what it said yesterday. 'Course, that’s pretty much what 
I do every day, just driving around. So I suppose that means something, then. 
What did yours say?”
“That I would meet a three-ton rhinoceros called Desmond.”
“I guess you can see a different bunch of stars from New Zealand,” said Joe.
“It’s a replacement. That’s what I heard,” volunteered Joe.
“A replacement?”
“Yup.”
“A replacement for what?”
“Previous rhinoceros.”
“Well, I suppose it would hardly be a replacement for a lightbulb?” said Dirk. 
“Tell me—what happened to the, er, previous rhinoceros?”
“Died.”
“What a tragedy. Where? At the zoo?”
“At a party.”
“A party?”
“Yup.”
Dirk sucked his lip thoughtfully. There was a principle he liked to adhere to 
when he remembered, which was never to ask a question unless he was fairly 
certain he would like the answer. He sucked his other lip.
“I think I’ll go and take a look myself,” he said, and climbed out of the car.
The large, dark green truck was pulled onto the side of the road. The sides of 
the truck were about four feet high, and a heavy tarpaulin was roped down over 
an enormous crate. The driver was leaning against the door of the cab, smoking a 
cigarette. He clearly thought that being in charge of a three-ton rhinoceros 
meant that no one would argue with him about this, but he was wrong. The most 
astonishing amount of abuse was being hurled at him by the drivers negotiating 
their way one by one past his truck.
“Bastards!” muttered the driver to himself as Dirk wandered up to him in a 
nonchalant kind of way and lit a companionable cigarette himself. He was trying 
to give it up, but usually kept a pack in his pocket for tactical purposes.
“You know what I hate?” said Dirk to the truckdriver, “Those signs in cabs that 
say ‘Thank You for Not Smoking.’ I don’t mind if they say ‘Please Don’t Smoke,’ 
or even just a straightforward ‘No Smoking.’ But I hate those prim ‘Thank You 
for Not Smoking’ signs. Make you want to light up immediately and say, ‘No need 
to thank me, I wasn’t going to not smoke.’ ”
The driver laughed.
“Taking this old bugger far?” asked Dirk, with the air of one seasoned 
rhinoceros delivery driver comparing notes with another. He gave the truck an 
appraising glance.
“Just out to Malibu,” said the driver. “Way up Topanga Canyon.”
Dirk gave a knowing cluck as if to say, “Don’t talk to me about Topanga Canyon, 
I once had to take a whole herd of wildebeest to Cardiff in a minibus. You want 
trouble? That was trouble.” He sucked deeply on his cigarette.
“Must have been some party,” he remarked.
“Party?” said the driver.
“I’ve always found that a rhinoceros makes a pretty poor kind of party guest,” 
said Dirk. “Try it if you must, but brace yourself.” It was Dirk’s view that 
asking direct questions made people wary. It was more effective to talk complete 
nonsense and let people correct him.
“What do you mean, ‘party’?” said the driver.
“The party the other rhinoceros was attending,” said Dirk, tapping the side of 
his nose, “when it died.”
“Attending?” said the driver with a frown. “I wouldn’t say that it was actually 
attending the party.”
Dirk raised an encouraging eyebrow.
“It charged down out of the hills, smashed through the perimeter fence, crashed 
through the plate-glass windows into the house, took a couple of turns around 
the main room injuring about seventeen people, hurtled back out into the garden 
where somebody shot it, whereupon it toppled slowly into a swimming pool full of 
mostly naked screenwriters, taking half a hundredweight of avocado dip and some 
kind of Polynesian fruit melange with it.”
Dirk took a moment or two to digest this information. Then, “Whose house was 
this?” he said.
“Just some movie people. Apparently they’d had Bruce Willis round only the 
previous week. Now this.”
“Seems a bit rough on the old rhino as well,” said Dirk. “And now here’s another 
one.”

Excerpts from an Interview with the Daily Nexus, April 5, 2000
How does Douglas Adams arrive for coffee? If he were like the Montecitans 
stopping by Pierre Lafond’s, he would show up in an SUV, a luxury car, or a 
luxury SUV. The basic cup of coffee at Pierre Lafond’s costs $1.25 and is called 
“organic French roast.” It tastes exactly like McDonald’s coffee or organic 
crankcase fluid, not that the drivers of SUVs seem to care.
I expected more from Adams than an SUV: I wanted to see him skip out of a 
spaceship, materialize, or even just walk. This is a guy who wrote The 
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and has managed to make life, the universe and 
everything much more entertaining. So, I wondered, how would he arrive?
Black Mercedes.
Adams is six feet five inches tall, with intensely round eyes. He hadn’t had a 
good day. His daughter was sick, and the croissant he was eating at 5:00 P.M. 
was lunch. Life hasn’t been bad for the forty-nine-year-old Adams, though. He 
travels the world, his nine books have sold over 15 million copies, and the 
oft-delayed Hitchhiker’s movie is now being produced by Disney and has the 
director of Austin Powers signed on.
“The perennial movie, which has been about to be made for about twenty years and 
is even more about to be made now,” Adams said. “But we shall see. I wish I had 
never thought of doing it as a movie. I’d have about ten years of my life back.
For the first time in over a decade, Adams is working on a book.
“There was a point where I just got massively fed up with it. My books tend to 
use up ideas at a ferocious rate,” he said. “I never intended to be a novelist 
to begin with. So I decided to go and do a whole bunch of other things. . . . 
The consequence of that is I have a huge backlog of story ideas, and now the 
sort of panic is, ‘Can I do them all in the rest of my career, given the speed 
at which they’re arriving at the moment?’ The other panic, of course, is the 
perennial writer’s problem of application. I think I have more fear of writing 
than most writers.”
The new book is not a Hitchhiker’s book—there are already five of those—or a 
Dirk Gently book, but “it will be recognizable in style to anyone who knows 
those books.
“Since then, I’ve now got lots and lots of different story lines waiting for me 
to turn them into books. One of them I shall apply the title Salmon of Doubt to, 
but I don’t know which one yet.”
In 1990, Adams, with zoologist Mark Carwardine, wrote Last Chance to See. It’s 
one of his hardest books to find, and his favorite. When Adams—who has lived in 
Santa Barbara for the last two years—speaks today at UCSB, it’s the book he’ll 
talk about.
“I do talks around most of the rest of the country,” Adams said. “So I was very 
keen to do one here, just to sort of say, ‘Hi, here I am.’ ”
Adams gives a lot of speeches, usually about high technology to large companies.
“I actually much prefer doing this particular one, which I only ever usually get 
to do at colleges because it’s funny, but big corporations don’t particularly 
like to hear about protecting endangered wildlife,” he said. “You lose a lot of 
money to endangered wildlife.”
Last Chance to See started as a magazine article for the World Wildlife Fund. 
The group sent Adams to Madagascar, where he met Carwardine. Adams wrote about 
the aye-aye, an endangered species of nocturnal lemur that looks like a cross 
between a bat, a monkey, and a very surprised infant.
“At the time, it was thought that there were only about fifteen. They’ve found a 
few more so it’s not quite so endangered, just very, very, very endangered,” 
Adams said. “The whole thing was completely magical.”
So magical that Adams and Carwardine spent the next year traveling the world and 
seeing endangered animals, like flightless kakapo parrots in New Zealand and 
baiji river dolphins in China. The last twenty dolphins will become extinct when 
the Chinese government completes the Three Gorges Dam and destroys the dolphins’ 
habitat.
“It’s a desperate thing, not only because another species is lost and the 
tragedy of that, but because I don’t know why we keep building these fucking 
dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they 
cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all 
fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, 
where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to 
build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or 
something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and 
maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human 
Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.”
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, intergalactic bulldozers destroyed the 
Earth and humanity. A very different sort of bulldozer destroyed the most 
successful species the planet had ever known. Sixty-five million years ago, a 
six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula, created a 
one-hundred-mile crater, and sent a cloud of searing vapor and dust into the 
air. That was pretty much it for the dinosaurs.
“I’m rather obsessed with the idea of that comet coming down and it being the 
single event to which we owe our very existence,” Adams said. “It is arguably 
the single most dramatic thing to have ever occurred in the world and certainly 
the one that was the most dramatic event in our lives, in that it paved the way 
for our existence, and no one was there to see it.”
Dinosaur-killing rocks are classic physics. The newer physics is a little too 
outlandish for Adams, a man who wrote that the answer to Life, the Universe and 
Everything is 42. A computer came up with that answer, and Adams said computers 
will change everything.
“Now that we’ve built computers, first we made them room-size, then desk-size 
and in briefcases and in pockets, soon they’ll be as plentiful as dust—you can 
sprinkle computers all over the place. Gradually, the whole environment will 
become something far more responsive and smart, and we’ll be living in a way 
that’s very hard for people living on the planet just now to understand,” Adams 
said. “I guess my six-year-old daughter will get a much better handle on it.”
Adams has done a bit of everything, from radio to television to designing 
computer games. Not all of them worked out.
“These are life’s little learning experiences,” he said. “You know what a 
learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, 
‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’
“At the end of all this being-determined-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades, I think I’m 
better off just sitting down and putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning 
order.”
Adams writes “slowly and painfully.”
“People assume you sit in a room, looking pensive and writing great thoughts,” 
he said. “But you mostly sit in a room looking panic-stricken and hoping they 
haven’t put a guard on the door yet.”
Adams will probably be writing for the next few years, before his daughter grows 
up.
“I think what I’ll do, because there has been talk about me doing a big TV 
documentary series, is that I’ll wait until her hormones kick in, and then I 
shall go off like a shot,” he said. “I think when she’s about thirteen I’ll go 
off and do a big documentary series and come back when she’s become civilized.”
The interview ended when Adams’s cell phone rang from inside his pocket. In the 
other pocket there was a little bit of padded cotton, red jtrimmed with a 
giraffe on it. It looked like it belonged to his daughter. His wife and daughter 
were supposed to have flown to London that night, but his daughter came down 
with an ear infection. “A serious one, actually.”
It was time for Adams to climb into his black Mercedes to go home and see her.
And so he did.
Interview conducted by Brendan Buhler,
Artsweek
Epilogue
A LAMENT FOR Douglas Adams, best known as author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to 
the Galaxy, who died on Saturday, aged forty-nine, from a heart attack.
This is not an obituary; there’ll be time enough for them. It is not a tribute, 
not a considered assessment of a brilliant life, not a eulogy. It is a keening 
lament, written too soon to be balanced, too soon to be carefully thought 
through. Douglas, you cannot be dead.
A sunny Friday morning in May, ten past seven, shuffle out of bed, log in to 
e-mail as usual. The usual blue bold headings drop into place, mostly junk, some 
expected, and my gaze absently follows them down the page. The name Douglas 
Adams catches my eye and I smile. That one, at least, will be good for a laugh. 
Then I do the classic double-take, back up the screen.
What did that heading actually say? Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few 
hours ago. Then that other cliché, the words swelling before my eyes.
It must be part of the joke. It must be some other Douglas Adams. This is too 
ridiculous to be true. I must still be asleep. I open the message, from a 
well-known German software designer. It is no joke, I am fully awake. And it is 
the right—or rather the wrong—Douglas Adams. A sudden heart attack, in the gym 
in Santa Barbara. “Man, man, man, man oh man,” the message concludes. Man 
indeed, what a man. A giant of a man, surely nearer seven foot than six, 
broad-shouldered, and he did not stoop like some very tall men who feel 
uncomfortable with their height. But nor did he swagger with the macho 
assertiveness that can be intimidating in a big man. He neither apologised for 
his height, nor flaunted it. It was part of the joke against himself.
One of the great wits of our age, his sophisticated humour was founded in a 
deep, amalgamated knowledge of literature and science, two of my great loves. 
And he introduced me to my wife—at his fortieth birthday party.
He was exactly her age, they had worked together on Dr. Who. Should I tell her 
now, or let her sleep a bit longer before shattering her day? He initiated our 
togetherness and was a recurrently important part of it. I must tell her now.
Douglas and I met because I sent him an unsolicited fan letter—I think it is the 
only time I have ever written one. I had adored The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the 
Galaxy. Then I read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
As soon as I finished it, I turned back to page one and read it straight through 
again—the only time I have ever done that, and I wrote to tell him so. He 
replied that he was a fan of my books, and he invited me to his house in London. 
I have seldom met a more congenial spirit. Obviously I knew he would be funny. 
What I didn’t know was how deeply read he was in science. I should have guessed, 
for you can’t understand many of the jokes in Hitchhiker if you don’t know a lot 
of advanced science. And in modern electronic technology he was a real expert. 
We talked science a lot, in private, and even in public at literary festivals 
and on the wireless or television. And he became my guru on all technical 
problems. Rather than struggle with some ill-written and incomprehensible manual 
in Pacific Rim English, I would fire off an e-mail to Douglas. He would reply, 
often within minutes, whether in London or Santa Barbara, or some hotel room 
anywhere in the world. Unlike most staff of professional helplines, Douglas 
understood exactly my problem, knew exactly why it was troubling me, and always 
had the solution ready, lucidly and amusingly explained. Our frequent e-mail 
exchanges brimmed with literary and scientific jokes and affectionately sardonic 
little asides. His technophilia shone through, but so did his rich sense of the 
absurd. The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch, and the follies of 
humanity were as comic in the world’s silicon valleys as anywhere else.
He laughed at himself with equal good humour. At, for example, his epic bouts of 
writer’s block (“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they 
go by”) when, according to legend, his publisher and book agent would lock him 
in a hotel room, with no telephone and nothing to do but write, releasing him 
only for supervised walks. If his enthusiasm ran away with him and he advanced a 
biological theory too eccentric for my professional scepticism to let pass, his 
mien at my dismissal of it would always be more humorously self-mocking than 
genuinely crestfallen. And he would have another go.
He laughed at his own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not to, but he 
did it with such charm that the jokes became even funnier. He was gently able to 
poke fun without wounding, and it would be aimed not at individuals but at their 
absurd ideas. To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow 
preordained for us, because we are so well suited to live in it, he mimed a 
wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a 
depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape 
as the puddle. Or there’s this parable, which he told with huge enjoyment, whose 
moral leaps out with no further explanation. A man didn’t understand how 
televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside 
the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained about 
high-frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, transmitters and 
receivers, amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a 
phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, 
nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself 
satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect 
there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”
Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla 
and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender (he once climbed Kilimanjaro in 
a rhino suit to raise money to fight the cretinous trade in rhino horn), Apple 
Computers has lost its most eloquent apologist. And I have lost an irreplaceable 
intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met. The 
day Douglas died, I officially received a happy piece of news, which would have 
delighted him. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone during the weeks I have secretly 
known about it, and now that I am allowed to, it is too late.
The sun is shining, life must go on, seize the day and all those cliches.
We shall plant a tree this very day: a Douglas fir, tall, upright, evergreen. It 
is the wrong time of year, but we’ll give it our best shot.
Off to the arboretum.
Richard Dawkins, in The Guardian,
MAY 14, 2001
(Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi
Professor of the Public Understanding
of Science at Oxford University.)

Douglas Noel Adams
1952-2001
The Order of Service for His Memorial
Schübler Chorales—J. S. Bach
Shepherd’s Farewell, from The Childhood of Christ
—Hector Berlioz
Welcome to the Church by Reverend Antony Hurst,
on behalf of St. Martin-in-the-Fields
Introduction and opening prayer by Stephen Coles
JONNY BROCK
Three Kings from Persian Lands—Peter Cornelius
ED VICTOR
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord—
Traditional American melody & words by Julia Ward Howe
MARK CARWARDINE
Gone Dancing—Robbie Mclntosh
Te Fovemus—The Chameleon Arts Chorus (by P. Wickens)
JAMES THRIFT, SUE ADAMS, JANE GARNIER
Rockstar—Margo Buchanan
Prayers of Thanksgiving by Stephen Coles
Holding On—Gary Brooker
Wish You Were Here—David Gilmour
RICHARD DAWKINS
For the beauty of the earth—Music by Conrad Kocher & words
by Folliott S. Pierpoint
ROBBIE STAMP
Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust from Cantata No 170
—J. S. Bach
Aria
Contented rest, beloved heart’s desire,
You are not found in the sins of hell,
But only in heavenly concord;
You alone fortify the feeble heart.
Contented rest, beloved heart’s desire,
Therefore none but the gifts of virtue
Shall have their abode in my heart.
SIMON JONES
For all the Saints who from their labours rest—
Music by R. Vaughan Williams &c words by William W. How
BLESSING BY REVEREND ANTONY HURST
Organ Music by J. S. Bach:
Fantasia in G
Prelude and Fugue in C
Italian Concerto
Editor’s Acknowledgments
To Douglas, without whom all of us would not be sharing the bounteous pleasures 
of these pages; I miss you;
To Jane Belson, Douglas’s beloved wife; her belief in and support for this book 
provide the foundation on which it rests;
To Ed Victor, Douglas’s long-time agent and trusted friend, whose commitment to 
this undertaking cleared away every obstacle;
To Sophie Astin, Douglas’s invaluable assistant, whose intelligence, devotion, 
and first-hand contribution to these pages proved essential;
To Chris Ogle, Douglas’s close friend, whose computer skills and knowledge of 
Douglas’s thought processes, passwords, arid what could very kindly be called 
Douglas’s filing system, enabled Chris to assemble a master disk of all 
Douglas’s work, without which this book would not exist;
To Robbie Stamp, Douglas’s good friend and business colleague, who reminded me 
that Douglas had already created the structure for this book;
To Shaye Areheart and Linda Loewenthal of Harmony Books, who first brought me 
into this project, and to Bruce Harris, Chip Gibson, Andrew Martin, Hilary Bass, 
and Tina Constable, who published and loved Douglas; to Peter Straus and Nicky 
Hursell in the UK, for their valuable editorial suggestions;
To Mike J. Simpson, former president of ZZ9, Douglas Adams’s official fan club, 
whose generosity and encyclopedic knowledge of Douglas’s life and work was an 
invaluable resource;
To Patrick Hunnicutt, who assisted my efforts in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 
and to Lizzy Kremer, Maggie Philips, and Linda Van in Ed Victor’s office;
To the various publications, writers, and friends of Douglas who so generously 
gave access and permission to use their work as it related to his;
To Isabel, my partner in life;
To my sons, Sam and William, who, as new generations tend to do, devoured 
Douglas’s books;
To all of Douglas’s readers: as you know, the love went (and still goes) both 
ways.
 
 
 
 
For more information on Douglas Adams and his creations, please visit 
www.douglasadams.com, the official website.
You may wish to join ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the 
Galaxy Appreciation Society, founded in 1980. For details of this fan-run club, 
visit www.zz9.org.
Douglas Adams was a patron of the following two charities: Dian Fossey Gorilla 
Fund (www.gorillas.org), and Save the Rhino International 
(www.savetherhino.org).
 
 
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