This month marks the 24th anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams (May 11th, 2001). I acknowledged Adams at the end of my debut novel because he is a literary, well, for lack of a better term, hero to me. He wrote the books that made me want to be a writer and while my first novel may not share a genre with Adams’ most famous works, I like to believe his influence on my own writing style put a tiny bit of his voice into my first novel.
In particular, a passage like this was heavily influenced by Adams’ style of taking ordinary ideas and making them sound ludicrous to a grand extent.
I still hope to one day write a fantasy or sci-fi comedy more akin to Adams’ novels, but for now, I’m satisfied that I was able to add a dash of Adams to my Ghibli-inspired stew.
I’ve been thinking about Adams a lot recently, now that I finally can call myself a published author. Adams died at 49. I’m about to turn 46 and while I have no plans for an early checkout from this mortal coil, I look at the short amount of time Adams was creating and am in utter awe of what he managed to put out into the universe is such a cosmically brief period. I can only hope that when I do check out, I’ve managed to put out 1/100th of the amazing he brought to our vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big universe.
Adams also died four months before September 11, 2001, and I do wonder about how he would’ve written about the world of the last 25 years. Between both the UK’s and US’s shenanigans on both the domestic and global stages, I have to believe he would have had fascinating, if not hilarious opinions on all if it. But a part of me worries that the sheer absurdity of the world we live in might have made a master of absurdist humor such as him obsolete. Moreso, as a conservationist, Adams might have simply been too dismayed at the rapid destruction of our world and its natural treasures to find any humor in this modern world as a whole.
Sadly, or maybe fortunately, we’ll never know. We can only look at the wonderful work he left behind and speculate at what he might’ve created had he not waved his towel, stuck out his thumb, and flagged down the first teaser leaving sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
So, please allow me a moment to lay flowers at the feet and to raise a cup of tea to the man who taught me to never panic and that the two most important things you can take with you out in a cold and uncaring universe are a towel and a book.
And I always know where I can find both.
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