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May 03, 2005
Douglas Adams
Friday morning as I was driving into work I was very surprised to hear a segment about Douglas Adams on NPRs The World. The segment noted that Adams read little science fiction and characterized himself as a satirist; he preferred to read history, literature, politics, and science.
There have been few successful attempts to combine SF and humor, and (unless the work is a parody of something else in SF, like Galaxy Quest) the humor is often a species of SF-as-social-commentary (or SF-as-parable.) Hitchhikers and its sequels fall into this category (as do some of Vonneguts and Pratchetts works.)
Ive just re-read Hitchhikers and I saw the movie over the weekend (I thought it was a very successful adaptation.) One of the books themes is causation. Adams manipulates plot just as much as Tolkien does (and he has an equally large sense of metahistory), but while Tolkien worked with mythology and religion the Hitchikers universe has no God and Adams works instead with probability and computer science (however loosely defined.)
The NPR profile noted that Adams returned to this interest towards the end of his life. When I re-read the Deep Thought chapter of Hitchikers I was struck by how much it reminded me of Lems Cyberiad, a set of short stories that features a series of logic puzzles and fables populated by robots and computers (in which humans are mythical creatures.) In that book computers are built to replicate tasks one would expect only humans could work out, in Hitchikers Well, that would be telling.
As you know, Adams died before giving the commencement speech here in 2001.
-LV
(Hmn, the other SF work my re-read reminded me of was Red Dwarf. Between the Adams Sirius Cybernetics and Red Dwarfs Talkie Toaster, I expect an exasperatingly chipper personalities out of everyday appliances any day now.)
Posted by lisav at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)