The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams

 The Wildly Improbable Ideas

 of Douglas Adams

42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams is published on 24th August by Unbound.

My thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy to review and to Random Book Tours for inviting me to take part on the tour.

Synopsis

When Douglas Adams died in 2001, he left behind 60 boxes full of notebooks, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches and even poems. In 42, compiled by Douglas’s long-time collaborator Kevin Jon Davies, hundreds of these personal artefacts appear in print for the very first time. Douglas was as much a thinker as he was a writer, and his artefacts reveal how his deep fascination with technology led to ideas which were far ahead of their time: a convention speech envisioning the modern smartphone, with all the information in the world living at our fingertips; sheets of notes predicting the advent of electronic books; journal entries from his forays into home computing – it is a matter of legend that Douglas bought the very first Mac in the UK; musings on how the internet would disrupt the CD-Rom industry, among others. 42 also features archival material charting Douglas’s school days through Cambridge, Footlights, collaborations with Graham Chapman, and early scribbles from the development of Doctor Who, Hitchhiker’s and Dirk Gently. Alongside details of his most celebrated works are projects that never came to fruition, including the pilot for radio programme They’ll Never Play That on the Radio and a space-inspired theme park ride. Douglas’s personal papers prove that the greatest ideas come from the fleeting thoughts that collide in our own imagination, and offer a captivating insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers and most enduring storytellers.

My Review

This is one of those " Keep for Ever" books that you will want to peruse over many years, dipping into the fascinating life of such an incredible author and playwright. For all of you Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" fans, Doctor Who and Monty Python fans this is such a wonderful book which, to my mind, has been too long in being produced. 

I was over the moon when I looked at all the hand written scrawls, school reports, scripts and scribblings that have been meticulously saved, edited and published in this beautiful volume celebrating the life of , to me, this incredible writer.

Apart from what is written in the synopsis there is not a lot to say about this amazing book apart from the fact that all Douglas Adams fans need one.

A brilliant 5 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 addition to my keep for ever book collection.

About the Author and the collection

Kevin Jon Davies

• Douglas was as much a thinker as he was a writer, and his artefacts reveal how his deep fascination with technology led to ideas which were far ahead of their time: a convention speech envisioning the modern smartphone, with all the information in the world living at our fingertips; sheets of notes predicting the advent of electronic books; journal entries from his forays into home computing – it is a matter of legend that Douglas bought the very first Mac in the UK; musings on how the internet would disrupt the CD-Rom industry, among others.
  
  
  42 also features archival material charting Douglas’s school days through Cambridge, Footlights, collaborations with Graham Chapman, and early scribbles from the development of Doctor Who, Hitchhiker’s and Dirk Gently. Alongside details of his most celebrated works are projects that never came to fruition, including the pilot for radio programme They’ll Never Play That on the Radio and a space-inspired theme park ride.
  
  
  Douglas’s personal papers prove that the greatest ideas come from the fleeting thoughts that collide in our own imagination, and offer a captivating insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers and most

After the Hitchhiker’s Guide radio series aired in 1978, young art student Kevin Jon Davies sought out its little-known author Douglas Adams to record an early fanzine interview. He went on to direct The Making of Hitchhiker, the 1993 documentary for BBC Video, and Adams invited him to art-direct The Illustrated Hitchhiker, a large-format book with pioneering digital composites. Since then he has contributed to a number of Adams-related projects, including The Hexagonal Phase (2018), the final radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.