Reflections on Douglas Adams' Books and How They Predicted Cutting Edge Publishing

When The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxywas first transmitted on BBC radio in 1977, it's odd to consider that Douglas Adams (the man behind the stories of intergalactic travel, sulking robots and computers which could calculate the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything) actually typed everything up on a good old-fashioned typewriter. Despite the scifi theme (or perhaps because of it), the whole first two series gives a definite air of an author who's not terribly keen on technology, or the progress it makes. From the world being destroyed to make way for a new hyperspatial bypass, to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, who aggressively develop gadgets that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all". Anyone who's owned an iPhone will probably feel a certain affinity with this.

It's even odder that, in later life, Adams' view on technology became very different, and he became a huge proponent for gadgets of all kinds, particularly those made by Apple. He was the first person in the UK to buy an Apple Macintosh. He was one of the first authors to collaborate with a software company to produce videogames (both the Hitchhiker's Guide and Bureaucracy text adventures by Infocom were devised between himself and Steve Meretzky). He was also in the vanguard in terms of online involvement; his above dealings with Infocom were mostly through a very early version of email, and was a regular contributor to the USENET groups alt.fan.douglas-adams and comp.sys.mac.*.

Perhaps it's fair to say that while his books (and radio shows, and television series, and films, and towels...) concentrated on the humorous aspects of modern technology and how it lets us down, Adams had a pretty good idea of how it should work. And to me, nothing epitomises this better that the titular book of his series, which cast a shadow decades long, and suggested methods of communication and collaboration that are only recently becoming realised.

For those of you who've not read the series, go and read them now. If that's not possible, a brief summary of how it was supposed to work. The guide itself was an electronic book, filled with useful (or at least friendly) information on how to survive on next to nothing while bumming your way around the galaxy. The Guide contained many inaccuracies (or, according to the editors, was definitively correct, but reality was often disappointingly incorrect), but was updated constantly as new entries were published over the Sub Etha Network, a nice bit of technobabble for the equivalent nowadays of an intergalactic wireless network. Entries were uploaded by people in the field through their copies of the guide, and published by whoever was wandering past the editor's desk at the time and felt it looked interesting.

If both the methods and the technology are sounding familiar, it's because we're finally catching up to the reality. Websites like Wikipedia and indeed, Associated Content tend to work on this basis of user-submitted entries. With the advances in WiFi in the last few years, we're rapidly approaching the time when people will be regularly submitting entries to such sites not from their desks, but from cafes, parks, and wherever they happen to be at the time. An article about, say, the latest concert at Madison Square could be submitted through the ether before the band has actually finished playing. This sort of thing is what we should be talking about when we're bandying around terrible buzzwords like 'Web 2.0' and 'Blogosphere'. It's happening as we speak, the media trendies haven't quite grasped it yet, and I suspect it'll redefine what we think of as journalism slowly and insidiously. And given the news channels we have nowadays, I can't see this being a terribly bad thing.

Adams tends to get overlooked when people start making up their lists of scifi authors who made amazingly accurate predictions about future technologies; names like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov get bandied around a lot, and deservedly so. Douglas tends to be remembered mostly for being tall, British, and witty, but over the next few years, I wouldn't at all be surprised if his name, and his ideas, start creeping into the zeitgeist a little more. And deservedly so. After all, the man at least knew how to make a proper cup of tea.