Douglas Noel Adams, creator of Zaphod Beezlebrox and Dirk Gently and inventor of the number 42, was born in Cambridge, England in March 1952.
He created “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as a BBC radio show in March 1978, and it quickly became popular. A book adaptation was published soon after and quickly made him a bestselling author. His style was sci-fi satire, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins with a definite touch of Monty Python.
His books always had great titles, like “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, “Life, the Universe and Everything” and “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”.
Adams embraced the technological innovations of the 1990’s, producing an award-winning CD-Rom called Starship Titanic, a Myst-like puzzle/adventure game in which the user tries to pilot a damaged starship to safety despite the interruptions of weird characters and situations. He also launched his own multimedia/internet company, The Digital Village, which runs his website DouglasAdams.com.
Another good Douglas Adams site is this list of Douglas Adams quotes, and a Usenet group called alt.fan.douglasadams has been around forever and has lots of good information. He wrote an article called ‘What Have We Got To Lose?‘ for the first issue of Wired UK Magazine and proved he was still cool by getting interviewed at Slashdot.org in June 2000.
He died suddenly of a heart attack on April 12, 2001 at the age of 49. Goodbye, Douglas, and you know we appreciate all the fish.
