Oh.
Wait.
Er …
… That is five books, isn’t it?
:smack:
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish had completely escaped my memory. Guess it really wasn’t as good as the first two!
I liked it :p.
And yes, there are 5 books total in the series.
I second that, the scenery is much better in the radio version*****. Kricket (soon to be Krikkit) you do know that the first two books started life as a radio series?
The Beeb have just finished a four episode broadcast of Life, the Universe and Everything IMHO it suffered from being adapted from a novel to a radio script, there was too much that was effectively just the characters reading sections of the book, in this case I think the book might actually be funnier than the show.
And you get to hear Marvin hum like Pink Floyd*
******In the original broadcast to was Pink Floyd, later they subsituted some library stuff.
Now that we’ve gotten the book-count matter cleared up, Salmon of Doubt was never intended to be a Hitchhiker book, it was going to be the third Dirk Gently book.
It has also been a tv show miniseries (which you can buy for $30 on DVD), a one man play (as well as a full cast play), a graphic novel, a video game, and a towel.
Correct, it was originally intenteded to be a Dirk Gently book, but before DNA died he considered it turning it into a Hitchiker’s book, and he says so in The Salmon of Doubt…or one of his friends says so anyways. I’m not sure how he was planning on changing it though. Nothing in Slamon of Doubt stuck me as a joke, or plot line, to be found in the Hitchiker’s universe.
I have that as well. Plus the Peril Sensitive Glasses and the fluff. I have no idea where they all are; but I made sure I kept everything that came with the game together. This was for an Atari computer, so even if I find the game I can no longer play it. After reading HHGTG in the '80s, I bought a towel and had ‘Don’t Panic’ put on it. Still have it, still like new.
Johnny L.A., there’s a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is.
I’ll throw in another vote for seeking out the original radio series (it’s available on CD, by the way, from the BBC online shop and used copies can be found on Amazon as well). Even after reading the books, it’s still worth it to cet the radio series just to hear the wonderful deadpan narration of “Peter Jones as ‘the book’”. The radio series scripts are also available in print, but the some of the voice characters are just so well done in the radio series (Marvin, Slartibartifast, the mice, and almost all the Syrius Cybernetics robits, especially the off-tune robotic chorus) - they just have to be heard. (And then go back and read the books again and just see if you don’t hear their voices as you’re reading.)
Avoid the TV series - no redeeming value whatsoever.
Douglas Adams did oversee the Infocom PC (text) adventure game of Hitchhiker’s. It was pretty good. Selected parts were absolutely inspired - think “Babel Fish”), but the humor level was quite uneven. He did another game he did with Infocom, Bureaucracy, which I thought really captured his comedic style, suggestng that, no matter how normal the world may look on the surface, look close enough and you’ll find truly bizarre events going on all around you.
Agreed that while the Hitchhiker’s Infocom game was enjoyable, Bureaucracy was absolutely inspired and one of the most enjoyable text games (behind the Zork series, of course, and Nord & Bert) ever created. Absolutely brilliant.
To the Salmon of Doubt point, from my copy which resides quite happily on my desk at work:
To me that suggests that in the course of writing SOD, he came up with some great ideas that didn’t fit in with the Dirk Gently realm, and so he set those ideas aside to possibly be used in a sixth (more upbeat!) Hitchhiker’s book, however, SOD was, from inception, a Dirk Gently book.
Wow.
I can type, honestly, I can.
Get him, guys!
Seriously…Kricket…you can stop after the third one. And yes, switch over to Terry.
My favorite bit, by far, of the Hitchhikers’ Guide books is from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where they meet the real ruler of the Universe. That guy is my hero.
You seem to have forgotten about Peter Jones as The Book.
You can dig up a Z-Machine interpreter for all computers these days. If you’ve got the .Z3 game files for those old Infocom games, you can play 'em.
<hijack>
A few years ago, I bought up the entire Infocom collection on CD-ROM on clearance. With Z-Machine interpreters, I can now play those games on my Mac and my Palm PDA(!).
Heck, I’ve got the Hitchhikers’ game right here…
</hijack>
And while I’ve never heard the radio plays, I do have the radio scripts in book form. 
Heh. Just last night I was up until 2:30 playing Plundered Hearts – and on Friday I was up until 6:30 playing Enchanter!
Most of the Infocom games are still copyrighted, but the original Zork trilogy has been licensed for free downloads, as has Zork: The Undiscovered Underground, a text adventure written in 1997 by original Zork co-author Marc Blank and Infocom author Mike Berlyn – you can get them here.
Adams put the Hitchhikers’ game on his website before he passed away, and you can play it here, although you can’t save. There’s also an illustrated version here, although I can’t get it to come up at the moment.
–Cliffy
I remember hearing a recording of that original broadcast in my youth. The music Marvin was humming sounded like Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene or Equinox, but the characters said it was Pink Floyd music.
Works for me.
Or maybe it wasn’t the original broadcast, and that Jean-Michel Jarre music was the “library stuff” that Small Clanger was talking about.
He owes a lot of people. A.A. Milne being another one.
I enjoyed the first book, but wasn’t too keen on the second. I didn’t even finish reading the third one. But I may try and read them again some time. I was quite young when I read them, so I may enjoy them more now.