The son of a theology teacher/management consultant and a nurse, Douglas Adams attended Cambridge University, studying English literature. While at school, he spent much of his time writing sketches for Cambridge Footlights, a theatrical club which...

"Every particle of the universe . . . affects every other particle, however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything. The beating of a butterfly's wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could...

With the publication of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 1979, Douglas Adams both established a cult and became a cult figure. He continued his saga with four more novels--The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe,...

THE SAD irony of Douglas Adams's early death, at the age of 49, is that he was finally doing something that he had wanted since he first began writing comic sketches for the Cambridge Footlights: writing a Hollywood movie script. It was a script...

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After the Academy Awards, Hollywood usually takes a little hiatus until summer, when the studios roll out a weekly parade of stadium-fillers. But in recent years, it's become difficult to pinpoint when spring ends and summer begins-and 2005 proves to be no exception.In early March,...

Hot Black Desiato has made so much money out of ear-shattering plutonium rock music that he is having to spend a year dead for tax reasons. Gargravarr is a man whose mind and body have agreed to live apart on the grounds of incompatibility. And here again, bleep bleep hooray, is Marvin the Paranoid Android robot, who manages to look permanently lugubrious, as far as it is possible for something with a totally metal face to show self-pity. In short, and indeed in prolixity, chums, [The Restaurant at the End ...

Douglas Adams's latest space extravaganza this time starts life as a novel [Life, the Universe and Everything]. The first two novels of the series—The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—were first born as a radio series…. The major characters of the first books return—the vulnerable, bemused Dent; the wise-cracking, know-all Ford Prefect; the cool, half-comatose Zaphod and the manic depressive robot Marvin. Although the p...

If The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a work of genuine lunacy, and its sequel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe less inspired and considerably more ragged, [Life, the Universe and Everything] is a much busier but practically mirthless offering: the whole notion palls, the dialogue is frequently reduced to the characters telling one another to "zark off," and even the chunks of furious hyperbole have an ominously serious ring…. [There] are some amusing spots, includ...