It all started with Adams lying drunk on his back in a field. This took place in Innsbruck on a hitchhiking trip around Europe before he entered university. "I sort of laid down on the ground and stared up at the stars," Adams told Susan Adamo of
Starlog in a 1981 interview, "and it occurred to me then that somebody ought to write a hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy. The thought didn't come back to me for years afterward." When it did, after Douglas had been writing scripts for England's BBC radio for several years, it returned with the resounding thud of the planet Earth being destroyed, and one Arthur Dent being propelled into space to become the first galactic hitchhiker.
Adams's quirky idea for a radio program spawned a multimedia blitz for the young writer: a series of five novels in the "Hitchhiker" group (the first one of which sold 100,000 copies in less than a month and ultimately sold more than two million in England alone); a stage play; a television series; and a computer game. Adams became a loopy cultural hero for the young; his tongue-in-cheek antics in the formerly strictly non-humorous precincts of outer space and sci fi earned him a legion of eager fans around the globe.
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