It was lovely to learn about all the process that The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (one of my favorite books) entailed in all its varied and multiple forms. Getting to know more about Douglas Adams in the fantastic way Neil Gaiman wrote this was a very nice experience. Four stars!

Having interviewed Douglas Adams at a trade show where he was introducing Starship Titanic, it was fascinating to read Neil Gaiman’s take on the project in Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and agree wholeheartedly. I had been taken in by the “front” of The Digital Village being Douglas Adams’ company, but there were nagging red flags in the back of my mind as I left the room. Even years later when I dined with Douglas at a multimedia festival in Cannes, I hadn’t quite diagnosed the problem. Gaiman’s book spells it out. It wasn’t Douglas’ company and, hence, he didn’t have quite the creative impact (notwithstanding his title of Chief Fantasist) I had expected him to have. [For the record, Douglas invited me to join him for a theological debate with the ground rules that we didn’t talk about Dirk Gently, Hitchhiker’s, or multimedia. Hey, I was so thrilled to spend time alone with this literary hero that I would have agreed if he had said, “Let’s go to dinner and discuss quantum mechanics, but the ground rules require us to only converse in mime.” So, if you think I have an “inside track” on this material, you are making a significant error. I am excited about details in Gaiman’s book that I wouldn’t even have known to ask about if discussion of his work was on the agenda.]

As long as I just performed the dreaded “name-dropping” routine, I might as well admit that Gaiman had a better quote from the Starship Titanic era than I was able to garner. Gaiman quotes Adams as complaining about the TrueTalk text-to-speech program saying, “…all the characters tend to end up sounding like either Stephen Hawking or a semi-concussed Scandinavian.” (p. 198) More to the point of the books, I liked Gaiman’s citation of Adams’ rationale for not making So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish more in tune with the Arthur Dent character we once knew (except maybe for the name, the dressing gown, and the towel, but except for a brief allusion, he doesn’t even appear till Chapter 5). According to Gaiman’s interview, Douglas said that Arthur Dent’s character had fundamentally changed. “So he is no longer someone through whose eyes we can see things. The whole thing has turned upside-down, and I don’t think I had got to grips with that until I was too far committed.” (p. 141)

But a short review can’t even begin to touch on all of the illuminating aspects of this truly behind the scenes, behind the scenes story. I loved reading about how certain people tried to keep Douglas on track when he was (as all writers, including me, are) incredibly late on a deadline. I was fascinated by Gaiman’s explanations of how the stage play of Hitchhiker’s went wrong in the large venue after being a sold-out success at the small venues. And then, I was enjoying the appropriateness of the coincidence in the posthumous radio production where they were working on Marvin’s voice modulation. “The original harmonizer used to create the cybernetic quality of Marvin’s voice had long since passed into obsolescence, so replicating his miserable tone would require time and experimentation. Cycling through the hundreds of pre-programmed settings on a piece of effects kit, they finally found the right voice treatment. It was setting number forty-two.” (p. 219) I don’t think you could find a story more delightful than that (though the finding of the asteroid labeled 2001DA42 with the year of Douglas’ death, his initials, and the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, then officially naming it after Douglas Adams seems pretty nice, as well—p. 229). I’ve never been disappointed with a Neil Gaiman book (comic, graphic novel, or traditional novel). Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy didn’t break the string.

An amazing book from an amazing author for an amazing author. It was hilarious, Interesting and easy to read.

n  n

Nothing I didn't know already to be honest, this book was more like comfort food for me.

I am a huge fan of books "Hitchhikers" and they are me go to re-read books as I can pick up one and read it from the bookmark I left in it six months ago and jump right into the story. I was so excited to see a bio about Doug and how the series came about. Well, this is the newest version of this book with other author contributors and I found it tedious,dull,and possibly worse than Vogon poetry. Maybe I needed a Babel fish to understand the way this was done, but Belgium! I expected better that this.

Ég las upprunalegu bókina eftir dauða Adams. Af tölvuskjá. Fyrsta bókin sem ég las á stafrænu formi í heild sinni.

Þetta er uppfærða útgáfan. Það er margt gott og áhugavert í henni en hún er frekar sundurlaus. Upprunalegur texti Gaiman er reglulega í fyrstu persónu. Síðan eru hlutar af textanum sem eru augljóslega ekki frá honum og það passar bara ekki alltaf vel saman.

Mikið er sorglegt að við fengum ekki meira frá Douglas Adams.

The book itself is a curiosity, most interesting to fans, and a dated one (last revised in 2003); attitudes are similarly dated (women are an afterthought at best throughout). It did make me want to listen to LAST CHANCE TO SEE. Simon Jones does a wonderful job narrating, of course, and I laughed out loud when he had to read the line: "As much as we all adore Simon Jones’s portrayal of the hapless Arthur Dent, he’s hardly the obvious romantic lead."

Kindly sent to me by my friend Tony / BCer bookgroupman.

Published in 1987 and this updated version in 1993. A wonderful biography, almost autobiography with the direct quotes from Douglas Adams himself. Made more poignant when you come upon anything that mentions the future, e.g. further Dirk Gently novels. It fired some of my creative juices as well, which is never a bad thing!

Any opportunity to slip into Douglas Adams is a treat, even if only anecdotes about his life. I hadn't appreciated how many different forms Hitchhiker's took, and how inconsistent they all were. Probably what I got most of out this was recommendations for other works (Meaning of Liff, Bureaucracy, etc.), which I will now have to find!

Full disclosure on this one: my library system did not have this book so I had to inter-library loan it, and the copy they came up with for me is a first edition. They've since published an updated version of the book, re-titled Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was published about four years after Adams's death in 2001. It probably has all sorts of extra chapters about the seventeen years of Adams' writing and fan activity since 1988, and of course, his death and legacy, that the first edition did not have. I would really like to track down a copy of the updated version, is what I'm saying.

This book was an obvious stop on my quest to read the complete Neil Gaiman bibliography, not least of which because it's one of the first things he ever published, and also because it's really interesting as a Gaiman fan (and an Adams fan) to see Gaiman freaking out hardcore about Douglas Adams and his work. His love for The Hitchhiker's Guide and its ilk is painfully obvious in every word (many of which have turns of phrase that foreshadow Gaiman's own career), which elevates the book from one of those commercial fan-guides it might have been, to something genuinely insightful. It also helps that Gaiman seems to have had access to the man himself, along with the key players involved in getting Adams's stories out to the world.

According to the picture that Gaiman paints, Adams was a brilliant man who stepped into fame reluctantly, and almost by accident. He was notoriously obscenely late on delivering manuscripts (putting new context to his famous quote, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by"), and he described the process of writing more akin to torture than creating art (or humor, as he liked to think of it). It was also interesting to see the differences he had with the various mediums and stories he created. He described writing Hitchhiker's Guide to be all about the jokes, but his other series, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was in many ways easier for him to write because the story didn't constantly have to bend around itself to land jokes. He was also rather obsessed with computers and translating his stories to games. (This is the part I'd be really interested in reading in the updated version . . . 1988 was around that time when obsession with computers and technology was starting to go from something fantastical to more of an everyday experience).

I've read Hitchhiker's Guide several times, although I haven't picked it up in almost ten years now, so I think I'm due for a re-read. It will be interesting to read it with all this background knowledge for context (also, it will be interesting to read it now that I've got a functioning brain, as opposed to whatever it is I had back in high school).

Must read for Douglas Adams fans and Neil Gaiman completionists, but it might also be interesting reading for someone new to Gaiman or Adams, depending on how interested you are in behind-the-scenes-making-of stories. Anyway I liked it.

Not really a biography nor a commentary, this really is just a companion to Hitchhikers Guide. A book I haven't read in close to 20 years, this book brought back a lot of the memory and humor I loved from that book.

Anyone who has read my books, shorts, and blog is well aware that Douglas Adams is my favorite author. I celebrate the man’s entire library, from the wildly popular Hitchhiker’s series to the obscurely hilarious Last Chance to See. I even dedicated the first book in my Max and the Multiverse series to his memory.

Thus, it would be reasonable to assume that I have plunged the depths of fandom. I have watched his many interviews, read his numerous essays, and consumed every Hitchhiker’s adaptation to date (including the original radio skits).

So imagine my surprise to learn that Neil Gaiman had written a Douglas Adams companion book … back in 1986.

Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has been in circulation for 35 years and I just now found out about it. Did I mention that Neil Gaiman wrote it? Good Omens? American Gods? Yes, that Neil Gaiman. It’s like being a fan of George R.R. Martin, but somehow missing Game of Thrones on HBO. That’s how dumb I felt.

In any regard, one of the best modern authors wrote a companion piece about my favorite author. I knew that I was going to love it, so it wasn’t exactly shocking when I did. Through a series of letters, interviews, and transcripts, Gaiman digs deep into the phenomenon that was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s surprisingly detailed, not just a “he did this” and “he did that” level of already-know-this. The book offers an endless bounty of interesting tidbits, which I was more than happy to devour as a fan.

On the flip side, this could also be seen as the main flaw. If you only have a passing interest in Douglas Adams, then this book is likely not for you. Don’t Panic is very well-written (thanks to the incomparable Gaiman), but it does require a foundation of interest. I read several reviews that chided the book for being tedious, while at the same time admitting their lack of fandom (facepalm). So as a necessary disclaimer: Gaiman fans be warned, this one is for Adams fans, which Gaiman most certainly is, and we love him for it.

Anyhoo, it should come as no surprise that I highly recommend this book ... to fans of Douglas Adams. Don’t Panic is all about the batter that made the Hitchhiker’s cake. So if that’s your cup of tea, then grab your towel and dive right in. You won’t be disappointed.