Der Inhalt der Festplatten von 4 Computern des verstorbenen Douglas Adams: Textfragmente, Interviews, Aufsätze und ein unvollendeter Roman -hört sich todlangweilig an - ist es aber nicht! Es ist eine sehr gute Einsicht in die Meinungen, Philosophien, Visionen und kleinen Probleme eines der größten Autoren dieser Welt.
Da gibt es: Philosophische Abhandlungen über den richtigen alkoholischen Drink, seine glühende Bejahung des Atheismus, das Problem mit den Adapterdingsbumsen beim Verreisen mit elektronischen Geräten, eine sehr treffende Trendbestimmung bezüglich des Internet und sozialer Netzwerke, die so um das Jahr 2000 wirklich noch sehr visionär war aber heute bereits eingetroffen ist, dann noch sein erstes Werk als Zwölfjäriger...... und zuletzt seinen unvollendeten Roman, einen Nachruf seines Freundes Dawkins und das Line Up seiner Beerdigungsveranstaltung.
Wenn man den Menschen hinter den genialen Romanen kennenlernen möchte oder sich als Fan bezeichnet ist dieses Buch absolut empfehlenswert!

Ich habe mich immer sehr geärgert, da ich im Jahr 2000 eine Veranstaltung mit ihm in Wien, zu der ich mich hineinschwindeln hätte können, verpasst habe, da ich erst im nachhinein darüber informiert wurde. Als er dann kurz darauf zu allem Überfluss auch noch gestorben ist, war ich stinksauer. Dieses Buch hat mich ein bisschen dafür entschädigt dass ich ihm nicht die Hand schütteln und ein paar Worte mit ihm reden konnte.

It's really amazing the amounts of nostalgia that can build up in a person's system before it kinda explodes into a kind of reverse word soup full of interviews, introductions, epilogues, and snippets of novels we wish we had but they were never penned because the author up and died on us.

I'm writing of Douglas Adams, of course.

I almost didn't re-read this one because I remember it WAS mostly just magazine articles and interesting early computer-tech stuff and ruminations on science, god, and other random bits that fly out of this wonderful man's brain in tightly humorous one-liners that explain not only life, the universe, and everything, but also the way his mind works... and this is all DESPITE the fact that Mr. DNA may or may not have had a functional nose with which to sneeze out those humorous one-liners.

So am I rating this entirely based on a man's ability to be clear, funny, horribly learned, and dead?

Yes, but it's gotta be more than that, and indeed it is. I loved the man.

I grew up reading and re-reading HHGttG about a bazillion times with or without the cheese sandwhich, playing countless hours on the Infrogames title of the same name being simultaneously corrupted and flabbergasted by my inability to create NO TEA, and learning how to fly by distraction.

I even decided when I was fourteen that I'd grow a beard for the distinct purpose of giving some poor hapless creature a traveling burial site to not see the rest of the world through.

DNA is that kind of man to me.

This book reminds me of just how regular a human he is and it is an unabashedly wonderful nostalgia piece to boot.

Oh, and we also get a few short stories including Ghengis Kahn, a non-presidential Zaphod, and the opening to the next Dirk Gently book which would have been fantastic, I'm sure, had he written it.

*sigh*

Still, what a wonderful thing it is. Farewell, Mr. Adams. (Yes. I know I'm 16 years late. It's just that this book was compiled shortly after his death, so I feel it fresh. Sue me.)

A posthumous collection of writing recovered from Douglas Adams’s various Apple computers, plus 11 chapters of an unfinished Dirk Gently novel. I preferred the earlier essays and fragments. But the Dirk Gently stuff is quite interesting because it’s a sequel to The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. It has provided me with further oxygen and direction for my Douglas Adams deep-dive.

There’s nothing more to say than what others have already said except that I miss him.

Funny. Sad because he died and that’s sad. Also, the part that is the third book of the dirk gently series was so good and I wish it was a finished book. I also enjoyed most of the other excerpts and essays.

There's honestly really no way of me writing about this book without gushing all over the place. Despite the undeniable brilliance of his other books, Salmon of Doubt very quietly takes you into the mind of the introspective and thoughtful Adams that must have spent time staring deeply into the unknowable. It gets to the core of what he wrote about and why; his fascination with science which he would eventually find amusing and eventually have it evolve into jokes that he'd write into his books. And to draw all of this together, the infuriating ease with which he places words together. Though he was notorious for procrastinating and finding the writing process as arduous as almost anyone can testify, Adams was also known (after being forced to) for being able to sit down and write straight for two weeks and come out with a book. And his humor from his blog writings are so casual and flippant that there's no way to not feel awful about how unfunny and unwitty you are.

I appreciated this book for the glimpse it gave into Adams' mind, which turned out to be a minutely aware and self-searching one about technology, about himself, about life, the universe, and everything. A bittersweet compendium celebrating the man he was and mourning the future books he'll never write, the observations he'll never perfectly word in a single apt sentence.

UPDATE ON "2ND" READING:
Technically it's not my second reading, but it's been a really long time since I sat down and read the whole thing again from start to finish. It's a book I remember huge chunks of, listen to the audiobook when I'm feeling restless, dip into it when I half remember a passage and want to reread the whole section and then end up reading the whole several following chapters. In a way I've read it quite a lot. But it's been a while since I really read it all the way through, taking in every word and really parsing everything he says.

Turns out that I've grown up a lot in that time.

I read it, incidentally, as a break from reading another one of my favorite writers whose most current work hasn't been evoking a lot of enthusiasm in me. What could be more appropriate, when disappointed by an author whose current work I feel like is somewhat regressive, than reading an author whose work never had time to grow?

Adams died at the relatively tender age of 49. It was unexpected, heartbreaking, and every time I go through this book, either briefly or wholly, I am struck by the sadness of that. He never got to see all the ways that the internet has exploded, for better or for worse - and the thing about Adams was the fact that, for the most part, he was expertly attuned to seeing technology as being for the better. His writings in this book about technology are the stuff I come back to the most. At a close second are his religious philosophies. What I got from his books at the time was not a resentment of religion but a fascination in our physical world. That our world was amazing and beautiful enough that religion wasn't required - but that didn't necessarily mean doing away with it or imposing that on other people.

And that's where I get a little relieved that I didn't have to watch Adams evolve. Because I've watched Dawkins do it, I've watched Fry do it. I've watched it turn into a spurning of religion in any form. Adams manages to hang onto his acknowledgement and understanding of it, but it's with a hint of European condescension and not exactly a difficult hop, skip, and a jump to the atheists of today. He paints it as something for the primitive locals to accept and the educated foreigners to understand. In that way, I'm glad that Adams is trapped forever in 2001 and older. It's one thing for someone to say that then; it's another thing for that mindset to holdout to this day. And I wish and want and hope and believe that he wouldn't have kept his foibles for another 16 years.

And by god are his foibles reflected well in what was left over of Salmon of Doubt. He's never been the greatest with female characters - I believe that it helped massively that Lalla Ward and Mary Tamm were sharp enough people to input personality into anything for the times he wrote Romana. They're invariably "attractive" (a massive pet peeve of mine being that female characters are introduced with a quantifier on that account - something, incidentally, that the book I was avoiding did) and often inscrutable. Richard and Arthur are both, in a way, bland, but are also both, in a way, interesting characters with interests and focus. His fumbling with characters like Kate and Trillian, bland with no personality or interests (or interests that change wildly from one story to the next), brings to sharp relief how bad he was at writing them. I don't exactly understand what was so incredibly inscrutable about the women-folk to Adams, but it does make me glad I don't have a book from him to be disappointed by. And yet, at the same time, I suffer under the missing half of Salmon of Doubt - about a cat that is missing its bottom half, like some sort of hellish ironic parallel. It remains unfinished, unfound, and despite apparently an entire well of writing in his harddrive, unknowable, taking the fate of Gusty Winds with it.

I love Adams - when I think of people whose works I've been invariably changed by, influenced by, Adams sits on top of that tower, beaming beatifically. But I'm old enough to opine myself, to have perspective and opinions separate from him (I didn't, once), and with that perspective, it's not that he's fallen in my eyes, it's that I've risen a lot since I last really perused him. This book is still incredibly important to me, and I won't deny that reading Dawkins' eulogy at the end still brings me to tears.

This collection of essays and interviews is just a genuine pleasure. Funny, interesting, and enjoyable.

A collection of essays, speeches, ramblings unearthed on his hard drive(s), one short story culled from a BBC annual, and the titular unfinished Dirk Gently novel. The essays are breezy and witty, often lacking focus when discussing science and technology, but comprise (realistically) the most readable of his non-fiction output. There are some readers, yours included, who feel Adams spent himself on the Hitchhiker’s books: although the Dirk Gentlys were absurdist romps sutured with awesome logic, they didn’t hang together as novels. The short excerpt from The Salmon of Doubt, however, might prove me wrong: the usual warmth and humour is present, although in nascent form, (the narration even slips from third into first person, a sign of Adams’s dissatisfaction). But all in all, nobody who loves Adams could resist reading this book, despite snoozing through the travel/nature pieces to get to the stuff they want. It’s a pleasing gallimaufry. Savour it, because there is no more.

This is a delightful and maddening book. This collection of essays, columns, speech transcripts and random musings was culled from Adams' computers after his tragic death at the age of 49. The collection offers new insight into one of the world's most gifted humorists, and there is both pleasure and education to be had in reading his thoughts on such diverse topics as music, atheism, evolutionary biology, conservation and computers.

The last section of the book contains the beginning of an unfinished Dirk Gently novel tentatively titled The Salmon of Doubt. Though Adams was an avowed atheist, the frustration I felt at having this tale end so abruptly was enough to make me wish he's wrong about the afterlife and hope some trance channel will track him down in the ethers so we can all find out just who was sending Mr. Gently those wire transfers and what, exactly, the rhinoceros was doing on the highway to Santa Fe.

A collection of Adams writings, both fiction and nonfiction. It was interesting reading these at the same time as Green's essay collection, in that I found some similar flaws (I wonder if they are flaws in essay in general). Overall, I enjoyed some of them, especially the tragically unfinished Dirk Gently book. Others interested me less or disappointed me. Mostly glad I read it though.

By his own admission, Douglas Adams was not a great writer. When you list the names of the authors who have advanced the English language, Douglas Adams will not feature in that pantheon, though it must be said that he loved the language more than most. But never mind that, for his place is secure in a far more important list: Greatest Thinkers. In the simplest sense of the word, Adams was a philosopher. Like his friends in Monty Python, he used comedy “as a medium to express intelligence” and to communicate ideas, the way comedy should be used. Although this isn’t the book that he intended to deliver to the world, it has served as the perfect goodbye to an author who died well before his time.

The book is divided into four parts—the first three being Life, the Universe, and Everything, obviously, followed by a fun short story that I’d read before,  Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, and finally, the unfinished sequel to  The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. In the first three parts, the editor has presented a collection of Adams’ speeches, interviews, website entries, book recommendations, introductions to other books/editions and some unpublished stuff rummaged from his many, many MacBooks. In other words, this is a book for those of us who are already familiar with Adams and were left wanting more, those of us to whom Douglas’ idiosyncratic wit and charm feel like a warm, comforting hug.

In his introduction to this book,  Stephen Fry elaborates on this feeling:

n  

“Douglas has in common with certain rare artists the ability to make the beholder feel that he is addressing them and them alone: I think this in part explains the immense strength and fervour of his ‘fan base’. [...] When you look at Blake, listen to Bach, read Douglas Adams or watch Eddie Izzard perform, you feel you are perhaps the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everyone else admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do. I advance this as a theory. Douglas’s work is not the high art of Bach or the intense personal cosmos of Blake, it goes without saying, but I believe my view holds nonetheless. It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do—”

n
What I love about DNA’s writing is his tendency to flit from topic to topic at supersonic speeds and draw comparisons between apparently unrelated subjects, like Newton and Darwin, for example. It takes a peculiar kind of intelligence to draw such elaborate connections. But Adams has this in common with both Newton and Darwin: a sense of wonder. My Physics professor used to say that to be a physicist, one must first be a philosopher, completely in awe of the universe and everything in it, just as Douglas was until the very end. But members of both professions also refuse to settle for a limited world-view, discontented to be living in ignorance. That same sense of wonder puts them on the quest to seek answers and so, they steer the human race forward. Douglas Adams understood and appreciated this and, in his humour and philosophy, he retained a deep respect for science. His strength lay in the fact that he could convey this reverence without ever sounding arrogant:



The Salmon of Doubt provides extensive insight into Adams’ thoughts and beliefs. As is evident, I particularly enjoyed his commentary on religion and atheism, which he wrote with an uncanny understanding of not only science and religion but also the human psyche. If you think atheists are a tiresome lot, you’ll be blown away by DNA, who had to have been the most affable and amusing atheist in history. Where his good friend  Richard Dawkins incites anger in those who cling to religious beliefs, on reading Adams you can’t help but laugh at your own (il)logical fallacies. (Incidentally, this edition includes an utter tear-jerker of an epilogue by Dawkins.) Such is the power of a good joke, as DNA unfailingly demonstrated:

n  

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

n
I hope that someday I can acquire his unique skill and ability to discuss heavy subject matter in a light-hearted manner, such that his audience is left with much to ponder over but never overwhelmed. Another joy was to read about his profound love for music. To read his essays on The Beatles and Bach is to see that Adams admired those who dared to do something different, who were imaginative and creative and avant-garde. Rare is such a person who could talk about almost anything under the sun: from subatomic particles to manta rays, technology to Jane Austen, architecture to evolutionary biology. The world suffered an incalculable loss when he passed. The Salmon of Doubt may not have gone where it intended to go, but I think it has ended up where it needed to be. It belongs in the compendium of every DNA fan who adores this writer and wants to know his thoughts on everything from Earl Grey tea to the letter ‘Y’. If you’re not a fan yet, I can’t imagine what you’re waiting for!

So long, DNA, and thanks for all the laughter.

A kind of poor book which just happens to be filled with awesome.

I'd really like a well-organized and indexed collection of all of Douglas Adams' short writings. Round up all the columns and editorials he wrote, the text he did for his websites, everything, and get it all tied up with a bow and some context. Salmon isn't that collection; the writings are just tossed into poorly-defined buckets with no real TOC to speak of (and let us not speak of indexes), and there's no real way to tell what's missing or what's even important. There's some occasional interesting serendipity to be had, but eh.

On the other hand, it's Douglas Adams, bringer of joy and wry, good-natured English despair, and even inferior collections of his work are crucial.