Douglas Adams er den absolut sjoveste forfatter, jeg nogensinde har læst noget af. Jeg er endnu ikke kommet i gennem en eneste af hans bøger uden at sidde helt alene og grine højlydt. Man er aldrig ensom, når man læser Adams.
Det skyldes hans enorme empati og forståelse for den menneskelige situation. Det kommer blandt andet til udtryk i et interview om hans ateisme. Hvor fremtrædende ateister ofte kan virke nedladende eller decideret ondskabsfulde overfor troende, er Adams mere tilgivende. Han siger: "De troende tager fejl." Kort og koncist. Hårdt og afvisende. Men så tilføjer han: "Det er menneskeligt at fejle." Adams ser på sig selv og menneskeheden med et let undskyldende smil. Vi er en tosset art, der bumler lidt rundt på en planet og ødelægger det hele for os selv. Mennesket er tåbeligt og tragisk, men alligevel elskværdigt. Det er det smukke ved Douglas Adams' tekster.

The Salmon of Doubt er en essaysamling med en særlig stemning, da den er udgivet relativ kort tid efter forfatterens pludselige død. Det er en udgivelse, der er præget af det chok, der er gået gennem hans familie og venner. Bogen er fyldt med introduktioner og mindeskrifter, samt programmet for hans mindehøjtidelighed. Det er personlige tekster formet af et dybt savn. Det skaber en bog, der både af præget af Adams' egen varme i teksterne, men også den varme og kærlighed hans nærmeste har næret til ham.
Det er en bog, der føles som at kramme for sidste gang.

"La scienza ha perso un amico, la letteratura ha perso grande autore, i gorilla di montagna e i rinoceronti neri hanno perso un coraggioso difensore, Apple ha perso il suo più eloquente apologeta. E io ho perso un insostituibile compagno intellettuale e un degli uomini più buoni e spiritosi che abbia conosciuto in vita mia." Richard Dawkins
D.N.A manchi e mancherai sempre ❤️❤️

2.5 stars

Since you come into this book expecting Douglas Adams, and what you get is only somewhat Douglas Adams, it was a huge let down. The man's writing is very distinct, and while the little bits that are his are good, the other bits aren't.

Ve işte böylece bitti.

The title comes from the unfinished third book of the Dirk Gently series. As well as 11 chapters of this story, there are essays, interviews, and articles written by Douglas Adams on such subjects as PG Wodehouse, The Beatles, hangover cures, and testing an underwater Sub Bug vehicle on The Great Barrier Reef.

I didn’t want to rush reading this selection of Douglas Adams’s writings, but my library loan ran out, so I had to finish faster than I would’ve liked.

The people who edited this selection together, did a very good job organizing these pieces into a logical order. And while some might be more interesting than others, there are a few I could easily read over and over - especially those that go into his views on atheism. And having access to the last, unfinished Dirk Gently novel is a joy, even if it makes me sad to know that I’ll never get another Douglas Adams book. Salmon had wonderful promise.

I'm terrible at reviews. Read it. Tell me what you think. It's... different.

A book by Douglas Adams. Well, it's not actually by him, except in the sense that they were words that he wrote, mostly in that order. But he was dead when it was published. Collection of some previously published essays and the fragments of his final novel, which was harvested in bits from filing cabinets and from the hard drive of his computer, including some bits that weren't meant to be seen by the general public, as they were deleted, but someone foolhardily recovered the bits and slapped them back together to make money. Adams died so young that my sense of what is right in the world insists that I cling to a conspiratoratical hope that he was a very shy and private man thrust into too many spotlights because of his fame and having failed at politely asking people to just go away and leave him alone, he had to resort to publishing notices of his death so that he could quietly live on the considerable savings from his books.

Come on, haven't you read Christopher Moore and wondered about the possibility?

What a delight to revisit the mind of Douglas Adams. I like that this is a collection of emails, speeches, one-liners, and rants. Yes, there's the start of a novel in there, that he may or may not have intended to call the Salmon of Doubt.
The result is so much better than it sounds like it's going to be: Douglas Adams died, but his buddy knew his password and emptied his Mac onto a CD, the various unfinished writings were lightly edited and printed as this.
But gosh, am I ever glad that they did, because there's some exceptional writing in here, hilARious, as he always was, and glitteringly insightful. His projections on the future of technology, from the 90's, are pretty brilliant, and the piece de resistance is the speech to Cambridge on the purpose of God.

A good send-off for Douglas Adams.

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.

In early 1998 (or was it ‘97?), I experienced one of the most heady experiences of my life. A literary idol approached me at a conference we were attending in France (it was in Cannes, but it was a media festival rather than the more famous annual event), invited me to join him at dinner and debate the existence of God. Douglas Adams, self-proclaimed radical atheist, wanted to consider God’s existence (or lack thereof) with me. As a minister, I’d like to write myself in as the hero and claim that I at least put a dent in the famous atheist’s armor. We had a fascinating conversation and I’d like to think that I pushed him into rethinking his position, but that’s not very realistic. Hang on! This does relate to this collection of Adams’ writing in his last years, especially those reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt.

In our discussion, I pulled out the well-worn rubber duck of apologetics. I told him that he was dishonest in calling himself an atheist instead of an agnostic. I didn’t realize that this was the most offensive opening I could try. I hadn’t read his interview with American Atheists where he asserted that Agnostic did not adequately express his position because he was “convinced that there is no God.” (p. 96) But I blundered into the conversation with my classic approach that it is intellectual arrogance to claim to “know” that there is no God by appealing to an illustration in one of Rudy Rucker’s books on multidimensionality. This took my literary hero off guard because “multidimensionality” was a great fascination for him. I told him that certainty of the non-existence of God might well be trying to decide a multidimensional issue via the limited dimensions we have discovered in our empirical science. Then, I conceded that being “convinced” was different than “knowing,” but that it wasn’t objectively any better than a person of faith being “convinced.” I scored the opening round a stand-off. I’m not sure what Adams would have scored it. He must have been somewhat satisfied because he shifted gears.

He told me that there was no rational need for the existence of God. This, of course, is a different question. Unlike my typical sermon, I opted to walk the tightrope of suggested that God is a useful concept—EVEN (don’t be horrified at my speculation, true believers) if a personal God didn’t exist. I told him that I personally believe in a personal God, but for purposes of discussion, we should consider whether there really was no rational need for the existence of God. I asserted that, contrary to Adams’ hero Richard Dawkins for whom I expressed admiration for his science and reservation for his assertions which went beyond the acceptable evidence, the idea of God was more helpful than harmful.

Adams was skeptical (duh!) and attempted two analogies which I found interesting. He pulled some British currency out of his wallet and suggested that burning it wouldn’t warm you, eating it wouldn’t feed you, and wearing it wouldn’t cover you, but that it had purchasing power because the state stood behind it. But, he suggested that you need the assurance that the state exists in order for the currency to have any effect whatsoever. I countered (maybe a feeble parry at best) that, for the bulk of the British population, they had no idea of the nature of money supply, national deficit, budget viability, and governmental oversight of that currency but had an essential faith in the government. One doesn’t have to have all of the economics behind the currency explained satisfactorily in order to use the money. In the same way, one doesn’t have to understand everything about God in order to benefit from the idea of God. Therefore, there may well be a rational need for God.

Before I explain the next analogy, imagine my amazement to see the late 1998 speech from Adams that was reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt: “Money is a completely fictitious entity, but it’s very powerful in our world; we all have wallets, which have got notes in them, but what can these notes do? You can’t breed them, you can’t stir-fry them, you can’t live in them, there’s absolutely nothing you can do with them, other than exchange them with each other—and as soon as we exchange them with each other, all sorts of powerful things happen, because it’s a fiction that we’ve all subscribed to. …if the money vanished, the entire cooperative structure that we have would implode.” (p. 140) Did our discussion bear fruit? Adams didn’t change his mind about the existence of God. He merely recognized the utility of the concept of God. Egotistically, I had thought to convince him one step at a time, but perhaps, I merely pushed him to fortify and develop his philosophical position to allow for a utilitarian (he called it “artificial”) God.

The conversation was still stimulating, especially so when Adams began to expound about Feng Shui. Now, maybe I wasn’t listening, but I thought he was expressing skepticism about Feng Shui, so I said that it wouldn’t really make any different that he and I don’t believe that dragons exist, but that the concept of the dragon may help people design more comfortable and functional living spaces even if no dragon ever sets foot in the dwelling (and presumably they would not). Therefore, I suggested that even if I was wrong about the personal God whom I serve, my life may be better and more meaningful as a result of my conceptual idea of God’s involvement in my life. Now, admittedly, Adams’ hero of evolutionary arrogance (Richard Dawkins) wouldn’t concede this as said individual perceives the very concept to be harmful due to the fundamentalist extremes which have wreaked havoc in human history, but it seemed like the approach caused Adams to pause. Again, that could be arrogance on my part. I WISH I had impacted Adams and this could merely be wish-fulfillment.

However, I was delighted to read on p. 146: “You figure out how the dragon’s going to be happy here, and lo, and behold, you’ve suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.” Do I think I won a debate with this man who was, in so many ways, my intellectual superior? Naaah! I just like to think that our conversation pushed him in a direction he was already considering. Do I wish I could have convinced him of the existence of a personal God who cared about Him and wanted to be involved in his life and life’s work? Absolutely! Do I still admire him as a person and his creative output? Absolutely!

There were a few other lines that I really enjoyed in this book of essays, interviews, introductions to books, albums, and concerts, speeches, and rambling thoughts before I got into what I really procured the book to read, the last Dirk Gently story. I loved his line about art when he said, “I think the idea of art kills creativity.” (p. 158) And, I loved the story about his awkward experience in the train station with the cookies (pp. 150-151). It appears that he was sharing a table while waiting for a train. He had his coffee and a packet of cookies along with his morning newspaper. As he was reading his paper, the fellow reached over, opened the bag of cookies, too one out and began to eat it. Some British reserve kept him from confronting the man for his effrontery, so they actually ate the cookies in uncomfortable silence one-for-one. When the man left, Adams moved his paper and discovered an identical, but unopened bag of cookies under his paper. He was amused that he had thought so ill of the man while he was erroneously consuming the other man’s cookies. And he knew why this had occurred, but the other man never discovered the punch line. In the U.S., of course, there would have been a loud vocal confrontation at the very least.

As for the title piece, the bare-bones portion of the unfinished Salmon of Doubt, it was delightful—even in its admittedly unpolished form. I followed the tortured logic of the cabbie who assumed that since people said, “Follow that cab!” in the movies and he, having had a long tenure as a cabbie had never heard that phrase, he must indeed have been the cab that all other cabs were following (pp. 249-250). I rolled my eyes with empathy when Dirk discovered a freezer cabinet full of “old, white, clenched things that he was now too frightened to try to identify.” (p. 226) I chuckled at the description of Gently’s office that was “old and dilapidated and remained standing more out of habit rather than from any inherent structural integrity” (p. 238) I really loved the slam on typical airline personnel speak (Airline Syllable Stress Syndrome—p. 253). I was sad that the book wasn’t complete, even in its current form.