Books by Douglas Adams

“It’s a picture book, not a biography. Facsimiles of his papers and his terrible, messy handwriting. His untidy typing full of blobs and crossing outs and xxxxxxxxxxxxx, deleted passages. There was a lot to wade through. I’ve been to the archives seventeen times last year, photographing, then reading it, logging it, working out the chronology. It’s a very similar process to the archive documentaries I make. It’s in vaguely chronological order showing his development and growth: poems from when he was 12-years-old, student comedy stuff, early radio writing, Doctor Who and early Hitchhikers material—the things that got him on the map. And then details of the projects he got invited to work on later once he was famous. We follow that whole story, through his tech company that he started and failed, and a couple that managed to get underway before the dotcom bubble burst. So, his whole life story. If you’re interested in how writers write, and in Douglas as an author, you’ll get something out of it. It will appeal to people of a curious mindset.” Read more...

The Best Douglas Adams Books

Kevin Jon Davies, Film Director

“He had this idea for a detective novel. And of course, he becomes a time-travelling detective. It’s hard to sum up the plot, you just have to work through it yourself. What you may find—I did—is that you get more out of the second time reading it. It’s one of those books. You’ve got to concentrate. But it will make you laugh. Stephen Fry has spoken about the elegant phrasing. He compared it to P.G. Wodehouse, of whom they were both massive fans.” Read more...

The Best Douglas Adams Books

Kevin Jon Davies, Film Director

“I think it came from a game Douglas played at school with his English teacher, of whom he was very fond, Frank Halford. He pops up in a couple of documentaries. Douglas would play this game with him, and later Douglas played it as a kind of drinking game. They did it from both angles—sometimes they’d come up with a human experience that doesn’t yet have a name, or an object, or a feeling, something that we’d all recognise but doesn’t have a defined name. Then they’d come up with a string of placenames and try to put them together.” Read more...

The Best Douglas Adams Books

Kevin Jon Davies, Film Director

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy – they always call it a trilogy even though there were four and then five books – obviously they’re classics, especially the first four, everyone loves them. The casual way in which Adams treats the universe as a whole – as something you can just sort of run around in – conveys a sense of excitement about the universe that really appeals to a lot of people… They’re novels, not textbooks. Good books on cosmology, astrophysics, or outside of my field for that matter, get people excited about the topic…There’s a lot in this trilogy that’s subtle and buried. For example, there’s a lot of talk about the bigness of space that really gives you a sense of the actual size of space in a way that a textbook typically doesn’t. The books play a lot with things like the Big Bang or the end of time in a fun way. I would obviously not even remotely suggest this as a textbook, but it goes part and parcel with the more serious side of physics.” Read more...

The best books on Cosmology

David Goldberg, Physicist

“It’s a lovely book, with a point to it. It’s his only factual book, and that means it sounds more serious, but I don’t think so. It’s one of his funniest. You don’t have to be any kind of fan of science fiction to love this book. It stands alone.” Read more...

The Best Douglas Adams Books

Kevin Jon Davies, Film Director