So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams (1984)

One of the great things about growing up before “the internet” was that you could form an opinion about a piece of art without knowing what anyone else thought about it. Unless something was extraordinarily mainstream, you’d get to talk to maybe half-a-dozen people about any given thing? Maybe Siskel & Ebert would do a piece on it? A review in the paper? Some friends at school? Mostly, you were left to your own devices to like something or not.

So then, one of the really strange things about living though “the internet” emerging was the experience of going online and discovering the places where your long-held opinion diverged from the world at large. For example, it turns out that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is a book basically no one liked, which came as quite a surprise to me, since I liked it very much.

The book turned 40 this past weekend, coming out a few days after the HHGG Infocom game, and like that game I’ll take the excuse to talk about it some more.

It’s not really a Science-Fiction comedy, it’s a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. It’s striking how different it is from Adams’ previous work, and frankly, from his work that followed.

Of course part of that is that while it was his fourth book, it was his first novel from scratch, not based on something else. The first two HHGG books were (heavily) reworked versions of the first two series of the radio show, the third book was based on a pile of ideas that was variously a Doctor Who episode, a pitch for a Doctor Who movie, and the concept for the never-made second series of the TV version. As such, it’s his first piece of work not building on ideas that had been clanking around since the late 70s.

As I mentioned way back when talking about Salmon of Doubt, So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of Adams’ middle period. You get the feeling that’s the sort of direction he wanted to move in, not just recycling the same riffs from a decade earlier. There’s a real sense of his, at least attempted, growth as an author.

Infamously, So Long was the book that after a year and multiple extended deadlines he still hadn’t actually started, so his editor locked him in a hotel room in London for two weeks, during which he cranked out the novel. I had two pretty strong reactions to learning this via the aforementioned internet; first, finding our that this whole book was, essentially, the first draft explained a lot, and second, there are very, very few people who could have written a book even this good in a single panicked fortnight.

Adams occasionally expressed regret that it was never really finished, and it shows. Or rather, it’s obvious what parts he cared about, and which parts he never got around to polishing.

So, let’s get the criticisms out of the way.

The previous books have a very strong Narrator Voice, extending out from the fact that the radio show was narrated by the Guide itself, and so even the narration in the book that isn’t explicitly a guide entry has the same tone and character, and is presumably still the Guide telling the story. Here, though, the narrator is clearly Douglas Adams himself, including a few places where he directly addresses the audience in what feel as much like his notes to himself as they do anything else. And there’s a little standalone epilogue about the virtues of not being able to concentrate which is fine on it’s own, but in the context of the book’s creation feels a little overly protest-y.

And it’s funny he has such a presence in that way, because in addition to that, while Arthur Dent was always clearly an author stand-in, there’s also never been less distance between the two as here. This book includes at least two events that happen to Arthur that Adams claimed really happened to him (that’s the story about the biscuits and one of his dates with Fenchurch.) Fenchurch herself is supposedly an amalgam of the two women Adams dated in the early 80s, and she lives in the flat Adams really lived in. There’s parts of the book that feel a lot more like Adams swapping stories over beers rather than an actual, you know, piece of fiction.

It’s not really funny in the same way the other books are, and a lot of the attempts at humor fall flat. There’s a joke about a planet ruled by lizards that the population hates but keeps voting for because “the wrong lizards might win,” that never really coheres and feels like something from one of the endless 80s Hitchhiker knockoffs than something from the real thing. There’s a running joke about a trucker who doesn’t know he’s The Rain God that is mostly very funny, but never really connects to anything else. Even Fenchurch, who is a great character, feels like she has a name where the author was trying to outdo “Ford Prefect” and came up short.

The character most hurt by this is Ford. Zaphod and Trillian don’t make an appearance in this one, so the action cuts back and forth between Arthur’s low-stakes romance and Ford being an extra-disreputable Doctor Who, crashing from one end of the galaxy to the other. This is a version of Ford you can most clearly imagine being played by Tom Baker—or rather, being written by a person who misses writing for Tom Baker—there’s a bit where Ford is stalking around Arthur’s house saying “beep beep beep” which isn’t all that funny on the page but that Tom would have made sing. It’s never entirely clear why Ford is doing what he’s doing, but not in a intentionally ambiguous way, more of a series of “I’ll explain laters” that just never really pay off. The Ford scenes are fun, but of all the book they read the most like rough drafts. It’s hard not to imagine that the book would have been better if Ford crashed into the narrative for the first time at the same time as he crashes into Arthur’s house.

It’s also interesting that Arthur doesn’t really start acting like old Arthur until Ford shows up, which says a lot about how those characters work. Arthur is a character who looks like is going to be a classic “straight man” comedy sidekick, but then starts arguing back and refusing to go along with things, refusing to give up agency despite not having a clue as to what’s going on around him. Here, he really doesn’t have anyone to argue with, and spends the book in a completely different gear until Ford shows up.

On the other hand, Marvin shows up at the very and and proves both that he’s the best character in the series and that “aggressively depressed robot” is an absolutely bulletproof concept.

Having gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the parts that work. Because the parts that work here really work.

The main body of the book follows Arthur, who returns to Earth, which is somehow un-demolished. The population has dismissed the “thing with the yellow spaceships” as a mass hallucination and/or CIA drug experiment. (Exactly how the Earth has returned is never totally explained, but there’s an ambiguous dream sequence that I always interpreted to mean that the Magratheans had slid the Earth Mk II into place where the original had been. Regrettably, the book declines to mention if Africa has fijords now.)

He goes about reintegrating into his old life, buys a computer, meets a girl, falls in love, teaches her how to fly, both literally and metaphorically. One of the great things about Arthur in this book is that he gets to be the one that knows things for once. The scene where Fenchurch pulls out the Guide and starts asking questions is truly great—finally Arthur is the one who gets to answer instead of ask.

His girlfriend, Fenchuch, is strongly implied to be the person who was going to provide the final readout of the original Earth’s program to find the Ultimate Question; she’s been at loose ends since that failed to actually happen. As such, Arthur digs up the location for “God’s Final Message to his creation” that he got in the previous book, the two of them hook up with Ford, and the three of them hitchhike back out into space.

That end, though. Whatever quibbles I might have about the rest of the book, the end is perfect. The whole premise of “God’s Final Message” both takes a swing at resolving the ongoing philosophical questions that undergrid Hitchhiker while still being actually funny. It really feels like a guy wrapping up this phase of his career. Happy endings, of a sort, resolve most of the open items, send Arthur off into the sunset.

(One of the reasons I have such disgust for Mostly Harmless is that not only is the book terrible on it’s own, but Adams screwed up the perfect end to the series he already had in order to do… that?)

It’s a slimmer volume than its three predecessors, both physically and figuratively, serving as more of a coda than a full installment on its own, but still sending off the series on the right note. It’s not more sophisticated to have bad things happen to people than good things; art isn’t of lesser quality if the characters finally catch a break.

Anyway, I didn’t let those dorks on the web change my mind. It’s still great.