Don’t Panic: Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at 40

Well! It turns out that this coming weekend is the 40th anniversary of Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky. I mentioned the game in passing back in July when talking about Salmon of Doubt, but I’ll take an excuse to talk about it more.

To recap: Hitchhiker started as a six-part radio show in 1978, which was a surprise hit, and was quickly followed by a second series, an album—which was a rewrite and re-record with the original cast instead of just being a straight release of the radio show—a 2-part book adaptation, a TV adaptation, and by 1984, a third book with a fourth on the way. Hitchhiker was a huge hit.

Somewhere in there, Adams discovered computers, and (so legend has it) also became a fan of Infocom’s style of literate Interactive Fiction. They were fans of his as well, and to say their respective fan-bases had a lot of overlap would be an understatement. A collaboration seemed obvious.

(For the details on how the game actually got made, I’ll point you at The Digital Antiquarian’s series of philosophical blockbusters Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style.)

These are two of my absolute favorite things—Infocom games and Hitchhiker—so this should be a “two great tastes taste great together” situation, right? Well, unfortunately, it’s a little less “peanut butter cup” and a little more “orange juice on my corn chex.”

“Book adaptation” is the sort of thing that seemed like an obvious fit for Infocom, and they did several of them, and they were all aggressively mediocre. Either the adaptation sticks too close to the book, and you end up painfully recreating the source text, usually while you “wait” and let the book keep going until you have something to do, or you lean the other way and end up with something “inspired by” rather than “based on.” Hitchhiker, amusingly, manages to do both.

By this point Adams had well established his reputation for blowing deadlines (and loving “the whooshing noise they make as they go by”) so Infocom did the sane thing and teamed him up Steve Meretzky, who had just written the spectacular—and not terribly dissimilar from Hitchhiker—Planetfall, with the understanding that Meretzky would do the programming and if Adams flagged then Meretzky could step in and push the game over the finish line.

The game would cover roughly the start of the story; starting with Arthur’s house being knocked down, continuing through the Vogon ship, arriving on the Heart of Gold, and then ending as they land on Magrathea. So, depending on your point of view, about the first two episodes of the radio and TV versions, or the first half of the first book. This was Adams’ fourth revision of this same basic set of jokes, and one senses his enthusiasm waning.

You play as Arthur (mostly, but we’ll get to that,) and the game tracks very closely to the other versions up through Arthur and Ford getting picked up by the Heart of Gold. At that point, the game starts doing its own thing, and it’s hard not to wonder if that’s where Adams got bored and let Meretzky take over.

The game—or at least the first part—wants to be terribly meta and subversive about being a text adventure game, but more often than not offers up things that are joke-shaped, but are far more irritating than funny.

The first puzzle in the game is that it is dark, and you have to open your eyes. This is a little clever, since finding and maintaining light sources are a major theme in earlier Zork-style Infocom games, and here you don’t need a battery-powered brass lantern or a glowing elvish sword, you can just open your eyes! Haha, no grues in this game, chief! Then the second puzzle is where the game really shows its colors.

Because, you see, you’ve woken up with a hangover, and you need to find and take some painkillers. Again, this is a text adventure, so you need to actually type the names of anything you want to interact with. This is long before point-and-click interfaces, or even terminal-style tab-complete. Most text games tried to keep the names of nouns you need to interact with as short as possible for ergonomic reasons, so in a normal game, the painkillers would be “pills”, or “drugs”, or “tablets”, or some other short name. Bur no, in this game, the only phrase the game recognizes for the meds is “buffered analgesic”. And look, that’s the sort of think that I’m sure sounds funny ahead of time, but is just plain irritating to actually type. (Although, credit where credit is due, four decades later, I can still type “buffered analgesic” really fast.)

And for extra gear-griding, the verb you’d use in reglar speech to consume a “buffered analgesic” would be to “take” it, except that’s the verb Infocom games use to mean “pick something up and put it in your inventory” so then you get to do a little extra puzzle where you have to guess what other verb Adams used to mean put it in your mouth and swallow.

The really famous puzzle shows up a little later: the Babel Fish. This seems to be the one that most people gave up at, and there was a stretch where Infocom was selling t-shirts that read “I got the Babel Fish!”

The setup is this: You, as Arthur, have hitchhiked on to the Vogon ship with Ford. The ship has a Babel Fish dispenser (an idea taken from the TV version, as opposed to earlier iterations where Ford was just carrying a spare.) You need to get the Babel fish into your ear so that it’ll start translating for you and you can understand what the Vogons yell at you when they show up to throw you off the ship in a little bit. So, you press the button on the machine, and a fish flies out and vanishes into a crack in the wall.

What follows is a pretty solid early-80s adventure game puzzle. You hang your bathrobe over the crack, press the button again, and then the fish hits the bathrobe, slides down, and falls into a grate on the floor. And so on, and you build out a Rube Goldberg–style solution to catch the fish. The 80s-style difficulty is that there are only a few fish in the dispenser, and when you run out you have to reload your game to before you started trying to dispense fish. This, from the era where game length was extended by making you sit and wait for your five-inch floppy drive to grind through another game load.

Everything you need to solve the puzzle is in the room, except one: the last thing you need to get the fish is the pile of junk mail from Arthur’s front porch, which you needed to have picked up on your way to lie in front of the bulldozer way back a the start of the game. No one thinks to do this the first time, or even first dozen times, and so you end up endlessly replaying the first hour of the game, trying to find what you missed.

(The Babel Fish isn’t called out by name in Why Adventure Games Suck, but one suspects it was top of Ron Gilbert’s mind when he wrote out his manifesto for Monkey Island four years later.)

The usual reaction, upon learning that the missing element was the junk mail, and coming after the thing with the eyes and the “buffered analgesic” is to mutter, screw this and stop playing.

There’s also a bit right after that where the parser starts lying to you and you have to argue with it to tell you what’s in a room, which is also the kind of joke that only sounds funny if you’re not playing the game, and probably accounted for the rest of the people throwing their hands up in the air and doing literally anything else with their time.

Which is a terrible shame, because just after that, you end up on the Heart of Gold and the game stops painfully rewriting the book or trying to be arch about being a game. Fairly quickly, Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian go hang out in the HoG’s sauna, leaving you to do your own thing. Your own thing ends up being using the backup Improbability Generator to teleport yourself around the galaxy, either as yourself or “quantum leap-style” jumping into other people. You play out sequences as all of Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian, and end up in places the main characters never end up in any of the other versions—on board the battlefleet that Arthur’s careless coment sets in motion, inside the whale, outside the lair of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. The various locations can be played in any order, and like an RPG from fifteen years later, the thing you need to beat the game has one piece in each location.

This is where the game settles in and turns into an actual adventure game instead of a retelling of the same half-dozen skits. And, more to the point, this is where the game starts doing interesting riffs on the source material instead of just recreating it.

As an example, at one point, you end up outside the cave of the Ravenenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and the way you keep it from eating you is by carving your name on the memorial to the Beast’s victims, so that it thinks it has already eaten you. This is a solid spin on the book’s joke that the Beast is so dumb that it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you, but manges to make having read the book a bonus but not a requirement.

As in the book, to make the backup Improbability Drive work you need a source of Brownian Motion, like a cup of hot liquid. At first, you get a cup of Advanced Tea Substitute from the Nutrimat—the thing that’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. Later, after some puzzles and the missile attack, you can get a cup of real tea to plug into the drive, which allows it work better and makes it possible to choose your destination instead of it being random. Again, that’s three different jokes from the source material mashed together in an interesting and new way.

There’s a bit towards the end where you need to prove to Marvin that you’re intelligent, and the way you do that is by holding “tea” and “no tea” at the same time. The way you do that is by using the backup Improbably Drive to teleport into your own brain and removing your common sense particle, which is a really solid Hitchhiker joke that only appears in the game.

The game was a huge success at the time, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was very funny but very hard. You got the sense that a very small percentage of the people who played the game beat it, even grading on the curve of Infocom’s usual DNF rate. You also got the sense that there were a whole lot of people for whom HHGG was both their first and last Infocom game. Like Myst a decade later, it seemed to be the kind of game people who didn’t play games got bought for them, and didn’t convert a lot of people.

In retrospect, it’s baffling that Infocom would allow what was sure to be their best-selling game amongst new customers to be so obtuse and off-putting. It’s wild that HHGG came out the same year as Seastalker, their science fiction–themed game designed for “junior level” difficulty, and was followed by the brilliant jewel of Wishbringer, their “Introductory” game which was an absolute clinic in teaching people how to play text adventure games. Hitchhiker sold more than twice those two games combined.

(For fun, See Infocom Sales Figures, 1981-1986 | Jason Scott | Flickr)

Infocom made great art, but was not a company overly-burdened by business acumen. The company was run by people who thought of games as a way to bootstrap the company, with the intent to eventually graduate to “real” business software. The next year they “finally” released Cornerstone—their relational database product that was going to get them to the big leagues. It did not; sales were disastrous compared to the amount of money spent on development, the year after that, Infocom would sell itself to Activision; Activision would shut them down completely in 1989.

Cornerstone was a huge, self-inflicted wound, but it’s hard not to look at those sales figures, with Hitchhiker wildly outstripping everything else other than Zork I, and wonder what would have happened if Hitchhiker had left new players eager for more instead of trying to remember how to spell “analgesic.”

As Infocom recedes into the past and the memories of old people and enthusiasts, Hitchhiker maintains it’s name recognition. People who never would have heard the name “Zork” stumble across the game as the other, other, other version of Hitchhiker Adams worked on.

And so, the reality is that nowadays HHGG is likely to be most people’s first—and only—encounter with an Infocom game, and that’s too bad, because it’s really not a good example of what their games were actually like. If you’re looking for recommendation, scare up a copy of Enchanter. I’d recommend that, Wishbringer, Planetfall, and Zork II long before getting to Hitchhiker. (Zork is the famous game with the name recognition, but the second one is by far the best of the five games with “Zork” in the title.)

BBC Radio 4 did a 30th anniversary web version some years ago, which added graphics in the same style as the guide entries from the TV show, done by the same people, which feels like a re-release Infocom would have done in the late 80s if the company hadn’t been busy drowning in consequences of their bad decisions.

It’s still fun, taken on its own terms. I’d recommend the game to any fan of the other iterations of the Guide, with the caveat that it should be played with a cup of tea in one hand and a walkthrough within easy reach of the other.

All that said, it’s easy to sit here in the future and be too hard on it. The Secret of Monkey Island was a conceptual thermocline for adventure games as a genre, it’s so well designed, and it’s design philosophy is so well expressed in that design, that once you’ve played it it’s incredibly obvious what every game before it did wrong.

As a kid, though, this game fascinated me. It was baffling, and seemingly impossible, but I kept plowing at it. I loved Hitchhiker, still do, and there I was, playing Arthur Dent, looking things up in my copy of the Guide and figuring out how to make the Improbability Drive work. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t amazing, it was amazingly amazing. At one point I printed out all the Guide entries from the game and made a physical Guide out of cardboard?

As an adult, what irritates me is that the game’s “questionable” design means that it’s impossible to share that magic from when I was 10. There are plenty of other things I loved at that time I can show people now, and the magic still works—Star Wars, Earthsea, Monkey Island, the other iterations of Hitchhiker, other Infocom games. This game, though, is lost. It was too much of its exact time, and while you can still play it, it’s impossible to recreate what it was like to realize you can pick up the junk mail. Not all magic lasts. Normally, this is where I’d type something like “and that’s okay”, but in this particular case, I wish they’d tried to make it last a little harder.

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As a postscript, Meretzky was something of a packrat, and it turns out he saved everything. He donated his “Infocom Cabinet” to the Internet Archive, and it’s an absolute treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information, memos, designs, artwork. The Hitchhiker material is here: Infocom Cabinet: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy : Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams

Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002)

There are multiple interlocking tradegies of Douglas Adams’ death—not the least of which is the fact that he died at all. But also he passed at what appeared to be the end of a decade-long career slump—well, not slump exactly, but a decade where he seemed to spend his time being very, very irritated at the career he’d accidentally found.

After he died unexpectedly in May of 2001 at 49, his publisher rushed out a collection of previously unpublished work called Salmon of Doubt. It’s a weird book—a book that only could have happened under the exact circumstances that it did, scrambled out to take advantage of the situation, part collection, part funeral.

Douglas Adams is, by far, the writer whose had the biggest influence on my own work, and it’s not even close. I’m not even sure who would be number two? Ursula LeGuin, probably? But that’s a pretty distant second place—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first “grown-up” book I ever read on my own, which is sort of my secret origin story.

As such I gulped Salmon down the instant it came out in 2002, and hadn’t read it since. There was a bit I vaguely remembered that I wanted to quote in something else I was working on, so I’ve recently bought a new copy, as my original one has disappeared over the years. (Actually, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what happened to it, but it’s a minor footnote in a larger, more depressing story, so lets draw a veil across it and pretend that it was pilfered by elves.)

Re-reading the book decades later, two things are very obvious:

First, Adams would never have let a book like this happen while he was alive. It’s self-indulgent in exactly the way he never was, badly organized, clearly rushed. I mean, the three main sections are “Life”, “The Universe”, and “And Everything”, which in addition to being obvious to the point of being tacky, is an absolutely terrible table of contents because there’s no rhyme or reason why one item is in one section versus another.

Second, a book like this should have happened years before. There was so much stuff Adams wrote—magazine articles, newspaper columns, bits and bobs on the internet—that a non-fiction essay collection–style book was long overdue.

This book is weird for other reasons, including that a bunch of other people show up and try to be funny. It’s been remarked more than once that no other generally good writer has inspired more bad writing that Douglas Adams, and other contributions to this book are a perfect example. The copy I have now is the US paperback, with a “new introduction” by Terry Jones—yes, of Monty Python—which might be the least funny thing I’ve ever read, not just unfunny but actively anti-funny, the humor equivalent of anti-matter. The other introductions are less abrasive, but badly misjudge the audience’s tolerance for a low-skill pastiche at the start of what amounts to a memorial service.

The main selling point here is the unfinished 3rd Dirk Gently novel, which may or may not have actually been the unfinished 6th Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel. However, that only takes about about 80 pages of a 290 page book; by my math thats a hair over a quarter, which is a little underwhelming. It’s clear the goal was to take whatever the raw material looked like and edit it into something reasonably coherent and readable, which it is. But even at the time, it felt like heavily-edited “grit-out-of-the-spigot” early drafts rather than an actual unfinished book, I’d be willing to bet a fiver that if Adams had lived to finish whatever that book turned into, none of the text here would have been in it. As more unfinished pieces have leaked out over the years, such as the excerpts in 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, it’s clear that there was a lot more than made it into Salmon, and while less “complete”, that other stuff was a lot more interesting. As an example, the excerpts from Salmon in 42 include some passages from one of the magazine articles collected here, except in the context of the novel instead of Adams himself on a trip? What’s the story there? Which came first? Which way did that recycling go? Both volumes are frustratingly silent.

It’s those non-novel parts that are actually good, though. That magazine article is casually one of the best bits of travel writing I’ve ever read, there’s some really insightful bits about computers and technology, a couple of jokes that I’ve been quoting for years having forgotten they weren’t in Hitchhiker proper. The organization, and the rushed nature of the compilation, make these frustrating, because there will be an absolutely killer paragraph on its own, with no context for where did this come from? Under what circumstances was this written? Similarly for the magazine articles, newspaper columns, excerpts from (I assume) his website; there’s no context or dates or backstory, the kinds of things you’d hope for in a collection like this. Most of them seem to date to “the 90s” from context clues, but it’s hard to say where exactly all these things fit in.

But mopst of what really makes the book so weird is how fundamentally weird Adams’ career itself was in the last decade of his life.

In a classic example of working for years to become an overnight success, Adams had a remarkably busy period from 1978–1984, which included (deep breath) two series of the Hitchhiker radio show, a revised script for the album version of the first series, a Doctor Who episode, a stint as Doctor Who’s script editor during which he wrote two more episodes—one of which was the single best episode of the old show—and heavily rewrote several others, the TV adaptation of Hitchhiker which was similar but not identical to the first radio series, the third Hitchhiker novel based (loosely) on a rejected pitch for yet another Doctor Who, and ending in 1984 with the near simultaneous release of the fourth Hitchhiker novel and the Infocom text adventure based on the first.

(In a lot of ways, HHGG makes more sense if you remember that it happened in the shadow of his work for Doctor Who, more than anything it functions as a satire of the older program, the Galaxy Quest to Who’s Star Trek, if you will. Ford is the Doctor if he just wanted to go to a party, Arthur is a Doctor Who companion who doesn’t want to be there and argues back, in the radio show at least, The Heart of Gold operates almost exactly like the Tardis. If you’ll forgive the reference, I’ve always found it improbable, that Hitchhiker found its greatest success in America at a time where Who was barely known.)

After all that, to steal a line from his own work, “he went into a bit of a decline.”

Somewhere in there he also became immensely rich, and it’s worth remembering for the rest of this story that somewhere in the very early 80s Adams crossed the line of “never needs to work again.”

Those last two projects in 1984 are worth spending an extra beat on. It’s not exactly a secret that Adams actually had very little to do with the Hitchhiker game other than the initial kickoff, and that the vast majority of the writing and the puzzles were Steve Meretzky doing an impeccable Adams impression. (See The Digital Antiquarian’s Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style for more on how all that happened.)

Meanwhile, the novel So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of his middle period. It’s not really a SF comedy, it’s a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. It wasn’t super well received. It’s also my personal favorite? 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 growth as an author. It also ties up the Hitchhiker series with a perfect ending.

Then a couple of more things happen. Infocom had a contract for up to six Hitchhiker games, and they really, really wanted to make at least a second. Adams, however, had a different idea for a game, which resulted in Infocom’s loved-by-nobody Bureaucracy, which again, Adams largely had nothing to do with beyond the concept, with a different set of folks stepping in to finish the project. (Again, see Bureaucracy at The Digital Antiquarian for the gory details.)

Meanwhile, he had landed a two book deal for two “non-Hitchhiker books”, which resulted in the pair of Dirk Gently novels, of which exactly one of them is good.

The first, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, is probably his best novel. It reworks a couple of ideas from those late 70s Doctor Whos but remixed in interesting ways. The writing is just better, better characters, funnier, subtler jokes, a time-travel murder-mystery plot that clicks together like a swiss watch around a Samuel Coleridge poem and a sofa. It’s incredible.

The second Dirk Gently book, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, is a terrible book, full stop, and I would describe it as one of the most angry, bitter, nihilistic books I’ve ever read, except I’ve also read Mostly Harmless, the final Hitchhiker book. Both of those books drip with the voice of an author that clearly really, really doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing.

(I’m convinced Gaiman’s American Gods is a direct riposte to the bleak and depressing Teatime.)

The two Dirk books came out in ’87 and ’88, the only time he turned a book around that fast. (Pin that.) After wrapping up the Dirk contract, he went and wrote Last Chance to See, his best book period, out in 1990.

Which brings us back around to the book nominally at hand—Salmon of Doubt. The unfinished work published here claims to be a potential third Dirk novel, and frankly, it’s hard to believe that was ever seriously under consideration. Because, look, the Gently contract was for two books, neither of which did all that well. According to the intro of this compilation, the first files for Salmon date to ’93, and he clearly noodled on and around that for a decade. That book was never actually going to be finished. If there was desire for a 3rd Gently novel, they would have sat him down and forced him to finish it in ’94. Instead, they locked him in a room and got Mostly Harmless.

There’s a longstanding rumor that Mostly Harmless was largely ghostwritten, and it’s hard to argue. It’s very different from his other works, mean, bad-tempered, vicious towards its characters in a way his other works aren’t. Except it has a lot in common with Bureaucracy which was largely finished by someone else. And, it has to be said, both of those have a very similar voice to the equally mean and bad-tempered Teatime. This gets extra suspicious when you consider the unprecedented-for-him turnaround time on Teatime. It’s hard to know how much stock to put into that rumor mill, since Adams didn’t write anything after that we can compare them to—except Last Chance which is in a completely different mood and in the same style as his earlier, better work. Late period style or ghostwriter? The only person alive who still knows hasn’t piped up on the subject.

Personally? I’m inclined to believe that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was the last novel he wrote on his own, and that his contributions to both Teatime and Mostly Harmless were a sketch of an outline and some jokes. Which all, frankly, makes his work—or approximation thereof—over the course of the 90s even stranger.

In one of the great moments of synchronicity, while I was working on this, the Digital Antiquarian published a piece on Adams’ late period, and specifically the absolute mess of the Starship Titanic computer game, so rather than me covering the same ground, you should pause here and go read The Later Years of Douglas Adams. But the upshot is he spent a lot of time doing not very much of anything, and spawning at least two projects pawned off on others to finish.

After the garbage fire of Starship Titanic and then the strangely prescient h2g2—which mostly failed when it choked out on the the reams of unreadable prose that resulted from a horde of fans trying and failing to write wikipedia in the style of Adams’ guide entries—there was a distinct vibe shift. Whereas interviews with him in the mid 90s tended to have him say things like “I accidentally wrote a best-selling novel” and indicate a general dislike of novel writing as a profession, there seemed to be a thaw, a sense that maybe after a decade-plus resenting his found career, maybe he was ready to accept it and lean back in.

And then he died in the gym at 49.

One of the many maddening things about his death is that we never got to see what his late style would have looked like. His last two good books provide a hint of where he was heading.

And that’s the real value of Salmon of Doubt—the theoretical novel contained within would never have been finished in that form, the rest of the content is largely comprised of articles or blog posts or other trivialities, but it’s the only glimpse of what “Late Adams” would have looked like that we’ll ever get.

As a point of comparison, let continue getting side-tracked and talk about the guy who succeeded Adams as “the satirical genre writer beloved by nerds,” Terry Pratchett. Pratchett started writing novels about the same time Adams did, but as the saying goes, put the amount of energy into writing books that Adams spent avoiding writing them. He also, you know, lived longer, despite also dying younger than he should have. Even if we just scope down to Discworld, Pratchett wrote 40 novels, 28 of which were while Adams was also alive and working. Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, which is Discworld-adjacent at least, came out in 1990, and serves as a useful piece of temporal geography; that book is solidly still operating in “inspired by Douglas Adams” territory, and Pratchett wasn’t yet Terry Pratchett, beloved icon. But somewhere around there at the turn of the decade is where he stops writing comedy fantasy and starts writing satirical masterpieces. “What’s the first truly great Discworld novel?” is the sort of unanswerable question the old web thrived on, despite the fact that the answer is clearly Guards! Guards! from ’89. But the point here is that was book 8 after a decade of constant writing. And thats still a long way away from Going Postal or The Wee Free Men. We never got to see what a “Douglas Adams 8th Novel” looked like, much less a 33rd.

What got me thinking about this was I saw a discussion recently about whom of Adams or Pratchett were the better writer. And again, this is a weird comparison, because Pratchett had a late period that Adams never had. Personally, I think there’s very little Pratchett that’s as good as Adams at his peak, but Pratchett wrote ten times the number of novels Adams did and lived twenty years longer. Yes, Pratchett’s 21st century late period books are probably better than Adam’s early 80s work, but we never got to see what Adams would have done at the same age.

(Of course the real answer is: they’re both great, but PG Wodehouse was better than both of them.)

And this is the underlying frustration of Salmon and the Late Adams that never happened. There’s these little glimpses of what could have been, career paths he didn’t take. It not that hard to imagine a version of Hitchhiker that worked liked Discworld did, picking up new characters and side-series but always just rolling along, a way for the author to knock out a book every year where Arthur Dent encountered whatever Adams was thinking about, where Adams didn’t try to tie it off twice. Or where Adams went the Asimov route and left fiction behind to write thoughtful explanatory non-fiction in the style of Last Chance.

Instead all we have is this. It’s scraps. but scraps I’m grateful for.

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This is where I put a horizontal line and shift gears dramatically. Something I’ve wondered with increasing frequency over the last decade is who Adams would have turned into. I wonder this, because it’s hard to miss that nearly everybody in Adams’ orbit has turned into a giant asshole. The living non-Eric Ide Pythons, Dawkins and the whole New Atheist movement, the broader 90s Skeptic/Humanist/“Bright” folks all went mask-off the last few years. Even the guy who took over the math puzzles column in Scientific American from Martin Gardner now has a podcast where he rails against “wokeists” and vomits out transphobia. Hell, as I write this, Neil Gaiman, who wrote the definitive biography of Adams and whose first novel was a blatant Adams pastiche, has turned out to be “problematic” at best.

There’s something of a meme in the broader fanbase that it’s a strange relief that Adams died before we found out if he was going to go full racist TERF like all of his friends. I want to believe he wouldn’t, but then I think about the casual viscousness with which Adams slaughtered off Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless—the beloved character who made him famous and rich—and remember why I hope those rumors about ghostwriters are true.

The New Atheists always kind of bugged me for reasons it took me a long time to articulate; I was going to put a longer bit on that theme here, but this piece continues to be proof that if you let something sit in your drafts folder long enough someone else will knock out an article covering the parts you haven’t written yet, and as such The Defector had an absolutely dead-on piece on that whole movement a month or so ago: The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us. Adams goes (mercifully) unmentioned, but recall Dawkins met his wife—Doctor Who’s Romana II herself, Lalla Ward!—after Adams introduced the two of them at a party Adams was hosting, and Adams was a huge sloppy fan of Dawkins and his work.

I bring all this up here and now because one of the pieces in Salmon of Doubt is an interview of Adams by the “American Atheist”, credited to The American Atheist 37, No. 1 which in keeping with Salmon’s poor organization isn’t dated, but a little digging on the web reveals to be the Winter 1998–1999 issue.

It’s incredible, because the questions the person interviewing ask him just don’t compute with Adams. Adams can’t even engage on the world-view the American Atheists have. I’m going to quote the best exchange here:

AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? How often does this happen?

DNA: Not even remotely. It's an inconceivable idea.

One can easily imagine, and by “imagine” I mean “remember”, other figures from that movement going on and on about how poorly society treats atheists, and instead here Adams just responds with blank incomprehension. Elsewhere in the interview he dismissed their disconnect as a difference between the US and the UK, which is both blatantly a lie but also demonstrates the sort of kindness and empathy one doesn’t expect from the New Atheists. Every response Adams gives has the air of him thinking “what in the world is wrong with you?”

And, here in the twenties, that was my takeaway from reading Salmon again. It’s a book bursting with empathy, kindness, and a fundamentally optimistic take on the absurd world we find ourselves in. A guy too excited about how great things could be to rant about how stupid they are (or, indeed, to put the work into getting there.) A book full of things written by, fundamentally, one of the good guys.

If Adams had lived, I’m pretty sure three things would be true. First, there’d be a rumor every year this this was the year he was finally going to finish a script for the new Doctor Who show despite the fact that this never actually ends up happening. Second, that we never would have been able to buy a completed Salmon of Doubt. Third, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be on twitter asking people to define “a woman.”

In other words: Don't Panic.

Happy (Day After) Towel Day

“Listen, it’s a tough universe! Theres all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything! If you’re going to survive out there, you’ve really got to know where your towel is.” —Ford Prefect

Books I Read In ’23: Part 2

House of X/Powers of X By Johnathan Hickman and others

The X-Men are a weird superhero book, even by american super hero standards. One of the strange things about them is their inability to be mediocre—the X-men are either “as good as superheroes get” or “unreadable trash” with no ground in-between. Compare that to, say, Spider-man, whose spent most of the last 60 years being “yeah, that was pretty good I guess,” with occasional outbreaks of brilliance or clones. This doesn't just apply to the books either: the movies, shows, what-have-you are all either one side of the scale or the other. To put that another way: no one has ever left an X-Men movie without having a strong opinion about what they just saw.

There’s a couple reasons for this, I think? There’s a weird mix of elements: they’re teachers, but also a commando team? In a world full of “regular” super heros, no one likes them? Also, a soap opera? And they’re a metaphor for the dealer’s choice of minority groups. And, the X-Men suffer more than most from the “fighting for the status quo” problem most superheroes have. The upshot is that to make them work, you have to actually have a take, it can’t just be “well, I guess Magneto is up to something again”.

The result is that the’re on this roughly 20 year cycle of someone coming in, having a new take that works, and then Marvel spends the next 10–15 years bleeding out everything from that burst of ideas. Lee & Kirby in the early 60s, Claremont & Byrne in the late 70s, Morrison at the turn of the century.

We’re due for a new spin, and Hickman wipes the deck clear and delivers. He kicked his run off with two linked books, pronounced House of “Ex” and Powers of “Ten”. (All good X-Men runs seem to center around using X to mean 10 in unexpected places.) The core metaphor and premise is pretty straightforward: we’re doing the formation of the State of Israel, but for mutants. (And with the Shi’ar Empire standing in for the United States as the not-so-subtle equipment supplier). This is coupled with a take that basically boils down to: “you know, if all these guys would just work together they’d be unstoppable.”

It’s about as good as the X-Men have ever been, and finally shake off the whole “fighting to protect the ones that hate them” angle: they have their own island now, and you can enter as much anti-mutant legislation as you like. Hickman has a great time riffing on this: Mutants have diplomatic immunity, Magneto is the Ambassador to the US, there are trade agreements. Plus, continuing on the “formation of Israel” angle, the fact that the mutants keep getting genocided gets treated with more seriousness than it ever has.

The layout is also fascinating, mixing traditional comic layouts with infographics, with a design sense that manages to look cutting-edge and and mid-60s at the same time. (Swiss design, coming through.)

The result is genuinely great, but great in the way that you know all the interesting material is going to be drained out of this over the next decade, and all the changes or new concepts are going to be retconned out and we’ll be back to the median-value room-temperature X-Men before too long; there’s a vague itch the whole time reading it thinking “there’s no way they’re going to actually keep any of this.” Which means that they’ve set themselves up for a “Destruction of Israel” story in a bit here, which I’m sure won’t delight all the wrong people.

But, you can’t grade a piece of art down based on what you know other people are going to do with it. As it stands, Hickman has knocked out 400-something pages of as good an X-Men story as there’s ever been. It’s worth enjoying in it’s own right, if for no other reason that he served up my favorite new idea in years: Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Wolverine are just a throuple now. Perfect. See you in another couple of decades, X-Men.

X-Men Epic Collections: Fate of the Phoenix & I, Magneto by Claremont, Byrne, and others

Speaking of those wacky mutants, my son is “exactly the right age to enjoy X-men” years old, so we’ve been picking up the reprints of the greatest hits here and there. And back when I was a kid, this was the Biggest Thing Ever: Dark Phoenix! Jean Grey Dies! Drama! Action! To quote the former galactic President: “Excitement, adventure, and really wild things!”

I hadn’t read any of this in probably 30 years, so I was pleased to see that it mostly holds up? It’s a superhero drama designed to be the most epic thing imaginable to tweens, and it still is.

One thing definitely stood out in hindsight, though. There was a fair amount of behind-the-scenes drama about killing off Jean Grey—the short, short version is that Claremont didn’t want to kill the character, but the editors insisted that she “pay for her actions.” Not to re-litigate 40-year old controversy, but in retrospect it’s so obvious that Jean “had to die” because she was a woman, and they didn’t want any of the female characters to be that powerful. What’s funny is reading this all later you can tell Claremont knows this, so he replaces Jean Grey with the nearly-powerless Kitty Pryde, and then makes sure Storm screws up or gets sucker-punched often enough to keep anyone from noticing how powerful she is too.

42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies

Kevin Jon Davies got started as part of the team doing the Guide animations for the BBC TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and turned that both into a friendship with Douglas Adams and a career making documentaries.

After Douglas Adams died, his collected papers ended up at Cambridge, where they mostly sat in file boxes. This book is a greatest hits collection of what Davies found when he went through them. Like a lot of posthumous collections, it’s equal parts fascinating and frustrating. As an example: there was a long standing rumor that Adams had written an entire first episode to the unmade second season of the Hitchhiker TV show, it turns out that’s true! And this book includes… only the first page. Then, the second half of the book is page after page of unrealized, unfinished projects. Fascinated, but frustrating. More than ever, this book makes me wish he’d had a business partner that could wrangle these projects over the finish line. Or, you know, make sure he got his heart checked out.

Fractals

(This may not appear correctly inside a feed reader or other limited-formatting browser.)

Part 1: DFW

1. Let me tell you a story about something that happens to me. Maybe it happens to you?
2. This same thing has happened probably a dozen times, if not more, over the last couple of decades. I’ll be in a group some kind, where the membership is not entirely optional—classmates, coworkers, other parents at the kid’s school—and the most irritating, obnoxious member of the group, the one I have the least in common with and would be the least likely to spend time with outside of whatever it is we’re doing, will turn to me, face brightening, and say “Hey! I bet you’re a huge fan of David Foster Wallace.”
3. I’ve learned that the correct answer to this is a succinct “you know, he didn’t invent footnotes.”^A
4. Because reader, they do not bet correctly. To be very clear: I have never¹ read any of his work. I’m aware he exists, and there was that stretch in the late 90s where an unread copy of Infinite Jest seemed to spontaneously materialize on everyone’s shelves. But I don’t have an opinion on the guy?²
5. I have to admit another reaction, in that in addition to this behavior, most of the people⁴¹ you run in to that actually recommend his work are deeply obnoxious.^α
6. So, I’ve never been able to shake the sense that this is somehow meant as an insult. There’s a vague “attempted othering” about it; it's never presented as “I liked this and I bet you will too,” or “Aha, I finally found a thing we have in common!” it’s more of “Oh, I bet you’re one of those people”. It’s the snap of satisfaction that gets to me. The smug air of “oh, I’ve figured you out.”
7. And look, I’m a late-era Gen-X computer nerd programmer—there are plenty of stereotypes I’ll own up to happily. Star Wars fan? Absolutely. The other 80s nerd signifiers? Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Monty Python? Sure, yep, yep. Doctor Who used to be the outlier, but not so much anymore.³ William Gibson, Hemmingway, Asimov? For sure.
8. But this one I don’t understand. Because it cant just be footnotes, right?
9. I bring all this up because Patricia Lockwood⁴ has written a truly excellent piece on DFW: [Where be your jibes now?].⁷ It’s phenomenal, go read it!
10. But, I suspect I read it with a unique viewpoint. I devoured it with one question: “am I right to keep being vaguely insulted?”
11. And, he nervously laughed, I still don’t know!
12. She certainly seems to respect him, but not actually like him very much? I can’t tell! It’s evocative, but ambiguous? It’s nominally a review of his last, unfinished, posthumously published book, but then works its way though his strange and, shall we say, “complicated” reputation, and then his an overview of the rest of his work.
13. And I have the same reaction I did every time I hear about his stuff, which is some combination of “that guy sounds like he has problems” (he did) and “that book sounds awful” (they do).
14. “I bet you’re a fan”
15. Why? Why do you bet that?
16. I’m self-aware enough to know that the correct response to all this is probably just to [link to this onion article] And I guess there’s one way to know.
17. But look. I’m just not going to read a million pages to find out.

Part 2: Footnotes, Hypertext, and Webs

1. Inevitably, this is after I’ve written something full of footnotes.^B
2. Well, to expand on that, this usually happens right after I write something with a joke buried in a footnote. I think footnotes are funny! Or rather, I think they’re incredibly not funny by default, a signifier of a particular flavor of dull academic writing, which means any joke you stash in one becomes automatically funnier by virtue of surprise.^C
3. I do like footnotes, but what I really like is hypertext. I like the way hypertext can spider-web out, spreading in all directions. Any text always has asides, backstory, details, extending fractally out. There’s always more to say about everything. Real life, even the simple parts, doesn’t fit into neat linear narratives. Side characters have full lives, things got where they are somehow, everything has an explanation, a backstory, more details, context. So, generally writing is as much the art of figuring out what to leave out as anything. But hypertext gives you a way to fit all those pieces together, to write in a way that’s multidimensional.^D
4. Fractals. There’s always more detail. Another story. “On that subject…”^E
5. Before we could [link] to things, the way to express that was footnotes. Even here, on the system literally called “the web”, footnotes still work as a coherent technique for wrangling hypertext into something easier to get your arms around.^F
6. But the traditional hypertext [link] is focused on detail—to find out more, click here! The endless cans of rabbit holes of wikipedia’s links to other articles. A world where every noun has a blue underline leading to another article, and another, and so on.^G
7. Footnotes can do that, but they have another use that links don’t—they can provide commentary.¹³ A well deployed footnote isn’t just “click here to read more”, it’s a commentary, annotations, a Gemara.^H
8. I come by my fascination with footnotes honestly: The first place I ever saw footnotes deployed in an interesting way was, of all things, a paper in a best-of collection of the Journal of Irreproducible Results.⁹ Someone submitted a paper that was only a half-sentence long and then had several pages of footnotes that contained the whole paper, nested in on itself.¹² I loved this. It was like a whole new structure opened up that had been right under my nose the whole time.^J
9. Although, if I’m honest, the actual origin of my love of footnotes is probably reading too many choose your own adventure books.¹⁷
10. I am also a huge fan of overly-formalist structural bullshit, obviously.^α

Part 3: Art from Obnoxious People

1. What do you do with art that’s recommended by obnoxious people?⁴⁰
2. In some ways, this is not totally unlike how to deal with art made by “problematic” artists; where if we entirely restricted our intake to art made exclusively by good people, we’d have Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and not much else. But maintaining an increasingly difficult cognitive dissonance while watching Annie Hall is one thing, but when someone you don’t like recommends something?³⁸
3. To be fair, or as fair as possible, most of this has very, very little to do with the art itself. Why has a movie about space wizards overthrowing space fascists become the favorite movie of actual earth fascists? Who knows? The universe is strange. It’s usually not healthy to judge art by its worst fans.³⁶
4. Usually.
5. In my experience, art recommended by obnoxious people takes roughly three forms:³²
6. There’s art where normal people enjoy it, and it’s broadly popular, and then there’s a deeply irritating toxic substrate of people who maybe like it just a little too much to be healthy. ³⁰
7. Star Trek is sort of the classic example here, or Star Wars, or Monty Python, or, you know, all of sports. Things that are popular enough where there’s a group of people who have tried to paper over a lack personality by memorizing lines from a 70s BBC sketch comedy show, or batter’s statistics from before they were born. ²⁸
8. Then there’s the sort of art that unlocks a puzzle, where, say, you have a coworker who is deeply annoying for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on, and then you find out their favorite book is Atlas Shrugged. A weight lifts, aha, you say, got it. It all makes sense now. ²⁶
24. And then, there’s art²⁴ that exclusively comes into your life from complete dipshits.
23. The trick is figuring out which one you're dealing with.^q

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Part 4: Endnotes

1. What never? Well, hardly ever!
2. I think I read the thing where he was rude about cruises?
3. And boy, as an aside, “I bet you’re a Doctor Who fan” has meant at least four distinct things since I started watching Tom Baker on PBS in the early 80s.
4. Who⁵ presumably got early parole from her thousand years of jail.⁶
5. In the rough draft of this I wrote “Patricia Highsmith,” and boy would that be a whole different thing!
6. Jail for mother!
7. In the spirit of full disclosure, she wrote it back in July, whereupon I saved it to Instapaper and didn’t read it until this week. I may not be totally on top of my list of things to read?³⁵
8. "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" (1967)
9. The JoIR is a forum for papers that look and move like scientific papers, but are also a joke.
10. The bartender is a die-hard Radiers fan; he happily launches into a diatribe about what a disaster the Las Vegas move has been, but that F1 race was pretty great. A few drinks in, he wants to tell you about his “radical” art installation in the back room? To go look, turn to footnote ω To excuse yourself, turn to footnote 20
11. I knew a girl in college whose ex-boyfriend described Basic Instinct as his favorite movie, and let me tell you, every assumption you just made about that guy is true.
12. Although, in fairness, that JoIR paper was probably directly inspired by that one J. G. Ballard story.⁸
13. This was absurdly hard²¹ to put together.³⁹
14. The elf pulls his hood back and asks: “Well met, traveller! What was your opinion of the book I loaned you?” He slides a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men across the table. To have no opinion, turn to footnote d. To endorse it enthusiastically, turn to footnote α
15. Or is it five?
16. You’re right, that bar was sus. Good call, adventurer! To head further into town, turn to footnote 20. To head back out into the spooky woods, go to footnote 22.
17. You stand in the doorway of a dark and mysterious tavern. Miscreants and desperadoes of all description fill the smoky, shadowed room. You’re looking for work. Your sword seems heavier than normal at your side as you step into the room. If you... Talk to the bartender, turn to footnote 10. Talk to the hooded Elf in the back corner, turn to footnote 14. To see what’s going on back outside, turn to footnote 16.
18. "Glass Onion” from The Beatles, aka The White Album
19. Superscript and anchor tags for the link out, then an ordered list where each List Item has to have a unique id so that those anchor tags can link back to them.²³
20. You head into town. You find a decent desk job; you only mean to work there for a bit, but it’s comfortable and not that hard, so you stay. Years pass, and your sword grows dusty in the back room. You buy a minivan! You get promoted to Director of Internal Operations, which you can never describe correctly to anyone. Then, the market takes a downturn, and you’re one of the people who get “right sized”. They offer you a generous early retirement. To take it, turn to footnote 25. To decline, turn to footnote 22.
21. But did you know that HTML doesn’t have actual support³³ for footnotes?²³

22. You journey into the woods. You travel far, journeying across the blasted plains of Hawksroost, the isles of Ka’ah’wan-ah, you climb the spires of the Howling Mountains, you delve far below the labyrinth of the Obsidian Citadel; you finally arrive at the domain of the Clockwork Lord, oldest of all things. Its ancient faces turns towards you, you may ask a boon.

    “Is this all there is? Is there nothing more?”: Footnote 27

    “I wish for comfort and wealth!” Footnote 25

23. I have no idea how this will look in most browsers.³¹
24. This usually still isn’t a direct comment on the art itself, but on the other hand, healthy people don’t breathlessly rave about Basic Instinct,¹¹ you know?

25. Good call! You settle into a comfortable retirement in the suburbs. Your kids grow up, move out, grow old themselves. The years tick by. One day, when the grandkids are over, one of them finds your old sword in the garage. You gingerly pick it up, dislodging generations of cobwebs. You look down, and see old hands holding it, as if for the first time. You don’t answer when one of them asks what it is; you just look out the window. You can’t see the forest anymore, not since that last development went in. You stand there a long time.

    *** You have died ***

26. And turnabout is fair play: I’ve watched people have this a-ha moment with me and Doctor Who.

27. The Clockwork Lord has no expression you can understand, but you know it is smiling. “There is always more,” it says, in infinite kindness. “The door to the left leads to the details you are seeking. The door to the right has the answer you are lacking. You may choose.”

    Left: Footnote a

    Right: Footnote 29

28. Other examples of this category off the top of my head: Catcher in the rye, MASH, all of Shakespeare.

29. You step through the doorway, and find yourself in an unfamiliar house. There are people there, people you do not know. With a flash of insight, you realize the adult is your grandchild, far past the time you knew them, the children are your great-grandchildren, whom you have never met. You realize that you are dead, and have been for many years. All your works have been forgotten, adventures, jobs, struggles, lost as one more grain of sand on the shore of time. Your grandchild, now old themselves, is telling their child a story—a story about you. A minor thing, a trifle, something silly you did at a birthday party once. You had totally forgotten, but the old face of the 6-year old who’s party it was didn’t. They’re telling a story.

    Oh. You see it,

    *** You Have Ascended ***

30. Fanatics, to coin a phrase?
31. This feels like it should have one of those old “works best in Netscape Navigator”, except Netscape would choke on all this CSS.³⁷

32. Björk: (over the phone) I have to say I'm a great fan of triangles.

    Space Ghost: Well, I have to say that I am a great fan of Chuck Norris, and he was in the Delta Force, and the delta was a triangle.

33. Instead you have to code¹⁹ them by hand.
34. Yeah, I see what you did there.
35. Okay, that's also a lie; I've actually been working on this on-and-off since July.¹³
36. Cases in point: I, II, III , IIII
37. Certified: “It works on my machine!”^α
38. Especially when they themselves don’t seem to like it?
39. I mean, the writing itself was tricky enough, with three¹⁵ interleaving essays.
40. Not annoying people, not assholes: obnoxious. Hard to define, but like pornography, you know it when you see it.
41. On the other hand, back in the 90s these people were asking about Robert Anton Wilson or saying “fnord” at me, so some things have gotten better, I guess.
42. That's not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it.

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Part 5: No Moral.

Good Adaptations and the Lord of the Rings at 20 (and 68)

What makes a good book-to-movie adaptation?

Or to look at it the other way, what makes a bad one?

Books and movies are very different mediums and therefore—obviously—are good at very different things. Maybe the most obvious difference is that books are significantly more information-dense than movies are, so any adaptation has to pick and choose what material to keep.

The best adaptations, though, are the ones that keep the the themes and characters—what the book is about— and move around, eliminate, or combine the incidents of the plot to support them. The most successful, like Jaws or Jurassic Park for example, are arguably better than their source material, jettisoning extraneous sideplots to focus on the main concepts.

Conversely, the worst adaptations are the ones that drop the themes and change the point of the story. Stephen King somewhat famously hates the movie version of The Shining because he wrote a very personal book about his struggle with alcoholism disguised as a haunted hotel story, and Kubrick kept the ghosts but not the rest. The movie version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was made by people who thought the details of the plot were more important than the jokes, rather than the other way around, and didn’t understand why the Nutrimat was bad.

And really, it’s the themes, the concepts, the characters, that make stories appeal to us. It’s not the incidents of the plot we connect to, it’s what the story is about. That’s what we make the emotional connection with.

And this is part of what makes a bad adaptation so frustrating.

While the existence of a movie doesn’t erase the book it was based on, it’s a fact that movies have higher profiles, reach bigger audiences. So it’s terribly disheartening to have someone tell you they watched a movie based on that book you like that they didn’t read, when you know all the things that mattered to you didn’t make it into the movie.

And so we come to The Lord of the Rings! The third movie, Return of the King turned 20 this week, and those movies are unique in that you’ll think they’re either a fantastic or a terrible adaptation based on which character was your favorite.

⁂

Broadly speaking, Lord of the Rings tells two stories in parallel. The first, is a big epic fantasy, with Dark Lords, and Rings of Power, and Wizards, and Kings in Exile. Strider is the main character of this story, with a supporting cast of Elves, Dwarves, and Horse Vikings. The second is a story about some regular guys who are drawn into a terrifying and overwhelming adventure, and return home, changed by the experience. Sam is the main character of the second story, supported by the other Hobbits.

(Frodo is an interestingly transgressive character, because he floats between the two stories, never committing to either. But that’s a whole different topic.)

And so the book switches modes based on which characters are around. The biggest difference between the modes is the treatment of the Ring. When Strider or Gandalf or any other character from the first story are around, the Ring is the most evil thing in existence—it has to be. So Gandalf refuses to take it, Galadriel recoils, it’s a source of unstoppable corruption.

But when it’s just the Hobbits, things are different. That second story is both smaller and larger at the the same time—constantly cutting the threat of the Ring off at the knees by showing that there are larger and older things than the Ring, and pointing out thats it’s the small things really matter. So Tom Bombadil is unaffected, Faramir gives it back without temptation, Sam sees the stars through the clouds in Mordor. There are greater beauties and greater powers than some artifact could ever be.

This is, to be clear, not a unique structure. To pull an obvious example, Star Wars does the same thing, paralleling Luke’s kid from the sticks leaving home and growing into his own person with the epic struggle for the future of the entire galaxy between the Evil Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. In keeping with that movie’s clockwork structure, Lucas manages to have the climax of both stories be literally the exact same moment—Luke firing the torpedoes into the exhaust port.

Tolkien is up to something different however, and climaxes his two stories fifty pages apart. The Big Fantasy Epic winds down, and then the cast reduces to the Hobbits again and they go home, where they have to use everything they’ve learned to solve their own problems instead of helping solve somebody else’s.

In my experience, everyone connects more strongly with one of the two stories. The tends to boil down to who your favorite character is—Strider or Sam. Just about everyone picks one of those two as their favorite. It’s like Elvis vs. The Beatles; most people like both, but everyone has a preference.

(And yeah, there’s always some wag that says Boromir/The Who.)

Just to put all my cards on the table, my favorite character is Sam. (And I prefer The Beatles.)

Based on how the beginning and end of the books work, it seems clear that Tolkien thought of that story—the regular guys being changed by the wide world story—as the “main one”, and the Big Epic was there to provide a backdrop.

There’s an entire cottage industry of people explaining what “Tolkien really meant” in the books, and so there’s not a lot of new ground to cover there, so I’ll just mention that the “regular dudes” story is clearly the one influenced—not “based on”, but influenced—by his own WWI experiences and move on.

⁂

Which brings us back to the movies.

Even with three very long movies, there’s a lot more material in the books than could possibly fit. And, there’s an awful lot of things that are basically internal or delivered through narration that need dramatizing in a physical way to work as a film.

So the filmmakers made the decision to adapt only that first story, and jettison basically everything from the second.

This is somewhat understandable? That first story has all the battles and orcs and wargs and wizards and things. That second story, if you’re coming at it from the perspective of trying to make an action movie, is mostly Sam missing his garden? From a commercial point of view, it’s hard to fault the approach. And the box office clearly agreed.

And this perfectly explains all the otherwise bizarre changes. First, anything that undercuts the Ring has to go. So, we cut Bombadil and everything around him for time, yes, but also we can’t have a happy guy with a funny hat shake off the Ring in the first hour before Elrond has even had a chance to say any of the spooky lines from the trailer. Faramir has to be a completely different character with a different role. Sam and Frodo’s journey across the plains of Mordor has to play different, becase the whole movie has to align on how terrible the Ring is, and no stars can peek through the clouds to give hope, no pots can clatter into a crevasse to remind Sam of home. Most maddeningly, Frodo has to turn on Sam, because the Ring is all-powerful, and we can’t have an undercurrent showing that there are some things even the Ring can’t touch.

In the book, Sam is the “hero’s journey” characer. But, since that whole story is gone, he gets demoted to comedy sidekick, and Aragorn is reimagined into that role, and as such needs all the trappings of the Hero with a Thousand Faces retrofitted on to him. Far from the confident, legendary superhero of the books, he’s now full of doubt, and has to Refuse the Call, have a mentor, cross A Guarded Threshold, suffer ordeals, because he’s now got to shoulder a big chunk of the emotional storytelling, instead of being an inspirational icon for the real main characters.

While efficient, this all has the effect of pulling out the center of the story—what it’s about.

It’s also mostly crap, because the grafted-on hero’s journey stuff doesn’t fit well. Meanwhile, one of the definitive Campbell-style narratives is lying on the cutting room floor.

⁂

One of the things that makes Sam such a great character is his stealth. He’s there from the very beginning, present at every major moment, an absolutely key element in every success, but the book keeps him just out of focus—not “off stage”, but mostly out of the spotlight.

It’s not until the last scene—the literal last line—of the book that you realize that he was actually the main character the whole time, you just didn’t notice.

The hero wasn’t the guy who became King, it was the guy who became mayor.

He’s why my laptop bag always has a coil of rope in the side pocket—because you’ll want if if you don’t have it.

(I also keep a towel in it, because it’s a rough universe.)

⁂

And all this is what makes those movies so terribly frustrating—because they are an absolutely incredible adaptation of the Epic Fantasy parts. Everything looks great! The design is unbelievable! The acting, the costumes, the camera work. The battles are amazing. Helm’s Deep is one of those truly great cinematic achievements. My favorite shot in all three movies—and this is not a joke—is the shot of the orc with the torch running towards the piled up explsoves to breach the Deeping Wall like he’s about to light the olympic torch. And, in the department of good changes, the cut down speech Theoden gives in the movie as they ride out to meet the invaders—“Ride for ruin, Ride for Rohan!”—is an absolutely incredible piece of filmmaking. The Balrog! And, credit where credit is due, everything with Boromir is arguably better than in the book, mostly because Sean Bean makes the character into an actual character instead of a walking skepticism machine.

So if those parts were your jam, great! Best fantasy movies of all time! However, if the other half was your jam, all the parts that you connected to just weren’t there.

⁂

I’m softer on the “breakdancing wizards” fight from the first movie than a lot of fellow book purists, but my goodness do I prefer Gandalf’s understated “I liked white better,” over Magneto yelling about trading reason for madness. I understand wanting to goose the emotion, but I think McKellen could have made that one sing.

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There’s a common complaint about the movie that it “has too many endings.” And yeah, the end of the movie version of Return of the King is very strange, playing out a whole series of what amount to head-fake endings and then continuing to play for another half an hour.

And the reason is obvious—the movie leaves the actual ending out! The actual ending is the Hobbits returning home and using everything they’ve learned to save the Shire; the movie cuts all that, and tries to cobble a resolution of out the intentionally anti-climactic falling action that’s supposed to lead into that.

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Lord of the Rings: the Movie, is a story about a D&D party who go on an exciting grueling journey to destroy an evil ring, and then one of them becomes the King. Lord of the Rings: the Book, is a story about four regular people who learn a bunch of skills they don’t want to learn while doing things they don’t want to do, and then come home and use those skills to save their family and friends.

I know which one I prefer.

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What makes a good adaptation? Or a bad one?

Does it matter if the filmmaker’s are on the same page as the author?

What happens when they’re only on the same page with half of the audience?

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The movies are phenomenally well made, incredibly successful films that took one of the great heros of fiction and sandblasted him down to the point where there’s a whole set of kids under thirty who think his signature moment was yelling “po-TAY-toes” at some computer animation.

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For the record: yes, I am gonna die mad about it.

Wednesday linkblog, Twitter reminisces edition

The reminisces are starting to flow now, as is really starts to settle in that the thing we used to call twitter is gone and won’t be back.. As such, I’d like to call your attention to The Verge’s truly excellent The Year Twitter Died. This is probably the best “what it was, and what we lost, for both good and ill” piece I’ve read. Especially don’t miss The Great Scrollback of Alexandria. I’m glad someone is putting the work into saving some part of what used to be there.

Also, this week in folks talking about twitter, I enjoyed John Scalzi’s check-in a month after finally walking away: Abandoning the Former Twitter: A Four-Week Check-In. Scalzi was one of the strongest “I was here before he got here, and I’ll be here after he leaves” voices I saw a year ago, and the last year beat him like the rest of us.

There’s, of couse, the usual blowback to stuff like this, with at least one article I saw in response to that verge piece claiming that no, twitter always sucked, here’s all the problems it had, I always had a bad time there, so on and so on. I won’t link to it because why give them the attention, but I spent the whole time reading it thinking of this quote from former-President Beeblebrox: “Zowee, here we are at the End of the Universe and you haven't even lived yet. Did you miss out.”

So Long, Apple Trailers, and thanks for all the fish

Well, they finally pulled the plug on iTunes Movie Trailers. Starting life as a website to showcase the then-new Quicktime video format, it evolved into an iOS ecosystem app, and quietly spent two decades as the best way to see trailers for new movies. It made it a long time; my first memory of it was using the original web version to slowly load the first teaser for Episode I over dialup.

I’ve seen some speculation that this was all part of a rebranding exercise to redirect traffic to the Apple TV app (not to be confused with the Apple TV streaming service, or the Apple TV hardware product,) I suspect it’s more likely that whomever had been keeping it running since the late 90s had finally retired? Or maybe it really just didn’t fit in with Apple’s expanding streaming/services future.

So a moment, then, to note the passing of a small, single-purpose service that did one thing, and did it perfectly. Becase that’s all it did—had a library of trailers for upcoming and recent movies. Search, sort, organize by release date. High quality video, no muss, no fuss, no other advertising glop. It was remarkably up to date, had a trailer for basically every new movie, and frequently had any other EPK-type promo video as well.

It was a constant on my Apple TV (the hardware). “Hey’ let’s see if there’s any new trailers!” was a common request in the house. It was fun, it was simple, we liked it. So yeah, they shut it down. Two months or so past the shutdown, it’s left a surprisingly big hole! What are the alternatives we’re left with?

It goes without saying that the Trailers section of the Apple TV app, like all other sections of that app, is unmitigated hot garbage. Not only is it hard to find, but it doesn’t even have all the trailers from the old app! Bad sorting, no release dates, and it doesn’t seem to be nearly as complete or updated near as often.

YouTube seems to be the standard answer, but that’s also such a step back. Sure, all the trailers are there, somewhere. But, search on the Apple TV’s (the hardware) Youtube app is terrible, and every trailer has dozens of crappy copies, re-uploaded with somebody else’s watermarks, or other ads tacked on the front, or some guy “reacting” to it, or worst of all, it’s not the real thing at all, just some fan edit. And sure, that’s YouTube, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I just want the damn trailer. YouTube’s biggest problem is the amount of noise to signal; which is great if you’re looking for the noise, but sometimes you want to go watch the actual signal, you know?

And like so many things from the early web, we used to have a thing just for that which perfectly, but now it’s just gone, with no real replacement. The world doesn’t get smaller, but it sure keeps getting emptier.

Let me rephrase what I said up at the start: I hope they shut it down because someone retired. It would be beyond depressing if they killed off a perfect single-use (and probably cheap) service that we all liked that did one thing really well because it wasn’t making a 300% return on investment for some streaming sub-division.

New School, new lessons

My son started at a new school this year for middle school, and the transition has honestly gone about as smoothly as it possibly could, all things considered. It’s a much larger school than his last one—which is not a euphemism for something else by the way, he went from a class size of about 15 to over 200—and so he is learning how to deal with more people on a daily basis. Which is good! That’s a good skill to have.

Yesterday he finally comes unglued a little and starts to rant “why can’t some kids just do what the teacher asks?”

What do you mean?

His example was they have a chromebook cart, and they’re supposed to take the chromebook with the number on it that matches their desk, and the put it back in the same slot. And every day at the end of class someone else has put their chromebook in the slot his is supposed to go in.

And, you know, I just kinda had to shrug and say, well, there will always be people with an acute case of Main Character syndrome who are convinced the rules don’t apply to them, that someone else will come along and fix their problems, clean up after them, put their carts back for them. Learning how to deal with those sorts is one of the main things we learn in school. Best case, they grow out of it while they’re a teenager and develop empathy. Worst case, these are who grow up to be telephone sanitizers.

Happy Towel Day!

“Listen, it’s a tough universe!  Theres all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything!  If you’re going to survive out there, you’ve really got to know where your towel is.”

—Ford Prefect