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.
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.
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
Friday night linkblog, classic talk show edition
I found this while looking for the Hitchhiker clip I linked in this morning’s piece: Douglas Adams on Letterman, 1985..
He’s promoting So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, and tells the story about the biscuits.
Adams is… not a great talk show guest, actually? And Letterman clearly doesn’t get it, for several values of ”it”, but is game to play along.
It’s pretty great! My whole adolescence, rolled into one clip.
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