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After he died unexpectedly in May of 2001 at 49, his publisher rushed out a collection of previously unpublished work called Salmon of Doubt.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

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