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Review [published October 2003]
Douglas Adams: The Salmon Of Doubt
Ian Hocking
When I was 12, I bought a text-adventure game called
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for my Amiga
500 computer. The box had “Don’t Panic!” written
in large, friendly letters on the front and showed a
green alien sticking its tongue out. Inside was a floppy
disk, planning permission for a hyperspace bypass
that would require the demolition of the Earth, some
pocket fluff, and Joo-Janta 500 Super-Chromatic
Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses (which become opaque
when the wearer gets scared). The game was written
by Douglas Adams. I decided to buy the BBC Radio
series on which the game was based. By the time I
was 14, I could recite – no joke – the entire six hours
of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Both radio
series, including the opening and closing credits. My
sound effects were particularly good.
The author of Hitchhiker is, of course, Douglas
Adams. Adams died suddenly on May 11th, 2001.
Within days his agent got hold of his hard drive, had
someone scan it for text documents, burn them to a
CD, and set this posthumous publication in motion:
The Salmon Of Doubt.
BUY Douglas Adams books online from and
This book has the potential to be excruciating. It
seems unfair on Adams because many of the fiction
vignettes, non-fiction pieces, emails, and transcribed
speeches were never intended for publication. But
this misses the point. We know Adams would not
have published them; we don’t expect another Hitchhiker’s
Guide (though a marketing wag has written
“Hitchhiking The Galaxy One Last Time” on the
cover where “Douglas is dead: Don’t Panic” would
be more appropriate). The result is a collection of
insights into a remarkable writer, one who suffered
from writer’s block, did not suffer from deadlines
(“The thing I most love about deadlines is the whooshing
sound they make as they go past”), and had a
passionate interest in saving endangered species.
The book’s title is taken from Adams’s unfinished
Dirk Gently detective novel. Dirk Gently appears in the
post-Hitchhiker works Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective
Agency and The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul. Gently
is a typical Adams character: based on someone Adams
knew, but when Gently talks, Adams speaks. The
unfinished Gently novel is good, though it does contain
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