The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams
Ballantine Books, 336pp, trade paperback (published in 2002)
Douglas Adams died at the age of 49 in 2001, way too early for his legions of fans. Over his career, he had a major impact on science fiction, and, he hoped, also a major impact on environmentalism and the growth of the computer age.
The Salmon of Doubt is a gift to his fans from his editor and his family. After his death, they combed through the hard drives on his computers (multiple) to find his uncollected works. In this volume there are letters (including his first published letter, from the age of 12), lectures, essays, one-liners, quips, two stories (“Young Zaphod Plays it Safe” and “The Private Life of Genghis Khan”), and as much of Adams’s final novel, The Salmon of Doubt, as they could put together. The editor of the volume goes into a little detail on the novel, noting that chapter 1 comes from Adams’s first version, while chapters 2-4 are apparently from the third version, and so on. This is where the editor’s job becomes apparent to the reader, because he really has sewn them together into a fairly coherent whole. He and Adams, however, talk several times about the novel, noting that, though the form presented would have been the third “Dirk Gently” novel, Adams thought he would modify it into the sixth “Hitchhikers” novel. I don’t buy it: I think it works great as a “Dirk Gently.”
But the overwhelming feeling I got, while reading the entire collection, was one of loss. The loss of his wonderful voice and his facility with language. I found myself chuckling over phrases and ideas, and wishing I could write as well. I found myself again marveling at his facility with naming characters (who can forget Zaphod Beeblebrox, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, or Slartybartfast?).
Reading The Salmon of Doubt is a bittersweet experience. The knowledge that it’s the last original Adams work we’ll see is bitter, but again reading his voice in pieces I hadn’t seen or heard before is, as always, sweet.