...and the TV series he never got to make

They are a bunch of oddballs whose popularity has endured for decades, but Douglas Adams came to hate the characters he created for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

Newly released material from the author’s archives, includes a note to himself in which he wrote: ‘Arthur Dent is a burk. He does not interest me. Ford Prefect is a burk. He does not interest me. Zaphod Beeblebrox is a burk. He does not interest me. Marvin is a burk. He does not interest me. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is a burk. It does not interest me.'

His gripes then morph into an imagined conversation with a giant dragon called Lionel.

Adams found writing notoriously difficult, famously saying his process was that: ‘I sit here and stare at a piece of paper until my head bleeds.’ And the newly unearthed documents also include a ‘general note to myself’ in which he offered tips to get over his writer’s block.

‘Writing isn’t so bad really when you get through the worry,’ he advised himself. ‘Forget about the worry, just press on. Don’t be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don’t strain at them.

‘Writing can be good. You attack it, don’t let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it!’

The papers were discovered in 67 boxes of files donated to his former Cambridge college, St John’s, after his death of a heart attack, at the age of 49, in 2001.

His archive also reveals Adams had plans for a TV series imagining Earth’s colonisation of the solar system. The Secret Empire is  described as a ‘big, sprawling, epic’ exploring the technological ideas that fascinated Adams such as artificial intelligence, nano technology and virtual reality.

The characters, including a soldier, mathematician and an historian, would have their consciousness transferred into machines so they could live across hundreds of years.

Other unfulfilled ideas disclosed in the book include a proposed theme park ride.

Writer Kevin Jon Davies was granted access to the Cambridge archive for a planned new book entitled  42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, which contains these revelations.

It will be published by Unbound, which has today launched a crowdfunding project to raise the money for its release. If enough people place an advance order, from £15 for an ebook to £500 to be a ‘patron’, it will be printed. Already it is more than a third funded, placing it on target to be released next year, when Adams would have been 70.

The book has been developed in close association with Adams’s family, who said in a statement: ‘’What Douglas loved more than a good idea was sharing a good idea, and whether it was the 1st or 100th time you had heard it, his obvious delight never diminished. It's a pleasure to share that delight with you in this book. We hope you enjoy it.’

A large-format hardback, it will reproduce extracts from the archive with explanatory text and footnotes across his whole career,  from early collaborations with Graham Chapman to his work on Doctor Who, through the Hitchhiker years, Dirk Gently, and his groundbreaking non-fiction book Last Chance To See, as well as his ideas on technology that were ahead of their time.

Published: 22 Mar 2021