#42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams

[rosemariecawkwell]

My Favourite Sci Fi and Fantasy of 2023

[kjond]

39/42 Douglas co-created early Infocom #games #Hitchhikers & 'Bureaucracy' - and we have his contemporary notes. In the late '90s at his multimedia company The Digital Village, they developed website h2g2.com and the sumptuous-looking CD-Rom game @StarshipTitanic.

[zz9official]

01/42 #42DouglasAdams’ own words – in his handwritten scrawl & terrible typing feature in this large format book, ‘42 The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams'. Out on 24 August. A treasury of previously unseen material from his personal archives…

02/42 Douglas' meanderings & marginalia, scribbled edits & deletions; writing littered with jottings, doodles and amendments. Radio sketches, novel manuscripts, job applications, project memos, personal and professional letters and replies… pre-order: https://unbound.com/books/douglasadams/ (images and text copied from Kevin Jon Davies (author)'s tweets

[mar-ruiz]

(vía Review: '42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams')

[calturnerreviews]

#BlogTour- #BookReview of #42 The Wildly Improbable Ideas of #DouglasAdams edited by @kevinjondavies @unbounders @RandomTTours #RandomThingsTours

I’m delighted to welcome you today to my stop on the blog tour for beautifully put together and presented book 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, edited by Kevin Jon Davies. Thank you to Anne Cater and Unbound for giving me the opportunity to read and review this stunning book. About the Book: – A full-colour compendium of hundreds of never-before-published artefacts from Adams’…

[bertyboy123]

42 The Wildly Improbable Ideas Of Douglas Adams# Kevin Jon Davies Blog Tour @RandomThingsTours

About The Book: A full-colour compendium of hundreds of never-before-published artefactsfrom Adams’ archive, including diary entries, notes and musings, letters,photographs, scripts, poems and more.– Authorised by the estate of Douglas Adams, it includes personalmemorabilia from his family.– Features a foreword from Stephen Fry and letters written after Adams’death from friends and fans: Neil…

[helmstone]

42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams now available to order

42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams now available to order

Due to be released August 24, you can now order a copy of 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. If you were one of (very) many backers of the Unbound project, you may well have your electronic copy today, and can scroll to the back for the dubious honour of seeing your name in print. I’m buried among dozens with my surname, so there we go. If you don’t know, here’s the…

[thedoctorwhocompanion]

Unseen Doctor Who Pitch by Douglas Adams Uncovered

Unseen #DoctorWho Pitch by Douglas Adams Uncovered

A previously unseen idea for a Doctor Who story by Douglas Adams has been discovered among the late writer’s papers at the University of Cambridge. Before anyone gets too excited at the news, we should stress that it’s a very rough synopsis that sets out a possible story in the sketchiest terms and, at little more than 100 words, it’s surely too short to form the basis of a future novel or…

[downthetubes]

Crowdfunding Spotlight: 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams - back it, before something weird happens to you

Crowdfunding Spotlight: 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams – back it, before something weird happens to you

Cover not necessarily finial Unbound’s latest project, a book for all fans of author Douglas Adams, offering a unique insight into the life and work of the creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has had far bigger news organs highlighting it than this humble site. It rightfully hit its crowdfunding target of £65,000 in just 11 hours about four minutes, and fans of Adam’s work continue…

[sunshine112]

Douglas adams quotes

1. “A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.’”

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.

2. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

3. “Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

4. “The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”

5 “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.”

6. “It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes

. “All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

8. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

9. “The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.”

10. “I'd far rather be happy than right any day.”

11. “Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.”

12. “Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

13. “What I need... is a strong drink and a peer group.”

14. “It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their own eyes and ears.”

15. “There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.”

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

16. “One is never alone with a rubber duck.”

17. “Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.”

18. “Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.”

19. “Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.”

20. “I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view.”

21. “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

22. “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”

23. “Life is wasted on the living.”

24. “There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.”

25. “I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”

Why 42? with Matt Parker

The standup mathematician Matt Parker delves into the rich significance of the number 42.

Why 42? with Matt Parker

No Such Thing as a Babel Fish with the QI Elves

The QI Elves investigate some of Douglas Adams’ predictions and inventions.

No Such Thing as a Babel Fish with the QI Elves

26. “All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.”

27. “Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

28. “A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.”

29. “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”

30. “People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.”

31. “We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.”

32. “Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?”

33. “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

34. “Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.”

35. “My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.”

36. “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”

37. “A cup of tea would restore my normality.”

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.

38. “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

39. “It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.”

40. “You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”

41. “Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.”

42. “Don't Panic.”

 From https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2bcFfMt6rGLTPpbG0yLwPw0/42-douglas-adams-quotes-to-live-by

[kjond]

Publication Day!

42/42 The answer to the Great Question of 'Life, The Universe and Everything' was '42' - from where this book gets its title. The number had been percolating through Douglas' mind well before he used it in #Hitchhikers, so we dispel old myths and examine the written evidence.

[kjond]

[kjond]

35/42 Among notes for #DirkGently, Douglas had drafted additional verses for the Samuel Taylor Coleridge #poem, which began: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.' The new stanzas were alluded to, but never seen in the text of the published novel - until now!

[kjond]

34/42 Douglas' first experiments with personal #computers began in late 1983 with rudimentary word processors and we have his scrawled notes from those frustrating times, when he was first re-writing #Hitchhikers as a #movie. We also cover his famous obsession with @Apple Macs.

[kjond]

41/42 - Douglas emigrated to California in 1999, ostensibly to work on the movie script for 'The Hitchhiker's Guide' but died aged 49 from a heart attack in May 2001. His former book editor Sue Freestone reflected on the man she knew, in an obituary originally published in 'The Bookseller'.

PUBLICATION DAY (UK) TOMORROW!

[kjond]

40/42 Douglas dreamed big and it wouldn’t have come much larger than the millennium-spanning epic #SciFi TV series 'Secret Empire', an idea detailed in previously unseen late-90s documents. A similar proposal was for a factual series covering centuries of *real* human endeavour.