Back in 1982, just a few months after I found myself drawn down to The Daily Texan to do journalism, I had the chance to interview Douglas Adams, then on the American book tour for the second volume of what later became the five-book Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy.” I came across a clipping of that recently when going through my papers, and I thought, despite my own less-than-felicitous prose style of the time, that it might generate some interest here. Note: it was not my idea to transmute “Douglas Adams” into “Doug Adams” for the headline. For that you can blame my editor.

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Doug Adams: Interview at the end of the universe

(The Daily Texan, March 3, 1982)

By MICHAEL GODWIN

Daily Texan Staff

Douglas Adams is the widely acclaimed author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.” A Cambridge alumnus who spent his undergraduate years writing and performing for the “Cambridge Footlights” comedy revue, Adams originally wrote two satirical science fiction novels in serialized script form for British radio; he was later persuaded to rewrite the stories in novel form. The two books have been selling briskly on both sides of the Atlantic. Adams was in town recently to promote “Restaurant.” While here, he spoke to UT’s Science Fiction and Fantasy club and talked with Texan writer Michael Godwin. The following are excerpts from that taped interview.

Texan: How do you feel about the science fiction and fantasy fans treating you as if you were a science fiction writer?

Adams: I’m not a science fiction writer — I’m a comedy writer, as I have to keep on going around loudly explaining. Except when I’m actually addressing a science fiction club, in which case I just keep quiet about that so as not to offend anybody. But I’m not a science fiction writer.

Texan: Are you surprised your books have done so well in the U.S.?

Adams: Yes, but the first book didn’t really move very much until the radio show came out. There didn’t seem to be any particularly good reason why it shouldn’t do as well as it did in England. There didn’t seem to be any great reason why it shouldn’t travel. Whenever anyone says, “well, there’s a great gap between English and American humor,” I don’t think there is. If the comedy is about the way people behave, then I don’t see why it shouldn’t work equally well on both sides, really.

Texan: Do you set out to satirize things like religion and mores? For example, you have a sort of two-bit messiah showing up during the final moments of the universe because he knows he’s about due.

Adams: Well, most of the satirical stuff there is not actually set out to be satirical. I think if you set out to make a point about something, then you almost inevitably end up doing something that isn’t funny. If, on the other hand, you set out to do something that makes you laugh, then you can more or less rely on the fact that whatever makes you laugh is an expression of what you think about things.

People tend to think that serious work and comedy preclude each other, but I don’t think they do at all. The trouble is that as soon as you start talking seriously about comedy it’s very easy to become pretentious and lose all sight of what comedy is about. I sometimes find that comedy is the clearest way of expressing an idea. If you get a complicated idea and you actually get to the point where it becomes funny, then it probably means that you’ve actually gotten to the point where it can be perceived as being very simple — comedy can be the best expression of an idea.

Texan: You once said that Vonnegut is one of your favorite authors. Do you think your work is similar to his?

Adams: I think there’s a certain obvious comparison in that we’re both doing science fiction and being funny. I say “we both” rather presumptuously because I would not put myself in the same category as Vonnegut at all. I’d like to think anybody who likes Vonnegut would like me if they ran out of good Vonnegut. I suppose we both have the same slightly detached use of the conventions of science fiction to hit whatever targets we want to hit. He’s obviously a much deeper, sadder writer. I suppose his greatest book is “Slaughterhouse Five,” which is again using the conventions of science fiction to understand the firebombing of Dresden through this very, very detached viewpoint. Most of my targets just tend to be things that irritate me: bureaucracy, self-defeating technology, all these sorts of things. They’re really more trivial targets than the ones Vonnegut aims at, though I’m flattered by the comparison of course.

Texan: What is your next project? Everybody would love it of course if you did another “Hitchhiker” book.

Adams: Well I am about halfway through the third and last “Hitchhiker” book, but I keep on feeling so trapped — like Frankenstein and his monster. If you look at the last page or two of “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” it’s quite clear that I intended not to write any more in the series. But eventually I was won ’round to the idea that I should do another story.

Texan: It must be pretty hard to top “the End of the Universe.”

Adams: Yes. This one sort of goes back and delves into the very far past. Actually, it’s a more constructed story. I’m writing this third book as a novel, rather than as reworked radioplays, because I wanted to find out what problems I was going to encounter writing a book straight off. The first two, although they’re heavily reworked form the scripts, nevertheless have a background to go on — the dialogue. When I got three-fourths of the way through the new book, I suddenly found myself dragging to a halt and I know when I drag to a halt that there is something fundamentally wrong somewhere. It was quite simple: there wasn’t enough dialogue! When you’re doing radio, obviously you have to do the whole story in dialogue, which means you constantly have to disguise the fact that your characters are saying very unnatural things.

Texan: “Look at that big green octopus over there!”

Adams: That’s it, or “I am now crossing the room.” On radio you actually have to have the guy say something which indicates that he is crossing the room while appearing to say something totally different; that is a constant problem. But nevertheless the discipline of that does mean that the dialogue actually becomes very alive in a way.

Texan: So you have to put all of your energy into the dialogue ….

Adams: Right. And that forms a very strong, lively basis for the prose in the story. I wasn’t doing enough of that in this third book so now I have to go back and rewrite it as if I were working from scripts. I then began to think that when I write my next book (which will be a comedy and not science fiction), maybe it would be a good discipline to start that on radio again just to get the dialogue right.

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