42 The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams

<p>When Douglas Adams died in 2001, he left behind 60 boxes full of notebooks, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches and even poems. In <i>42</i>, compiled by Douglas's long-time collaborator Kevin Jon Davies, hundreds of these personal artefacts appear in print for the very first time.</p><p>Douglas was as much a thinker as he was a writer, and his artefacts reveal how his deep fascination with technology led to ideas which were far ahead of their time: a convention speech envisioning the modern smartphone, with all the information in the world living at our fingertips; sheets of notes predicting the advent of electronic books; journal entries from his forays into home computing – it is a matter of legend that Douglas bought the very first Mac in the UK; musings on how the internet would disrupt the CD-Rom industry, among others.</p><p>42 also features archival material charting Douglas's school days through Cambridge, Footlights, collaborations with Graham Chapman, and early scribbles from the development of <i>Doctor Who</i>,<i>&nbsp;Hitchhiker's</i>&nbsp;and <i>Dirk Gently</i>. Alongside details of his most celebrated works are projects that never came to fruition, including the pilot for radio programme <i>They'll Never Play That on the Radio </i>and<i></i>&nbsp;a space-inspired theme park ride.</p><p></p><p>Douglas's personal papers prove that the greatest ideas come from the fleeting thoughts that collide in our own imagination, and offer a captivating insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers and most enduring storytellers.</p>