Creator / Douglas Adams

TV Tropes.org has this to say about Douglas Noel Adams...

A British humorist and science fiction writer, most renowned for having written The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy", the Dirk Gently series, and three Doctor Who stories during the Tom Baker era (he was the script editor during Season 17).

A really hoopy frood, he was very fond of deadlines (he liked the whooshing sound they made as they flew by) and always knew where his towel was. ^note Actually, he didn't. That was where the joke came from: he could never, ever find his towel, and figured that it was probably symptomatic of the general disorganization of his whole life. Anyone who actually knew where their towel was, he reasoned, would have to be a really together person. His interests included evolutionary biology, software technology, Apple computers, the music of Pink Floyd, Bach, and The Beatles, and SCUBA diving. He was involved in a BBC radio production (and then book) with Mark Carwardine called Last Chance To See, where he made his case for the necessity of biodiversity and the need for conservation initiatives, and also for paying comedy writers to go on holiday. He also considered himself a radical atheist, but the "radical" bit was just to show people that he was serious about it (as opposed to merely being agnostic), not because he was intolerant or aggressive. If ever a human being was Too Cool to Live, it was him.

Hitchhiker was constructed in a typically Adams fashion — he was notorious for cribbing from his own previous works, and a good many aspects of Hitchhiker had been put to paper in some form (mostly Adams' own plays and unpublished short stories) before the series itself was conceived.

In true Douglas fashion, he advocated using exercise as a way of combating his depression, then died of a massive heart attack at age 47 while at the gym. Because of where he was living at the time (Santa Barbara, 2001), Adams actually was carrying a towel when he died. Many of his fans find this to be very bittersweet.

Adams has been honored with an asteroid, named in his honor (25924 Douglasadams); the asteroid's prior designation (2001 DA42) is notable in that it coincidentally carries the year of Adams' passing; his initials; and the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Adams would quite probably see such a coincidence as solid proof that the universe has a sense of humor.

See the article on The Other Wiki for more.

Little known fact: Adams invented the wiki before Wikipedia even existed. H2G2, an online encyclopedia system conceived by Adams, was launched in 1999, and predated Wikipedia by two years. Both Wikipedia and H2G2 depended on information contributed by the public, although H2G2 required that editors, staff on Adams' payroll (later, staff on The BBC's payroll), approve of certain contributions before it it can be published.

Works of Note:

• Doctor Who: Credited writer on "The Pirate Planet" and "Shada" (which unfortunately was unfinished and never aired due to a worker's strike, although what was filmed was eventually released on home video; It has also been adapted as a webcast, audio drama, and novel), generally accepted as main writer of "City of Death" (under a pseudonym), and made heavy contributions to all of Season 17 as script editor.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (which was adapted into a series that aired on BBC Four in 2010-2012)
• "The Private Life of Genghis Khan" (short story)
• Our Show For Ringo Starr (unproduced script)

Tropes Named:

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• Author Existence Failure (a spaceship suffers "sudden massive existence failure")
• Bits of Me Keep Passing Out
• Deconstructor Fleet (pun on Vogon Constructor Fleet)
• Future Imperfect
• Gargle Blaster
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet
• Let's Meet the Meat
• Puff of Logic
• Reality Is Out to Lunch

Elsewhere

• The Alleged Car (The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul)
• Beautiful Void (What he termed the setting of Myst)
• Zeerust (The Meaning of Liff)

Tropes Associated with his Work:

• Bathos: A lot of the humor of his work runs on this.
• Brick Joke: Douglas was infamous for these. It could be several books before he finally dropped the punch line.
  • With some sense of black humor, you could consider the fact that he wore a towel when he died his last Brick Joke.
• Creator Recovery: Sadly averted. Adams stated that he was going through a rough patch when writing the fifth The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book and set out to write a sixth to correct the last one's Downer Ending. Unfortunately, he suffered an Author Existence Failure before it could be completed. A sixth Hitchhiker book was later written by Eoin Colfer, to mixed reviews.
• Lightmare Fuel: Making you giggle and cower at the same time (or in stomach-churningly quick succession) is part and parcel of his signature style. Bonus points if you're doing this and spotting the pun or allusion at the same time. In short: if your ribs don't hurt, your brain and adrenal glands will.
• Ridiculous Procrastinator: Adams was notorious for turning in scripts late, and during his time as a novelist would often go off to start other projects to get out of finishing the ones with deadlines coming up. He described himself as a writer who took a certain perverse pleasure in Not Writing. It got to the point where his editor took to locking him in a hotel room with nothing but a typewriter when worse came to worse.
  I love deadlines. I love the wooshing sound they make as they fly by.
• Self Plagiarism: Most of his Doctor Who stuff eventually migrated its way into his novels. Life, the Universe and Everything contains elements of The Pirate Planet and one of his rejected scripts, and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency carries over a character from Shada and an entire plot thread from City of Death.
• Temporal Paradox: Played with constantly in both the Hitchhiker and Dirk Gently series.
• Unfazed Everyman: The trope used to be known as the Arthur Dent, and it is still used as a redirect.

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