Adams says the initial move was harder than he expected. “I’ve only recently understood how opposed to the move my wife was.” He now says he would recommend it to anyone “in the depths of middle age just upping sticks and going somewhere else. You reinvent your life and start again. It is invigorating.”

His role in his dot-com business fits into this sense of invigoration. His job title is chief fantasist. “I’ve never thought of myself in the role of a predictive science-fiction writer, I was never an Arthur C. Clarke wannabe. The Guide was a narrative device for absorbing all those ideas that spark off the flywheel, but it has turned out to be a very good idea. But it’s early days,” he warns. “We’re still in a swimming pool and there is an ocean out there.”

Other new ventures are a novel—eight years late and counting—talk of a Dirk Gently film, the H2G2 Web site and an e-novel. “I’ve been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me.”

The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.” He is surprisingly enthusiastic about this apparently antique art form.

“With new, more-immature technologies there is a danger in getting excited about all the ways you can push them forward at the expense of what you want to say. It is therefore rewarding to work in a medium where you don’t have to solve those problems because it is a mature medium.”

After such a long fallow period he wisely notes that many of these new projects and ideas will fall by the wayside. “But I’ve been out of the mainstream of novel writing for several years and I really needed to take that break. I’ve been thinking hard and thinking creatively about a whole load of stuff that is not novel writing. As opposed to running on empty, it now feels like the tank is full again.”

LIFE AT A GLANCE: Douglas Noel Adams

BORN: March 11, 1952, Cambridge.

EDUCATION: Brentwood School, Essex; St. John’s College, Cambridge.

MARRIED: 1991 Jane Belson (one daughter, Polly, born 1994).

CAREER: 1974–78 radio and television writer; 1978 BBC radio producer.

SOME SCRIPTS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1978 and 1980 (radio), 1981 (television).

GAMES: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984; Bureaucracy, 1987; Starship Titanic, 1997.

BOOKS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980; Life, the Universe and Everything, 1982; The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd), 1983; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, 1984; Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, 1988; Last Chance to See, 1990; The Deeper Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd), 1990; Mostly Harmless, 1992.