For the first time in over a decade, Adams is working on a book.

“There was a point where I just got massively fed up with it. My books tend to use up ideas at a ferocious rate,” he said. “I never intended to be a novelist to begin with. So I decided to go and do a whole bunch of other things. . . . The consequence of that is I have a huge backlog of story ideas, and now the sort of panic is, ‘Can I do them all in the rest of my career, given the speed at which they’re arriving at the moment?’ The other panic, of course, is the perennial writer’s problem of application. I think I have more fear of writing than most writers.”

The new book is not a Hitchhiker’s book—there are already five of those—or a Dirk Gently book, but “it will be recognizable in style to anyone who knows those books.

“Since then, I’ve now got lots and lots of different story lines waiting for me to turn them into books. One of them I shall apply the title Salmon of Doubt to, but I don’t know which one yet.”

In 1990, Adams, with zoologist Mark Carwardine, wrote Last Chance to See. It’s one of his hardest books to find, and his favorite. When Adams—who has lived in Santa Barbara for the last two years—speaks today at UCSB, it’s the book he’ll talk about.

“I do talks around most of the rest of the country,” Adams said. “So I was very keen to do one here, just to sort of say, ‘Hi, here I am.’ ”

Adams gives a lot of speeches, usually about high technology to large companies.

“I actually much prefer doing this particular one, which I only ever usually get to do at colleges because it’s funny, but big corporations don’t particularly like to hear about protecting endangered wildlife,” he said. “You lose a lot of money to endangered wildlife.”

Last Chance to See started as a magazine article for the World Wildlife Fund. The group sent Adams to Madagascar, where he met Carwardine. Adams wrote about the aye-aye, an endangered species of nocturnal lemur that looks like a cross between a bat, a monkey, and a very surprised infant.

“At the time, it was thought that there were only about fifteen. They’ve found a few more so it’s not quite so endangered, just very, very, very endangered,” Adams said. “The whole thing was completely magical.”

So magical that Adams and Carwardine spent the next year traveling the world and seeing endangered animals, like flightless kakapo parrots in New Zealand and baiji river dolphins in China. The last twenty dolphins will become extinct when the Chinese government completes the Three Gorges Dam and destroys the dolphins’ habitat.