My most recent visit with Douglas took place in California, our afternoon stroll along Santa Barbara’s wintry beach punctuated by running races with his then six-year-old daughter, Polly. I had never seen Douglas so happy, and I had no inkling that this time together would be our last. Since Douglas died he has come to mind with astonishing frequency, which seems to be the experience of many who were close to him. His presence is still remarkably powerful nearly a year after his death, and I can’t help thinking he had a hand in the amazing ease with which this book came together. I know he would have keenly wanted you to enjoy it, and I hope you will.

—Peter Guzzardi
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
FEBRUARY 12, 2002

Introduction

Introduction

Douglas Adams was—in every sense of the word—larger than life. To begin with he was prodigious in stature, towering over the world at six feet five inches or more. (Indeed, even as a child on school trips, Douglas writes, his teachers “wouldn’t say ‘meet under the clock tower,’ or ‘meet under the War Memorial,’ but ‘meet under Adams.’”)

He was larger than life as a personality, too: expansive and joyous and perpetually curious, always intrigued by new opportunities, and eager to pursue them with a single-mindedness and charm that usually proved irresistible. I had the good fortune to have lunch with him in Islington a few hours after he had received a formal invitation—as a result of his recent embrace of the “Save the Rhino International” movement—offering him the opportunity to get dressed up as a rhinoceros and, despite being weighed down by the cumbersome costume, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. The event was, apparently, imminent, and, of course, the proposed date for the climb coincided with several important writing deadlines. (Douglas was also peerless in his ability to procrastinate—but more about that later.) “Are you going to do it?” I asked. “Of course,” he replied, “Why wouldn’t I?” (And he did—an adventure recounted in “The Rhino Climb,” which appears, for the first time in book form, in this volume.)

One of Douglas’s most endearing attributes was the incessant delight he took in sharing his wide-ranging, and always evolving, ideas and enthusiasms with virtually anyone who seemed to appreciate them. Indeed, it was this quality, along with his unparalleled humor, kindness, and generosity, that made him such a unique and wonderful friend. I first met him at an American Bookseller’s Association convention in the early 1980s. We were introduced by our mutual colleague (and literary agent) Ed Victor, who knew that I was an unabashed Hitchhiker fanatic and that Douglas had become intrigued with a medium that I had been busy learning about—the computer text adventure, a genre of interactive fiction that, as Douglas himself has characterized it, allows the storyteller to “respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller.”