Above all, of course, Douglas Adams was a transcendent, multi-faceted, comic genius. What made Douglas’s work unique, I think, were the wildly contradictory attributes he displayed in his writing. He seamlessly blended world-class intelligence—and a daunting knowledge about an impossible variety of subjects (literature, computers, evolution, pop culture, genetics, and music, to name but a few)—with cosmic silliness; technophobia with a lust for, and fascination with, every high-tech toy imaginable; deep cynicism about virtually everything with an effusively joyful spirit; and one of the quickest wits I’ve ever encountered with a relentless perfectionism in pursuing his craft.

Mix in a bit of impish mischief (if, indeed, anyone who weighed over 260 pounds could ever be accused of being “impish”), an unrivaled sense of irony, and a peculiar knack for making absurd—yet logical—connections, and you get such one-of-a-kind creations as the line of electromechanical security robots who repeatedly shout “Resistance is useless!” even as they’re destroyed by their attackers; or the guidebook publisher who, after carefully reviewing every aspect of life on earth, decides that all the useful information a space traveler could ever want about the human race can be summed up in the phrase “Mostly harmless”; or—to choose an example from the tantalizing fragment of Douglas’s unfinished (and oft-postponed) next novel that appears in this volume—the cab driver who, having noted that no one has ever jumped into his taxi and shouted the much ballyhooed phrase “Follow that cab!”, reaches the obvious conclusion that his must be the cab that all the other cabs are following.

The writings collected in the volume you’re holding in your hand were retrieved posthumously from the disk drive of Douglas’s Mac and masterfully assembled by Peter Guzzardi—assisted heroically by Jane Belson, Douglas’s widow, and his long-time assistant, Sophie Astin. The pieces anthologized here not only show off, as do all his books, the remarkable breadth of Douglas’s interests and talent, but also reveal—unlike his novels—the constant, irresistible invitation to share something new and exciting that opened those of us fortunate enough to know him personally to so many rewarding pursuits and pleasures. If you’re at all like me, before you’ve finished reading these pages you’ll have taken Douglas’s advice and picked up a copy of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, or listened once again (perhaps more closely than ever) to the Beatles’ “Drive My Car” or Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, or taken it upon yourself to learn more about the Dagenham Girl Pipers, or brewed—for the first time in your life—a truly proper British cup of tea.