I’ll be here when you get back.

No, I mean it.

I’ll put down some asterisks. I’ll see you after them, when you’ve read the book.

* * *

DOUGLAS ADAMS WAS tall. He was brilliant: I’ve met a handful of geniuses, and I’d count him as one of them. He was a frustrated performer, a remarkable explainer and communicator, an enthusiast. He was an astonishing comic writer: he could craft sentences that changed the way a reader viewed the world, and sum up complex and difficult issues in aptly chosen metaphors. He combined the trappings of science fiction with profound social commentary and a healthy sense of humor to create fresh worlds. He loved computers, was an astonishingly fine public speaker. He was a bestselling author. He was a competent guitarist, a world traveler, an environmentalist, a man who held remarkably wonderful parties, a gourmand.

What he was not, and this may seem somewhat odd, especially when you consider how many of them he wrote and sold, and how famously well he wrote them, was a novelist. And this, I suspect unarguably, is the oddest of his novels.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was Douglas’s first attempt to write a novel from scratch.

In many ways it could be seen as an experiment. A transitional novel between the galaxy-spanning romps of the first three Hitchhiker’s books and the more Earthbound adventures of Dirk Gently. It was, after all, the first of the three of Douglas’s books not to have originated in the extraordinary period of creativity that took him from the creation of the Hitchhiker’s radio series to the end of his time as script editor of Doctor Who. His first two books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, had strong foundations: they were built on the backs of the scripts that Douglas, and (for the second series) Douglas and John Lloyd, had crafted for the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio 4 series. The third book, Life, the Universe and Everything was adapted from an unused outline Douglas had written for a Doctor Who film, Doctor Who and the Krikketmen. His next book, the remarkable Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, was adapted from Douglas’s unfilmed Doctor Who story Shada (with a sprinkling of ideas from the filmed Doctor Who story City of Death).

The first Hitchhiker’s books had been written by Douglas as a young man for a world that expected nothing, and were published as paperback originals. Now Douglas was, for the first time, being published in hardback. He was a bestselling novelist, who had not yet written a book he was proud of. This may partly have been because he was not a novelist.

Now he needed to write a book he had been paid a lot of money to write. His accountant had embezzled most of the money and then killed himself. Douglas Adams had gone to Hollywood on his first, abortive, quest to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made into a film. He had lived there for over a year, doing drafts of the film, did not have a good time there, and, surprised and a little battered, he had returned home to a little converted stable house off Upper Street in Islington, and, eventually, and under pressure, put off actually writing So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.