His publisher, Pan, found themselves, early in 1984, soliciting a book that was, for the most part, unwritten and for that matter mostly unplotted. The lenticular image on the original cover showed a walrus that became a dinosaur, because Douglas had mentioned that there would be a walrus in the book.

There would be no walrus in the book.

It became part of the story of the book that, as the publishing date of the book got closer and the book got no closer to being written, publisher Sonny Mehta had taken a hotel suite and essentially locked Douglas in to write it, editing the pages as they came through. It was a strange way for a book to be written, and something Douglas used as an excuse for any problems that the book had.

But it was a book he was still particularly proud of when it came out. I remember that.

Douglas Adams had returned from America to Islington, and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish occurs in the space that Southern California isn’t. Which is to say that both Douglas’s Outer Space and his Southern California are extremely Californian: the hotel in which rock stars read Language, Truth and Logic by the pool and the bar in which Ford Prefect attempts to pay his bill with an American Express card are not a galaxy apart, and the hooker who has a special service for rich people could exist as easily in one world as another.

Arthur Dent, in previous stories a flat character who existed mostly to boggle at the improbabilities, often infinite, he was confronted with, became someone significantly more like Douglas. Douglas’s return from America was echoed in Arthur Dent’s return from hitchhiking across all of time and space to an Earth that the readers believed to have been destroyed, and his explanation to the world that he had been in America.

It might be seen as a problem for a writer who was considered a social satirist to have, a few pages into the first book in a bestselling series, destroyed the Earth. On the good side it sets you free to explore the vastness of the infinite. On the downside, it rather limits you as an observational humorist, when it comes to specifics, and while Douglas may not have been a novelist, he was definitely an observational humorist.

Still, I think there’s another reason for the restoration of the Earth at the beginning of this book.

Like it or not, and when it came out some people did and some people didn’t, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is a love story, and the novel puts an Earth back for there to be a love story on. Underneath all the glitter, Arthur and Fenchurch, and the unlikely circumstances of their meeting, their love and the travails thereof, is the true subject of the book.

And as we grow older our reading of books changes. As a young man, writing a book about Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I remember picking up on the awkwardness of chapter 25, and Douglas’s rhetorical question as to whether or not Arthur Dent has . . .