Neil Gaiman

Adds much extra information to the Hitchhiker trilogy, including previously unpublished radio show excerpts and a profile of Douglas Adams

The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion

Don't Panic

Adds extra information to the Hitchhiker trilogy, including previously unpublished radio show excerpts and a profile of Douglas Adams.

Douglas Adams & the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Kirsten Simkiss

This book is a celebration of Douglas Adams and the works he created during his lifetime, most notably focusing on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy" from which this book gets it's title. It was really lovely learning more about Douglas Adams and how he worked. I had heard bits and pieces and while I'd read the books and listened to MP3s of the radio show, I picked up a lot of interesting tidbits about the man behind the laughter. I read the more recent version of the book, updated after Adams's death, so it covered more than the earlier versions where the timeline ended in 1988 apparently.

While I'm used to reading Neil Gaiman's fiction, I found that his style wasn't quite as strong in this biographical piece - which I actually thought was to the benefit of the book. It lets Adams's personality shine through without anyone else's personality really there to impede it.

I probably am not likely to reread this book, but if you're looking for more information on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the life of Douglas Adams himself, or on any of his smaller projects like Dirk Gently, this is definitely a good resource.

The #1 New York Times–bestselling author’s “hilarious . . . idiosyncratic . . . delightful” and definitive companion to a global phenomenon (Publishers Weekly). Douglas Adams’s “six-part trilogy,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy grew from a blip of a notion into an ever-expanding multimedia universe that amassed an unprecedented cult of followers and became an international sensation. As a young journalist, Neil Gaiman was given complete access to Adams’s life, times, gossip, unpublished outtakes, and files (and became privy to his writing process, insecurities, disillusionments, challenges, and triumphs). The resulting volume illuminates the unique, funny, dramatic, and improbable chronicle of an idea, an incredibly tall man, and a mind-boggling success story. In Don’t Panic, Gaiman celebrates everything Hitchhiker: the original radio play, the books, comics, video and computer games, films, television series, record albums, stage musicals, one-man shows, the Great One himself, and towels. And as Douglas Adams himself attested: “It’s all absolutely devastatingly true—except the bits that are lies.” Updated several times in the thirty years since its original publication, Don’t Panic is available for the first time in digital form. Part biography, part tell-all parody, part pop-culture history, part guide to a guide, Don’t Panic “deserves as much cult success as the Hitchhiker’s books themselves” (Time Out).

Don't Panic The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion

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