THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY spanned numerous formats, from radio to prose, to TV and finally to film in 2005. Now a new biography has exhumed the archives to bring readers 16 draft chapters that Douglas Adams abandoned in the process of crafting third instalment Life, The Universe and Everything. Writer Jem Roberts unearthed the “new” sections along with unused excerpts from the first novel in a collection stored at Cambridge University, where Adams was educated.
The creator was notorious for his influential yet decidedly non-prolific output and was famously locked in a room so he could attempt to meet a deadline. Roberts sheds light on what we might expect from the discovery:
“The original version was going brilliantly – he had loads of really funny chapters and scenes – and then he just decided to abandon the whole lot and start from scratch… The book that we know has exactly the same plot. He’d written a version that was about two thirds of the way through before he abandoned it. A lot of people thought it had gone in the bin.”
His latest biographer puts the ditching of the material down to personal setbacks after a failed relationship. As someone who doesn’t view everything Adams does as a work of genius, I approach anything he cut out with caution – after all, there’s a reason writing is sometimes called rewriting – but nevertheless he did have some amazing ideas and if these chapters are as good as Roberts indicates us Hitchhiker‘s fans could be in for the full slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
Roberts’ The Frood, named after an expression used in the series, will hit shelves in September.
Source: BBC
