I enjoyed ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ immensely. I like British humour. The ‘trilogy in five parts’ provides
a classic example of what I like about British humour: “What’s that strange thing you
British play?” / “Er, cricket? Self-loathing?” / “Parliamentary democracy. ...” (page 651 of ‘The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy’). Is this snobbery? Is this really self-loathing? Or is it simply word-play?
Whatever; but there are layers to the humour and it is always difficult to
pinpoint where it is directed.
I am a science-fiction buff. I prefer distortion,
manipulation, extrapolation of the laws of science to pure flights of imagination.
Science-fiction always has an undercurrent of logic; it abides by the fact that
existence, nature, are all about logic. (I am sorely tempted to present this
proposition of mine, as a concise definition of science-fiction!) Imagination
or fantasy, on the other hand, may take leave of logic altogether and then you
cannot subjectively interact with the flow of the tale; you have to submit to
it. The Guide is science-fiction. The details are authentic and quite a
few times logic suddenly springs up to enliven some episode which had seemed
bizarre, a flight of fancy. And there are some straightforward insights into
oddities offering them a place in the logical scheme of things. To continue the
above quote: (the subject is astrology) “.. The rules just kind of
got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But
when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen
and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the
rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and
drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about
a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules,
the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. ...” There!
Astrology now is acceptable to the likes of me.
Douglas Adams is a master when it comes to playing
with logic. It is as if he has composed a play and logic is a ghost which makes
dramatic entries on to the stage to tie loose ends. In the Guide, logic
is a lively and a potent character in itself. Sometimes it makes you wonder if
Adams wrote, at least part of the book, backwards. There is this episode (on
page 89 of the combined volume) when missiles are about to hit a spacecraft
when the ‘Improbability Drive’ is applied and the two missiles turn into 1. a
bowl of petunias and 2. a very surprised-looking whale. As if this is not outlandish
enough, there is more: in addition to the whale talking to itself from the
moment it is created 300 miles from the ground, till it strikes the ground; all
that the bunch of petunias says in its mind is “Oh no, not again.” You are
prepared to live with ‘improbability’ turning missiles into whales and petunias,
you also accept the whale reflecting upon his existence; but the exclamation of
the bowl of petunias is so absurd! What is this if not flippancy, you wonder?
And then as you read on, there arrives (on page 400!) an explanation which
rounds things off pretty smoothly. And then you read further on and the
rounding off becomes the ghost that haunts and ultimately gives the story a
touch of pathos. Adams does it time and again. If you are in the habit of doing
a critical appraisal as you read, then Adams shames you by neatly filling, at a
later point, blanks and voids in the logic or in the event chronology or in
some missing detail. Seldom does he indulge in the dirty trick of casually
slipping in a vital piece of information only to surprise you in the end; a
trick so often used by mystery writers from Agatha Christie to Asimov.
Future world and outer space are where 90%
of Science-fiction is. Computers are now taken for granted. The Guide begins
in the present, never jumps into the future but merrily traverses time from
primitive ages to the end of the Universe. It has robots too. And alien beings.
But here they all are ‘people’. There are species with curious attributes and idiosyncrasies;
but none with super powers to set them apart from all others. One of the main
characters is humanoid with two heads. This gives rise to interesting
possibilities but he is just a devilish, reckless character; not a demon. There
is a super-intelligent robot but his defining feature is his mental depression.
The Guide is not a story of a conquest or even an exploration though it
travels wildly and one of the places visited is ‘The restaurant at the end of
the universe’. But the four main characters meet ‘people’ who are waiters,
accountants, civil servants and such like. The Guide in fact forces the reader
to adopt the viewpoint of ‘people’: The villagers … had only ever seen one
spaceship crash, and it had been so frightening, violent and shocking and had
caused so much horrible devastation, fire and death that, stupidly, they had
never realized it was entertainment (page 739). Note the key word: stupidly
appearing between two commas. Its people; stupid, unintelligent people not in
the know of the modern value system. Among the four main characters, one is a double-headed
narcissist, one is a hyperactive rover, one is intelligent, sharp and independent
girl who is always keen to take the initiative in any situation but the fourth,
the main protagonist is a timid, self-conscious, mostly bewildered human.
It is tempting to say that flashes of sharp,
almost cynical insights from a hard-headed commonsense viewpoint are the
characteristic attribute of Douglas Adams; but that would not be true. One,
there are a number of SF writers who write about common people living in the
future. And two, there is a far more pronounced feature of the Guide which
sets it apart from the rest. (So I think. My statement is limited to my
knowledge of the galaxy of SF writing.)
SF is recognised as a genre of fiction
writing; but that does not mean that all SF has a uniform purpose, or that it
talks the same language. The fiction of Asimov and Clarke and Ballard is
vintage SF; but along with H G Wells and Jules Verne, Aldous Huxley (Brave New
World) and George Orwell (1984) also qualify as SF writers. Even the two short
stories Metamorphosis and The Borough by Franz Kafka may arguably be called SF
writing. This inclusion does not in any way disturb their claim to be all-time
classics. Similarly, if I state here that Douglas Adams writes science fiction
of the mind; I shall not be making a comprehensive, meaningful statement. The Foundation
series by Asimov postulates a body, rather several bodies, of men who exercise
(in several ways) the power of the mind to influence the physical world. In an
SF story I read, a man is obsessed to climb 100-story buildings. In another
story, a drug completely wipes out the personality of a teen-aged girl. These
too are SF stories of the mind. So, I have to explain how Douglas Adams is
different. I shall do so through examples and shall try to arrive at a
destination.
Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect hitch a hike
on the Vogon spacecraft where they are not welcome at all: Vogons are totally
ruthless. It is said that you will be killed by them quickly if you are lucky
and if you are not; you will have to listen to Vogon poetry. Arthur and Ford
are made to hear poetry by the Vogon commander. As a result, they undergo
severe pain. Even though by this time you are familiar with Adams’ crazy humour
which usually is set in mortally critical conditions; this comes as cynical. So
you ingest it as a left-handed comment by a writer who is either an
unrecognised poetic talent or a contemptuous connoisseur. You may even call it
another example of the ‘self-loathing’ practised by the British; especially by
British authors.
But no! As you proceed, you come across
more and more instances where figures of speech sort of are personified.
Embodied into physical realities. Here are some examples, not necessarily in
chronological order.
S. E. P. Short for Somebody Else’s Problem.
Is it a wonder that you fail to notice
somebody else’s problem? But, “An S. E. P. is something that we can’t see,
or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s
somebody else’s problem. … The brain just edits it out; it’s like a blind spot.
If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it
is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.”
(page 334)
It turns out
to be a spaceship. And once Arthur and Ford know what it is; they manage to board
it and are able to save themselves.
Here is another gem. Nothing travels
faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, …. (page
635). Hang on; this is not a smart crack, or rather it is a smart crack but
Adams effortlessly takes off into ‘science fiction’. … bad news, which obeys
its own special laws. (Even now you can explain it away as a figure of
speech; but then) The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to
build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn’t work
particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived
anywhere that there wasn’t really any point in being there.
Another insight? Clearly surpasses Lewis
Carroll though, doesn’t he? Do you still think Adams is just being
tongue-in-cheek? Let’s see how Arthur learns to fly.
And suddenly he tripped again and was
hurled forward by his considerable momentum. But just at the moment he was
about to hit the ground astoundingly hard he saw lying directly in front of him
a small navy blue tore bag that he knew for a fact he had lost in the baggage
retrieval system at the Athens airport some ten years previously in his
personal time scale, and in his astonishment he missed the ground completely
and bobbed off into the air with his brain singing. (page 405)
You do trip when you are running as if
running were a terrible sweating sickness. You do miss landing your next
step on spot if you are not looking. You also misspell a word or have a slip of
the tongue if your mind wanders from what your hand or your mouth is busy
doing. In that case you may even send your drink into your windpipe and have a terrible
fit of coughing. The co-incidence or concurrence between your mind process and
your body-actions is lost and an accident takes place where your body ends up
doing something which is neither in tandem with your mind nor in continuation
of the course it has been following.
This common logic is in place here too.
Arthur’s body neither falls to the ground nor does it continue to run. Instead,
he starts flying! Thereby subordinating physics to perception. What you
perceive is what is real – as far as your own personal universe is concerned.
This is the maxim of Douglas Adams. Stated
very clearly on page 689: Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual
space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you
think you are.
The flying Arthur knows this. How? It
occurred to him almost instantly, with the instinctive correctness that
self-preservation instils in the mind, that he mustn’t try to think about it,
that if he did, the law of gravity would suddenly glance sharply in his direction
and demand to know what the hell he thought he was doing up there, and all
would suddenly be lost. (page 406)
Take note: Gravity becomes operational when
it glances in your direction. And then too, before commanding you to
fall, it wants to know what you think you are doing up there. Gravity
too acts as a person. It thinks, it admonishes and therefore it can be
hoodwinked.
Once this is clear, it is easy to apply the
maxim to technology. There is a robot, a security robot whose function it is to
report other things moving about doing things they shouldn’t do. (page
670) It is an advanced, mobile version of a burglar- or a fire-alarm. Would it
be right to say that this robot is happy when it is able to report
things as above? Applying human psychology, fulfilling the one function you are
created to perform, is bound to make you happy. This is applicable even to
biology if the scope of the term ‘happy’ is widened enough. A dog is extremely
happy to serve its master. In the Guide, not only the computers but even
the elevators and the doors interact with the characters (whom they are supposed to
serve) in terms of emotions. So, Ford goes on to short the circuit of the security robot
in such a way that no matter what, it is in a ‘happy’ condition. So it is no
more motivated to report unusual behaviour. Moreover, Ford can get it to do
anything at all and the robot gleefully obliges.
There is more than just paraphrasing
functionality and happiness. Consider the ‘modern elevators’. They operate on
the principal of “defocused temporal perception.” (page 179) They have
the capacity to see dimly into the future, which enables them to be on the
right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it …
And where does this get the elevators? Many
elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated
with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented
briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest,
demanding participation in the decision-making process and finally took to
squatting in basements sulking.
When Douglas Adams gets his tongue in his cheek, even his ordinary machines acquire human neuroses. (Marvin, the super-intelligent robot which is one of the principal characters, is always, ever, inconsolably depressed.) And he never lets the reign of logic
slip from his grip. Read, for example, The Universe – some information to
help you live in it.
1.
Area: Infinite
2.
Imports: None
3.
Exports: None
4.
Population: None
5.
Monetary Units: None
6.
Art: None
7.
Sex: None.
There is
elaborate explanation under each head of course; which is, as always, very
logical. For example, under Art the entry is: The function of art is to hold
the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough – see point
one. (page 243, 244)
I think it is safe (logical?) to conclude
that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is science fiction of the mind. This
discovery made me read the whole trilogy in five parts all over again and I
came across umpteen instances of ‘mind over matter’. Arthur C Clarke writes
engineering SF. He gives minute details about the structure of his spacecrafts
and other devices. The ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ trilogy (this one is in three parts;
Clarke is not psychedelic) is a classic example. That makes his SF
authentic, gives it an air of scientific prophesy. Asimov’s time-travelling ‘Eternity’
draws power from the Nova Sol. Encircling the Sun from all sides has been
postulated as the energy source of a high-energy-consuming humanity of the
future. With improbability drives and spaceships powered by bad news, there is
no point in enquiring what energy source do the Adams’ spacecrafts use or how
they traverse galactic distances. There is an eye for the detail but it draws a
line at creating a sense of the normal. Just as you don’t have to explain the
functioning of an internal combustion engine to say ‘I took my car to the
office.’ However, it is unnerving to have a logic-driven narration ultimately underline the futility of the human effort.
Just as it happens with all good literature I read, I go and
live it in my mind. So, not as an SF enthusiast but a frequent traveller,
I wish to attest that Douglas Adams’ Guide to the Galaxy is absolutely
authentic. If you are planning to take a trip there, it will be a most useful
companion.
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