Posh-School SF
Television and radio announcers have a distinctive but necessarily rather limited critical vocabulary. They use up all their superlatives on "gripping sagas", "action-packed crime-busters" and "uproarious, side-splitting" comedies, and have little left with which to package anything more genuinely youthful, imaginative and funny. It reflects rather badly on everyday programming that Douglas Adams's clever science-fiction comedies The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy are unfamiliar enough to be introduced into the domestic arena as "zany" and "madcap", and it is a comment on the mass audience that the enjoyment of such unexceptionable pleasures should be thought of as some kind of cult.
[British programmes] such as I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, Monty Python's Flying Circus and Not the Nine O'Clock News manage to thrive on this special status—on the fact that they are held at a distance from the rest of the evening's offerings. They build up a semi-private language of stock situations, favourite satirical targets and recurring comic triggers, and have established an anarchic, facetious, though also teasingly symbiotic relationship with the fully domesticated mainstream. The good-humour of that relationship shows up clearly in the characteristic play they make with the manners and language of news-readers and announcers themselves.
There is a rich vein of satire here into which Adams's writings fall, suggesting, in general, that some science-fiction takes itself just as appallingly seriously as, and can be exposed as no more imaginative than the reading of the news….
The mini-genre is one which seems to have evolved within the electronic media. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide, with its clipped, up-to-date, joke-a-minute style, bristling with gimmickry and microtechnological blobs and bleeps, seemed ideally suited to radio and even more so to television, where its diagrams and print-outs have an appeal somewhere between watching Ceefax and playing Space-Invaders.
As followers will know, the formula has been transferred with some success to the printed page. This latest volume, Life, the Universe and Everything, is the third, following on from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. This gives the publishers the opportunity to talk of a "trilogy".
The constant element in Adams's plot is the helpless, semiclad character of Arthur Dent, last remaining inhabitant of the Earth, which has been demolished to make way for an interstellar by-pass. [In Life, the Universe, and Everything], Arthur and his know-all space friend Ford Prefect find themselves caught up in the malevolent plan of the rulers of the planet Krikkit to destroy everything that isn't cricket and to seize the Golden Bail that will give them great power. Meanwhile Arthur hopes to discover the Ultimate Question of Life, knowing already that the Ultimate Answer to the Question is forty-two. The pair come across a number of extra-terrestrial phenomena, such as the planet of Squornshellous Zeta, whose swamps are inhabited by mattresses, and the Campaign for Real Time. This, though, is only the plot. Much of the comedy arises from a variety of pseudo-high-tech mis-information….
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide retains its life on the page because much of this humour is primarily verbal, using mild parody, making the everyday absurd by giving it a strange name or simply by giving it a capital letter. It has an imaginative energy which derives as much from its consistent play with a cosy, familiar world—the suburban English world of cricket, dressing-gowns and by-passes—as from the extravagance of its characters and settings.
Adams's writing has a likeable, posh-school, wide-eyed, naive manner related, perhaps, to the primitive manner currently in vogue in high-brow poetic circles. It would be wrong, though, to claim too much for the books. Print shows up also the extent to which the humour depends on a limited repertoire of gimmicks, and this third volume, though by no means lacking in enthusiastic drive, does little to suggest that the idea could or should be taken much further from here.
Richard Brown, "Posh-School SF," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1982; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 4147, September 24, 1982, p. 1032.
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