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The 85 Weirdest, Day 7: Douglas Adams
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
DOUGLAS ADAMS (1952-2001) imagined a spaceship whose engine was powered by highly unlikely coincidences; a temporally bifurcated alien who convinced Leonardo to whip up six more copies of the Mona Lisa; and a bathrobe-clad hitchhiker who lamented to a friend, “You’re turning into an infinite number of penguins.” Across a multimedia array of novels, screenplays, and radio dramas, Adams was Grand Master of the absurd; we would weep over his premature evacuation from the planet, but we’re still too busy laughing at all he wrote.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:36 am
[…] DOUGLAS ADAMS […]
April 5th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Douglas Adams’ clever and puckish use of the English language is sadly underrated. Ask an English professor to devise a college course in science fiction, and they’ll probably fill it with earnest and doom-laden novels about the decline of civilization. (Full disclosure: I once taught sf, and I didn’t even dare include Adams) But I think there’s more to learn about the artful use of words from Adams’ trick of twisting cliches and subverting expectations over the course of a sentence than from a truckload of ponderous dystopic novels.