The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (16 page)

Cookies This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong, I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles.

There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know ... But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do?

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

From a speech to Embedded Systems, 2001

AND

EVERYTHING

Interview with the Onion A.V Club I think the idea of art kills creativity.

D.N.A.

THE ONION. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on. What do you want to talk about first?

Douglas ADAMS. I guess there are two main things. One is that we are imminently about to finish this thing that I’ve been laboring over for what seems like two years now, called Starship Titanic, which is a CD-ROM. It’s coming out in a couple months’ time. The other thing is that I’ve just agreed to the sale of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Disney. So I guess over the next couple of years, that’s what I’m going to be doing. I’m making that movie.

O. Tell me about Starship Titanic.

D.A. Well, it’s a CD-ROM, and the most important thing is that it started as a CD-ROM. People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of Hitchhiker’s, and I thought, “No, no.” I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in. Because, really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is “What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?” Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops. So something will be very, very different if it’s developed as a CD-ROM than if it’s developed as a book. Now in fact, I tell a slight lie, because the idea as such, in a sort of single-paragraph form, actually was what it was in one of the Hitchhiker books—I think Life, the Universe, and Everything. Because whenever I’d get sort of stuck on the story line in Hitchhiker, I’d always invent a couple of other quick story lines and give them to The Guide to talk about. So here was one little idea that was sitting there, and a number of people said to me, “Oh, you should turn that into a novel.” It just seemed like too much of a good idea, and I tend to resist those. But in fact I discovered there was a very good reason why I wasn’t interested in doing Starship Titanic as a book, which was that essentially it was a story about a thing. I just thought of this idea and didn’t have any people attached to it, and you can only really tell stories about people. So, later, when I was thinking “Okay, now I want to do a CD-ROM, because I want to justify the fact that I spend all my time sitting fiddling around computers,” I actually wanted to turn it into proper grown up work. So I was thinking, what would be a good thing? Then I suddenly remembered that the problem with turning Starship Titanic into a book—that it was about a thing, about a place, about a ship—suddenly became very much to its advantage. When you’re doing a CD-ROM, what you’re eventually going to create is a place, an environment.

reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in. Because, really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is “What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?” Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops. So something will be very, very different if it’s developed as a CD-ROM than if it’s developed as a book. Now in fact, I tell a slight lie, because the idea as such, in a sort of single-paragraph form, actually was what it was in one of the Hitchhiker books—I think Life, the Universe, and Everything. Because whenever I’d get sort of stuck on the story line in Hitchhiker, I’d always invent a couple of other quick story lines and give them to The Guide to talk about. So here was one little idea that was sitting there, and a number of people said to me, “Oh, you should turn that into a novel.” It just seemed like too much of a good idea, and I tend to resist those. But in fact I discovered there was a very good reason why I wasn’t interested in doing Starship Titanic as a book, which was that essentially it was a story about a thing. I just thought of this idea and didn’t have any people attached to it, and you can only really tell stories about people. So, later, when I was thinking “Okay, now I want to do a CD-ROM, because I want to justify the fact that I spend all my time sitting fiddling around computers,” I actually wanted to turn it into proper grown up work. So I was thinking, what would be a good thing? Then I suddenly remembered that the problem with turning Starship Titanic into a book—that it was about a thing, about a place, about a ship—suddenly became very much to its advantage. When you’re doing a CD-ROM, what you’re eventually going to create is a place, an environment.

And the user becomes the character.

D.A. Yeah, exactly. Once the place begins to develop, you then put characters in it. But it isn’t about the characters, it’s about the ship. What I then wanted to do was something ... Well it was either very old-fashioned or very radical, depending which way you look at it; I wanted to build a conversation engine into the game. Years and years ago, I did a game based on Hitchhiker’s Guide with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text. You know, there are several thousand years of human culture telling you you can do quite a lot with text, and putting in the extra element of interactivity should just add to the possibilities. You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that. I just loved constructing these virtual conversations between the player and the machine. So I just thought it’d be lovely to try to extend that and do more with it in a modern graphics game. Because what I would like to do is see if one can take that old conversation technology and make characters really speak. Put them in an environment and see where you go from there. So we started to tackle this problem of being able to speak to the characters.

Of course, everything you do with language just balloons as a problem. To begin with, we wanted to do it whereby it would be text-to-speech, which gives you the advantage that you have much more flexibility in constructing sentences on the fly. On the other hand, all of your characters sound like semi-concussed Norwegians, which I felt was a downside. So we eventually realized we were going to have to do prerecorded speech. And I thought, “That’s terrible, because you only have a limited number of responses. It’s just going to be ... Oh, I’m not sure about that.” So the way we eventually solved the problem, or gradually solved the problem, was that the amount of prerecorded speech just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. We just did another two-hour recording session this morning. We’ve now got something like sixteen hours of little conversational snippets: little phrases, sentence half-sentences, and all the things the machine puts together on the fly in response to what you type in. For a long time it wasn’t working very well. And now, just really in the last two or three weeks, it’s started to come together, and it’s started to be spooky. People come in and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t see how this is going to work. How ’’bout if you ask it this?” and they do, and their jaw drops. It’s just wonderful. People come in and spend hours just sitting, locked in conversation with these characters. I hasten to add that with the sixteen hours of dialogue, it was a small team of us who wrote it. I did part of the dialogue writing, and other people did some, and we all pulled it together. It’s pretty remarkable when it works, you suddenly have this populated world. Very strange, damaged robots crawling around the place, all of whom have a wide range of opinions and attitudes and ideas and strange histories, and know about some entirely unexpected things. You can engage them all in conversation.

hasten to add that with the sixteen hours of dialogue, it was a small team of us who wrote it. I did part of the dialogue writing, and other people did some, and we all pulled it together. It’s pretty remarkable when it works, you suddenly have this populated world. Very strange, damaged robots crawling around the place, all of whom have a wide range of opinions and attitudes and ideas and strange histories, and know about some entirely unexpected things. You can engage them all in conversation.

Do you feel concerned that after all this work, people won’t treat it with the gravity of, say, a movie or a book? That they won’t treat it as an art form? D.A. I hope that’s the case, yes. I get very worried about this idea of art. Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. That was one of the reasons I really wanted to go and do a CD-ROM: because nobody will take it seriously, and therefore you can sneak under the fence with lots of good stuff. It’s funny how often it happens. I guess when the novel started, most early novels were just sort of pornography. Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I hasten to add. Before 1962, everybody thought pop music was sort of ... Nobody would have ever remotely called it art, and then somebody comes along and is just so incredibly creative in it, just because they love it to bits and think it’s the greatest fun you can possibly have. And within a few years, you’ve got Sgt. Pepper’s and so on, and everybody’s calling it art. I think media are at their most interesting before anybody’s thought of calling them art, when people still think they’re just a load of junk.

O. But, say, twenty years from now, would you like to be recognized as one of the earliest practitioners of CD-ROM as art?

D.A. Well, I would just like a lot of people to have bought it. One, for the extremely obvious reason.

But the other is that if it’s popular and people really like it and have fun with it, you feel you’ve done a good job. And if somebody wants to come along and say, “Oh, it’s art,” that’s as it may be. I don’t really mind that much. But I think that’s for other people to decide after the fact. It isn’t what you should be aiming to do. There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, “Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.” It’s funny. I read something the other day, just out of absolute curiosity; I read Thunderball, which is one of the James Bond books that I would love to have read when I was, I don’t know, about fourteen, just sort of thumbing through it for the bits where he puts his left hand on her breast and saying, “Oh my God, how exciting.” But I just thought, Well, James Bond has become such an icon in our pop culture of the last forty years, it would be interesting to see what it actually was like. And what prompted me to do this, apart from the fact that I happened to find a copy lying around, was reading someone talking about Ian Fleming and saying that he had aimed not to literary, but to be literate. Which is a very, very big and crucial difference. So I thought, well, I’ll see if he managed to do that. It’s interesting, because it was actually very well written as a piece of craft. He knew how to use the language, he knew how to make it work, and he wrote well. But obviously nobobody would call it literature. But I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art, but are merely practicing a craft, and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them. I find when I read literary novels—you know, with a capital “L”—I think an awful lot is nonsense. If I want to know something interesting about a way human beings work, how they relate to each other and how they behave, I’ll find an awful lot of women crime novelists who do it better, Ruth Rendell for instance. If I want to read something that’s really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if I like, or what we’re all doing here, or what’s going on, then I’d rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins. I feel that the agenda of life’s important issues has moved from novelists to science writers, because they know more. I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it’s art while it’s being created. As far as being a CD-ROM is concerned, I just wanted to do the best thing I could and have as much fun as I could doing it. I think it’s pretty good. There are always bits that you fret over for being less than perfect, but you can keep on worrying over something forever. The thing is pretty damn good.