Douglas Adams’ most important book?

 Last Chance to See is arguably Douglas Adams most important book. (A solid argument can be made for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in either radio or book form, since that’s what gave him the license to ignore deadlines) It is definitely his most serious work.

Last Chance to See is a non-fiction book, adapted from a radio series of the same name. It describes how Adams, photographer Mark Carwadine and whatever producer the BBC dragged in went on a series of trips to see critically endangered species.

The irony of using entertainment to try and help species that are only endangered because of the human race is not lost on Adams.

In fact, the book is less any kind of scientific documentation than it is a travelogue. Scratch that. It is totally a travelogue. Adams spends many more pages describing what it took for them to get to the animals than the animals than themselves.

This is not a critique. This is not a flaw. By writing the book this way, Adams shifts the discussion away from the animals endangered with extinction and focuses on what is endangering them. You know, us.

The writing alternates between talking about the silly things people do and ‘my God, look what we’ve done’ Which makes the book alternate between rather funny and breathtakingly bleak. And the last chapter, on the island of Mauritius where the dodo lived until they didn’t and quite a few other species are highly endangered, it gets quite bleak.

Last Chance to See was published in 1990. It would be nice to think that it is a time capsule and things have gotten better for endangered species. Sadly, when the BBC did a follow-up TV series to the radio series twenty years later, some of the species had become extinct in that time. Most of the others aren’t doing that great either.

Last Chance to See isn’t a look at the world thirty years ago. It remains a sadly timely as ever mirror to look at ourselves.

What Douglas Adams and Klaus Teuber have in common

Rereading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the upteenth time, I realized that I have pretty much the same relationship with that book as I have with Settlers of Catan.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a fine work but it’s impact on my life was heavily compounded by first reading it when I was still in the single digits and at a time when science fiction was still struggling to break into the mainstream. We now live in an age where fantasy and science fiction are routinely in the best seller lists, there have been multiple Star Trek TV shows, super heroes are an actual movie genre and my fellow US citizens have actually heard of Doctor Who. None of that was true when I first read the Hitchhiker’s et al. I’d never seen anything like it before, in part because there really wasn’t anything like it for me to see.*

Settlers of Catan was my introduction to the broader world of designer board games. My experiences before it were abstracts and war games. A modular board? Everyone gets to do something every turn? It takes less than two hours to play? It was a revelation.

While there were other games coming in from Europe, it was still very much a super niche world. At the time, I only found games like Settlers of Catan on a table in the back of the nearest gaming shop behind shelves of unpainted lead figures. It was a new world. If not for the internet, it would have been nearly impossible to explore.

I still think that Settlers of Catan is a fine game and still one of the best trading mechanics I’ve played. But if I hadn’t tried it back then and Puerto Rico or Carcassonne has been my gateway and played Catan for the first time last week, I don’t think it would have close to the same impact. If I read Hitchhiker’s et al now for the first time, it’d be fun but not a game changer.

A work can be great and even age very well. However, it will be still be living in the new world it created.

*A very debatable statement but earlier science fiction comedy seems to fall more into satire.

42

I turned 42 today.

To be honest, I'm kind of past the point where I really think about the number. The last time I thought about it was when I turned thirty and I dreamed I was surrounded by teenagers chanting I wasn't a hepcat anymore.

To be fair, thirty was kind of 'What am I doing with my life?' In comparison, when I turned forty, I was married, had moved across the country and had an infant son. That was more of 'Wow! Look at what I've done with my life!'

But as someone who read his copies of Douglas Adams until they were literally in pieces as a teenager, I have to acknowledge forty-two.

Even folks who don't know Douglas Adams from Evelyn Waugh know that forty-two is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

I swear that in the annotated scripts to the radio plays, Adams stated that the whole point was that it didn't mean anything (although I bet it has come to mean something to a lot of people) 

But I am going to take this from it. Yeah, the number isn't important. What matters is what I've done with those years. And, while there have been some bumps and twists along the way, it just keeps getting better.