Tag Archives: douglas adams

Books, Doctor Who, The Adventure Gamer

“Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen” by Douglas Adams & James Goss (2018)

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(This is 2018 Reading Challenge Book #9.)

I’ve never hid my obsessions with Doctor Who: I started this blog as a place to talk about the show, as long forgotten as that idea seems now. Douglas Adams was one of the humorists that inspired me, and sometimes kept me sane, as a young man. Combine the two, and I’m in nerd-heaven. That doesn’t excuse the fact that Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen is my fourth DW book this year and that I might end up reading at least two more. On the bright side, it will be the last book that I try to shoehorn into my playing of the Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide game as I have completed it now (over on The Adventure Gamer) and will be posting the final rating in a day or two.

Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen is the third posthumous collaboration between James Goss and Douglas Adams, based on his archived papers and notes. The history of this book alone is worth the price of admission: Douglas Adams first wrote a treatment for Krikkitmen back in 1976, during the Fourth Doctor’s tenure with Sarah Jane Smith. The treatment wasn’t accepted for one reason or another, although they clearly liked Mr. Adams’s work enough to bring him onboard. Adams left on it the back-burner, at one point even considering it for a possible theatrical film. Never one to leave a good idea behind, aspects of Krikkitmen made their way into Shada and eventually the main thrust of the book was transposed into the third Hitchhiker’s book, Life, the Universe, and Everything. The Doctor and companion became Arthur and Ford, but otherwise many of the fundamentals remained: a terrible race of white-outfitted robots wielding cricket bats fought a war millions of years ago for the fate of the galaxy. It is the distant racial memory of this terrible war that inspired the game of cricket, although only the English could possibly make a game out of the slaughter of millions. The Doctor ultimately fights this scourge and protects the universe and at one point nearly blows it up by accident himself.

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Books, Doctor Who, The Adventure Gamer

“Shada” by Douglas Adams and Gareth Roberts (2012)

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(This is 2018 Reading Challenge Book #8.)

Setting up this reading challenge, which I am dreadfully behind on, I did not expect it to focus on Doctor Who books. This is my third and there may be a few more, but I suppose that is better than not reading at all. Over on “The Adventure Gamer”, I have been covering the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game by Infocom and Douglas Adams. Without a doubt, it is one of the best adventure games of the 1980s, filled with humor, fun, and devilishly difficult puzzles. I highly recommend it! As background research, I have been diving deep into Douglas Adams lore. I have read most of two biographies (focusing on the 1980s), re-read the Hitchhiker’s Guide novel, already covered the radio plays, and now I find myself looking at Douglas Adams’s four serials for Doctor Who, of which only two were produced. The book that I have just finished, Shada, was actually Mr. Adams’s final script for the program and was partly filmed before an industry strike caused it to be shelved and eventually abandoned altogether. If I have time, I plan to read The Krikkitmen, The Pirate Planet, and The City of Death as well.

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Books, The Adventure Gamer

“The Original Hitchhiker’s Radio Scripts” by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1978, 1980)

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(This is 2018 Reading Challenge Book #5.) 

After The Hobbit and the Prydain Chronicles, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is one of the most influential on my childhood. I long since lost count of how many times I read the various books; I even owned the “bible bound” edition, much to my mother’s consternation. This series changed the way that I saw the world, influenced my sense of humor, and made me smile when almost nothing else could. It’s also a series that I have largely “grown out” of as I haven’t picked up any of the books in more than a decade and my last interaction with the series was watching the 2005 movie when it came out.

In 1984, Infocom collaborated with Douglas Adams to produce an adventure game based on the book. It’s quite a famous game, in the circles where such things can be famous, and I’ll be reviewing it shortly for TAG. Although most people think of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series as books, in fact the first novel was Mr. Adams’s fourth revision of the material: the original radio play, an album version, a stage play, and then finally the novel. For all that I loved the book, I had never experienced any of the original versions. For this project, I picked up the original scripts (published in 1985) for the radio series. The series itself aired in two seasons and a special: a first batch in early 1978, a “Christmas special” that year that had nothing to do with Christmas, and a second season in early 1980. Most of the episodes are written by Douglas Adams, with co-writing credit given for a number of later first season episodes to John Lloyd.

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