By Edwina Harvey
The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy appeared as a radio play (broadcast in Australia by the ABC) around the time I was becoming a fledgling adult. Uniting two of my passions: science fiction and humour, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. When I discovered the novelisation I devoured it then passed it around to friends with the zeal of a religious convert, desperate for people to speak the language of towels, hoopy froods and Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.
The word “stalker” hadn’t entered the general vernacular, but I was a fan, and courtesy of co-operative work colleagues and flexi-time, I was able to get to a number of Australian book signings by Douglas Adams. In 1985 I even managed to get to one of his book signings at Forbidden Planet in London prior to attending a Hitch Hikers Guide convention in Birmingham run by the international fanclub, ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.
Did I engage in stunning repartee with Adams at any of these meetings? Did he remember me from one signing to the next? Sadly, no. Usually I just mumbled “Thank you,” though to my chagrin I did manage to say “You’re very tall,” once; a fact I’m sure he was well aware of. The closest I actually got to conversing with Douglas Adams was via several letters (that thing we did before emails were invented,) when I was active with and acting on behalf of the Hitchers Club of Australia. Passionate about protecting wildlife, his animal conservation book, “Last Chance to See”, was in its early planning stages and Adams was seriously considering trying to find a live Tasmanian Tiger. That plan was later dropped as the focus of the book shifted to endangered species not yet considered extinct.
In November 1990, as Douglas Adams toured Australia promoting the release of his book, “Last Chance to See”, co-authored with Mark Carwardine, I scored a hattrick, getting my copy of this new book signed by Douglas Adams at Galaxy Bookshop in Sydney, before attending a literary dinner at the Ballroom of the Queen Victoria Building, where as guest speaker, Adams seemed much more comfortable speaking to a receptive audience, entertaining them with funny stories (he’d been a member of the Cambridge Footlights after all) than signing books to strangers, which seemed to have become a bit of a chore to him as his fame increased. About a week later I attended a literary luncheon in Melbourne where he again had the audience in stitches while promoting “Last Chance to See”. Ironically, it would be the last time I saw my favourite author alive.
In a radio interview with Richard Fidler in 2014, Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller’s Wife, mentioned she’d been a volunteer guide for Highgate Cemetery, where many came to visit the gravestones of celebrities, including Douglas Adams. I squirreled this interesting piece of trivia away with no expectation of revisiting England.
The World Science Fiction Convention being held in Dublin in August 2019 presented me with an opportunity. England was ‘just next door’, what if I extended my holiday a bit?
It was a sunny Sunday morning when I made my way to Highgate Cemetery, paid my £4 admission, (the cemetery was under threat of being sold and redeveloped into high-rise apartment blocks in the 1970s before being purchased by the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust) and asked for directions to Douglas Adams’s grave site. I was told I wasn’t the first to seek him out that day. So I wasn’t a lone pilgrim? I wondered if my counterpart had travelled as far as I had to pay their respects.
Adams’s gravestone is not far from the cemetery entrance; a little way off the main walk and up an incline, the barely discernible pathway snagged with tree roots. A sign with ‘42’, no doubt left as a mark of respect by another fan, shone like a beacon and led me to the unassuming gravestone. I found no trace of the towel I’d read someone had left there. I assume it’s rotted away over the years. But the large ceramic pot I’d heard about, crowded with biros, was there. I’d brought a pen of my own especially, and found a place for it amongst the others. Then I retreated to a nearby bench to reflect on my youth, and the excitement the Hitch hikers Guide had given me. I’d spent a weekend travelling between Sydney and Brisbane by coach (a bum-numbing 16 hrs each way) to see the La Boite Theatre’s production of the Guide stage play (the first Australian production I think); I snuck into ABC TV studios one New Year’s Eve because a friend of a friend had access to the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy TV series months before it was shown in Australia; I’d met other Guide fans from all around the world, many still my friends today. I was an active part of an amazing phenomena that ended up with more arms than a spiral galaxy as Adams’s Hitch hikers Guide evolved into various formats including records, theatre, books, computer-game and eventually a film. I didn’t even know I’d stuck my thumb out, but I’d been taken on a marvellous ride!
Time stopped for Adams when he was 49 years old, while the years kept passing by for me with the same whooshing sound he claimed deadlines made as they passed him by. I was older than him now. How ever did that happen? But here I was, having travelled half way around the world, to pay my respects to someone who unknowingly had been such an influence on my life, and the lives of countless others.
His gravestone was so unassuming, simply announcing to eternity: Douglas Adams - Writer – 1952 – 2001. It didn’t even begin to do him justice. Yes, he’d been a writer, but he’d been so much more than that.
About the Author
Edwina Harvey
Pretty much a life-long fan of speculative fiction, Edwina Harvey is a writer, editor, silk painter and ceramic artist.
Her short stories and articles have appeared in a variety of publications including Aurealis, Antipodean SF, Grass Roots, Harbinger, Magpies, Strange Pleasures #3 and Worlds Next Door.
She has had three books, The Whale’s Tale, The Back of the Back of Beyond, and An Eclectic Collection of Stuff and Things and a novelette, Never Forget, published through Peggy Bright Books. <www.peggybrightbooks.com>.
Edwina received her editing qualifications in 2012 and now works as a freelance editor, specialising in speculative fiction.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Nick works as a freelance writer out of Perth, Western Australia, where he likes to read unsettling fiction and complain about the sun.
Callan J. Mulligan was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988.
Louis Evans is a sci-fi writer living in Brooklyn with his partner and two cats named after fictional European detectives, Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey.
Kaoru Sakasaki lives with his family in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.
Neil A. Hogan has been writing space fiction on and off since the '80s.
João Ventura writes short fiction, which has appeared in several websites (AntipodeanSF and Bewildering Stories among them), and also in printed form: Somnium, in Brazil; Dragão Quântico, Hyperdrivezine, Phantastes (Portuguese fanzines); Universe Pathways (in both the English and the Greek versions).
An emerging writer, James Patrik enjoys exploring the existential themes.
Steven Fritz graduated from the University of Maryland, became a Naval Aviator and flew helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft in the US Navy.
Brian has published over sixty short stories in the United States as well as internationally.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.