Hitchhikers All

Douglas Noel Adams has changed science fiction and the way we look at our place in the universe.
Today sees the countless-times delayed release of the film adaptation of Adams's most enduring legacy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While the film is merely another step in the nearly 30-year evolution of this story, its release is both bittersweet and instructive. When Adams suddenly and shockingly died on May 11, 2001, he left behind a wealth of unfinished business, among it the screenplay for this film, which he was in the process of revising for the umpteenth time. He was also working on a manuscript which might have become the sixth installment of the at-that-point ludicrously inaccurately titled Hitchhiker's "trilogy". But the body of work that Adams left behind gives much insight into Adams the Man, and allows us to really take stock of what the world gained from his life (and prematurely lost in his death).
Using Hitchhiker's as a guide to Adams, it should come as no surprise that he spent much of his final years in a pursuit of knowledge and ideas in the service of science. Just as Hitchhiker's was a story constantly changing and evolving -- beginning as a radio show on the BBC and rapidly mutating in a series of books, theatrical productions, television shows, albums, video games, comic books (and even a towel) -- Adams spent much time in his last years advocating principles of ecology and evolution in his work with and support of good friend and eminent evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. He also invested his time and money in his nearly reverent love of computers and the promise of information technology, helping to create an Earthbound version of the Hitchhiker's Guide online at h2g2.com. And where Hitchhiker's began life as a humorous concept about a show where the Earth blows up for different reasons each week, Arthur Dent's trials as the last human male in existence in a displaced universe grew increasingly sobering and sympathetic. So it's hardly uncharacteristic that Adams spent a year traveling the world with zoologist Mark Carwardine, tracking down and recording the tenuous existence of some of the planet's endangered species, resulting in the non-fiction book (and radio series) Last Chance to See. Once he even joined a team that climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in a rhinoceros suit to drum up media attention for Save the Rhino. That's the kind of guy he was.