Hitchhiker's Guide to Tri-Metro

My Douglas Adams Retrospective talk went far better than I could have hoped today. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, cause I did prepare for it; I just kept thinking that I could have somehow prepared for it better. In the end, it still worked out terribly well, so I should shut up complaining.

I agreed to do the talk a month and a half ago as part of a book discussion course for a local seniors center that offers classes to their members every Thursday. Judy, the group's organizer, a friend of mine from church, had approached my boss Mrs. A to see if anyone from the "liberry" would be interested. Mrs. B and I were the only ones who agreed to do it.

I asked Judy what sort of books might be appropriate for the seniors, but she didn't want to limit me. She said they were a very receptive audience and would appreciate whatever I wanted to talk about. She did suggest I choose something I was passionate about. Trouble is, I've not been passionate about a book since Life of Pi and I didn't want to do that one because I would almost have to spoil it to stretch it into a 40 minute talk. Instead, I looked back at books I'd been passionate about in the past and decided that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series was probably the spot on choice as far as my life's book passions go.

When I was trying to think of how exactly I'd come to read the book in the first place, I realized that my love for it had actually spun out of a love for a different British science fiction institution: Doctor Who. See, I came to Hitchhiker's by way of its TV series in the early `80s. I'd been flipping channels at a friends house one night and stumbled on it. At first I mistook it for Doctor Who itself, my then all time favorite show ever (and still in the top ten for me now). It had the same BBC video look to it, with a big robot that looked like a windup toy. Had to be Doctor Who, right? It wasn't til the end credits that I knew what it really was, recognizing it from a book in the sci-fi section of a local bookstore. It was still around 5 years before I actually sought out the first book in the series, but once I read it I was a whole hog convert.

Now, not only did I discover Hitchhiker's by way of Doctor Who, but I discovered another favorite writer, Neil Gaiman, by way of Hitchhiker's. I bought Neil's Hitchhiker's biography, Don't Panic, in a bookstore soon after it was published. A year or two later, I began reading press about a new comic series called Black Orchid written by Neil Gaiman. Only I couldn't remember where I knew his name from, only that I owned something by him. I went through my entire comic book collection (considerable even back then) trying to find a book he'd written and came up blank. Finally I gave up, allowing my head to flop back in frustration. From that flopped position, I spied Don't Panic by Neil Gaiman on my bookshelf. Ahh, mystery solved. Needless to say, after reading Black Orchid, I was a Neil convert for life too.

As usual, I didn't start preparing for my talk in until last Sunday. I then spent three days writing out verbatim what I was going to say and choosing excerpts from Adams's work to read for the group. (My theory is, the less of me yammering on about the books and the more of me giving the audience a taste of the material itself, the better off everyone will be.)

This morning, at three minutes before I was supposed to start my speech, I was still the only soul in the room. A little old lady had wandered in briefly, but decided it wasn't the class she was looking for after all and left. Then, about one minute til, the flood gates opened and between 15 and 20 middle-aged to little-old ladies came on in.

While they were getting seated, I heard one say, "I can't believe we're doing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

At first I thought she was unhappy about it, but it turned out she and her family were big fans of the radio series and used to listen to tapes of it whenever they went on family trips.

For a visual aid, I brought every Douglas Adams related thing I own, including my dog-eared paperback copies of the Hitchhiker's books, my pleather-bound collected edition of them, the radio series, the TV series, the unabridged books on tape as read by the author, the Hitchhiker's radio scripts book, the Hitchhiker's comic books, the Dirk Gently books, Neil's Don't Panic, Adams's non-fiction Last Chance to See and the posthumous Adams's essay and fiction collection The Salmon of Doubt.

The crowd seemed to enjoy the talk. I have no illusions that I produced 15 octogenarian Adams converts by the end, but one or two may seek these out.

Fortunately, I've made sure we have them all at the "liberry."