Marion Mcgivern from our Features team talks about the book that changed her life
Features team member Marion recalls her discovery that science could be fun – and funny!
DON’T PANIC! Those words appear in large, friendly letters on the cover of the fictional “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” and on the back of the battered paperback I’ve kept for years.
My pals at sixth-form college couldn’t stop talking about a new radio series – no-one had heard anything like it. Including me, as I kept missing the Radio 4 broadcasts.
So when Douglas Adams’s comedy science fiction script was issued as a paperback novel, I snapped it up – even though I didn’t particularly like science fiction . . . or science.
That changed the moment I began to read.
Douglas Adams’s writing combines the wit and wordsmithery of
P.G. Wodehouse, the ease of expounding complex ideas of Professor Brian Cox and a level of curiosity last seen in “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland” (another favourite!)
As someone who began asking questions around the age of two and hasn’t stopped yet, it introduced me to an author who asked more questions about the world than I did, and if he didn’t always answer them, at least he set out some fascinating lines of enquiry.
The story follows Arthur Dent, a classic Englishman abroad, who undertakes most of his interstellar travels clad in his dressinggown in search of a decent cup of tea. Arthur’s guide, and ours, is his best friend, Ford Prefect, an alien and roving researcher for the bestselling tourist guide, the eponymous “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”, who had inadvertently become stranded on Earth 15 years earlier. He was thus able to update Earth’s entry in the “Guide” from “Harmless” to “Mostly harmless.”
The pair’s adventure begins when Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass and Ford and Arthur stow away with the unsuspecting Vogon demolition crew. Along the way we meet a two-headed president of the galaxy, a paranoid android, a race of super beings who look like mice, and we find out the meaning of life, the Universe and everything (it’s “42”). Throughout, there are some really interesting asides – and jokes – about maths, science and philosophy.
“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light,” we’re told, “with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
For someone like me, who had been immersed in the arts at school and went on to study English at university, the idea that Adams, also an English graduate, had taught himself so much about the ideas he’d then used in his fiction was inspiring.
It inspired me to take up studying again as an adult – sciences this time – and to realise that you don’t have to give up being curious when you stop being a child. Douglas Adams never did, and I don’t intend to, either! n