When I was in publishing in the 1980s, hardly a season went by without some wonderful piece of gossip about the brilliant new book Douglas Adams was not writing. These tales were matched by scarcely credible reports of the increasingly desperate non-literary techniques employed by his then editor, Sonny Mehta, somehow to liberate this unwritten chef-d'oeuvre and place it before the massive and avid audience engendered by Adams's 1979 cult bestseller The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its successors, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) and Life, the Universe and Everything (1982).
'I love deadlines,' the recalcitrant author used to say. 'I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.' So there's an irony, which Adams would have enjoyed hugely, at the almost indecent speed at which, exactly a year after his untimely death at the age of 49, his widow, literary agent and some of his closest friends have assembled this posthumous volume from the recesses of the CD-ROM on which Adams had accumulated his unpublished writings (letters, speeches, introductions, faxes, pensées). For a man whose reputation went up with every book he didn't write, Adams was privately quite productive, leaving no shortage for his fans.
Robert McCrum
Sunday May 12, 2002 The Observer
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