For a weird moment I thought it was a joke, then I realised it wasn’t.
“Douglas Adams is dead,” I said.
“Yes,” said the interviewer. “I know. Did you ever meet him?”
I said yes. And I was obviously shaken enough that the interviewer offered to stop for half an hour, and I said no, it was fine, we should carry on.
After that the interview was pretty much a bust. Or at least, I don’t remember anything else that was said. (Sorry, Justin.)
I’d known Douglas fairly well in the 80s — interviewed him originally for Penthouse then used the leftover material in a dozen other magazines, then in 1987 I wrote “Don’t Panic — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion” for Titan Books, which involved lots more interviews with Douglas and his friends and colleagues, and lots more spending time in his flat going through his files and archives looking for cool stuff.
Saw him at David Gilmour’s 50th birthday party, in 1996, and I told him how the Neverwhere TV series was going, and he said at least it wouldn’t be the same experience he’d had with the Hitchhiker TV series, but it was.
Saw him in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for a signing for the Starship Titanic game. (Only a dozen people came to the signing. He started out by demonstrating the game, but it kept crashing and he couldn’t get out of one of the opening sequences. It was kind of sad.) He’d previously asked me to work on a radio adaptation of the later Hitchhiker’s Books, and I’d said no as I didn’t have the time.
We’d e-mail from time to time.
He was a very brilliant man. (Not said lightly. I think he really was one of those astonishingly rare people who saw things differently and more clearly and from a different angle.) I don’t think he liked the process of writing very much to begin with, and I think he liked it less and less as time went on. Probably, he wasn’t meant to be a writer. I’m not sure that he ever figured out what it was that he did want to do; I suspect it’s something they don’t have a concept for yet, let alone a name — and if he’d been around when this thing was around (World Designer? Explainer?) he would have done it brilliantly.
(I hope that his death isn’t followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn’t wanted to see print.)
He was immensely kind and generous, with his time and his material, to a young journalist, over 15 years ago; and watching how he, and how Alan Moore (who I met around the same time), treated their fans and other people – graciously, kindly and generously – taught that young journalist an awful lot about how famous authors ought to behave. And how most of them don’t.
& I’ll miss him. posted by Neil Gaiman 3:08 PM
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Sunday, May 13, 2001
Spent a large chunk of yesterday replying to fanmail. (I always try to answer it. It goes into a box, and three or four times a year I clean out the box, scrawling postcards that answer questions & say thank you as best I can in the room on the back of a postcard.) I don’t do it as often as I should, and get a wholly disproportionate sense of accomplishment when it’s all replied to, and the box is filled with postcards.
And I pulled out my copy of Don’t Panic (the original Titan edition of 1987, not the reissue that Dave Dickson wrote extras for at the end, nor the US Pocket Books edition where page 42 – which we’d left intentionally blank because the first time I’d printed out the book page 42 was [not on purpose, just a glitch from whatever computer program I was using to word process in those dim dark days] a blank piece of paper with “page 42” on it, and that seemed improbable enough to be some kind of a sign – on the US Pocket Books edition Page 42 was just part of the book. . . ) and I read the book I’d written fourteen years ago, and heard Douglas’s voice all the way through it, affable, baffled, warm and dry.
There are worse ways to say goodbye. And it may have been a strange one, but it worked, and we take our goodbyes where we can.posted by Neil Gaiman 8:40 AM
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Tuesday, May 15, 2001
So, today brought an envelope, and in it, the finished book cover for American Gods. It’s lovely. Big lightning bolt on the cover, gold letters, and the back cover is covered with wonderful blurbs, many of them melted down from ones already posted here. Also photo of me, with smoke in background and messy hair. Author delighted. Finished books should arrive on the 31st of May. Author excited.
Also e-mail today saying American Gods has been sold to Czechoslavakia and to France, which gives us the first two foreign sales.
The most interesting American Gods call was from the editor of the e-book edition of American Gods, which will be published at the same time as the novel, asking about what kind of things we can add to the e-book: I suggested that we add this journal. . .
posted by Neil Gaiman 8:29 PM
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Wednesday, May 16, 2001
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There is nowhere in the whole world quite as strange or as special as The House on the Rock. Parts of Chapters 5 and 6 of the novel take place there — stuff happens, and some characters get to ride the World’s Largest Carousel.
Nobody’s allowed to ride the World’s Largest Carousel in real life. It just goes round and round and round, like something from the Weisinger-era Fortress of Solitude.
I drove for 3 hours to get there. Jeff, the photographer, had a whole crew of people waiting. First, make-up. Then, the initial set up: a double-exposure picture of me and the strange nipple-revealing shop-window dummy mannequin angels that hang from the roof of the Carousel room. (One of the photos from today will illustrate the review in the Entertainment Weekly books section.)