‘The True Story of Douglas Adams’ coming soon

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy is one of the most read and well-known Science-Fiction novels of all time. Fans of the book and Douglas’s subsequent work will be delighted to hear that later this year a biography of Douglas Adams is being published which will include all new, never previously published material. The author of this new book, J L Roberts, has been given full, exclusive access by the Adams estate to the collection of papers donated to Cambridge University after Douglas Adams’s death, and the publishers – Random House – have been permitted to include some of the best bits in this biography, The Frood: The True Story of Douglas Adams and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Although full details are still forth coming, this ‘exclusive’ content includes:

• An alternative original pitch for Hitchhiker

• Lost rough script for TV series 2

• Cut extracts from first H2G2 novel, ‘The Dentrassi’ and ‘Arthur’s Reverie’

• Extracts from a ‘lost’ draft of Life The Universe and Everything (a 3/4 complete book which was abandoned)… including ‘Arthur Dent’s Diary’, ‘Marvin Meets His Destiny’, ‘The Consultant’, ‘In The Beginning’, and ‘Inter-Species Sex’

• Further scraps of unused material, with names like ‘Baggy The Runch’ and ‘The Assumption of Saint Zalabad’

Here’s the full blurb from the publishers:

As a wise ape once observed, space is big – vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly so. However, if you look too closely at space, it becomes nothing but lumps of rock and sundry gases. Sometimes it’s necessary to take a step back, and let a few billion years go by, before any of the true wonder and scope of the cosmos becomes apparent.

Similarly, the late 20th century author, humorist and thinker Douglas Adams was big –vastly, hugely and thoroughly mind-bogglingly so, both in physical terms, and as a writer who has touched millions of readers, firing up millions of cerebellums all over planet Earth, for over 35 years – and for nearly half of that time, he hasn’t even been alive.

It would be ridiculous to pretend that Douglas Adams’s life and work has gone unexamined since his dismayingly early death at 49 but throughout the decade since the last book to tackle the subject, the universes Adams created have continued to develop, to beguile and expand minds, and will undoubtedly do so for generations to come.

An all-new approach to the most celebrated creation of Douglas Adams is therefore most welcome, and The Frood tells the story of Adams’s explosive but agonizingly constructed fictional universe, from his initial inspirations to the posthumous sequel(s) and adaptations, bringing together a thousand tales of life as part of the British Comedy movements of the late 70s and 80s along the way. With the benefit of hindsight and much time passed, friends and colleagues have been interviewed for a fresh take on the man and his works.

The book will be available from Thursday 9th October 2014. In the UK it will be £20.00 and is published by Random House Books.

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