Don't Panic
Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The #1 New York Times–bestselling author’s “hilarious . . . idiosyncratic . . . delightful” and definitive companion to a global phenomenon (Publishers Weekly).
Douglas Adams’s “six-part trilogy,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy grew from a blip of a notion into an ever-expanding multimedia universe that amassed an unprecedented cult of followers and became an international sensation. As a young journalist, Neil Gaiman was given complete access to Adams’s life, times, gossip, unpublished outtakes, and files (and became privy to his writing process, insecurities, disillusionments, challenges, and triumphs). The resulting volume illuminates the unique, funny, dramatic, and improbable chronicle of an idea, an incredibly tall man, and a mind-boggling success story.
In Don’t Panic, Gaiman celebrates everything Hitchhiker: the original radio play, the books, comics, video and computer games, films, television series, record albums, stage musicals, one-man shows, the Great One himself, and towels. And as Douglas Adams himself attested: “It’s all absolutely devastatingly true—except the bits that are lies.”
Updated several times in the thirty years since its original publication, Don’t Panic is available for the first time in digital form. Part biography, part tell-all parody, part pop-culture history, part guide to a guide, Don’t Panic “deserves as much cult success as the Hitchhiker’s books themselves” (Time Out).
Customer Reviews
A fulsome oral history of the phenomenon.
Neil Gaiman has always been a talented raconteur, but in this oral history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he reveals himself to also be an even-handed and skilled documentarian. There are many ways this story could have been slanted, but even as an erstwhile fan of the series in its various forms, all participants are treated fairly and objectively. It’s a skillful retelling of how the delightfully daffy and absurd mind of Douglas Adams translated to radio, television, the page and eventually the silver screen, with some efforts more successful than others. Don’t forget your towel.