The Salmon of Doubt

Douglas Noël Adams liked to tell people that he was born in Cambridge, England, in 1952 a few months before Watson and Crick made their famous discovery there and that his initials were DNA. Alas, he died all too young at the age of 49 in 2001.

Douglas Adams is best known for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His last book, The Salmon of Doubt, was published posthumously. It is a compilation of materials found on his various Macintosh computers. The last quarter of the book is an unfinished novel that might have become another book in the Hitchhiker series or another book in his series of Dirk Gently detective novels, no one is quite sure. "The Salmon of Doubt" was Adams's working title for this unfinished novel, and is a spoof on the Salmon of Wisdom in Irish mythology.

The rest of the book consists of a wide variety of materials. For example, we learn that Adams's favorite author was P. G. Wodehouse. From page 67 in the paperback edition:

He's up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness.

Sounds like Adams himself. We also learn that Douglas Adams was a friend and fan of Richard Dawkins, who wrote a "keening lament" when he heard that Adams had died in the gym of a heart attack: "I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met." This lament was published in the British press and is republished in The Salmon of Doubt as the Epilogue.

The Salmon of Doubt includes a fascinating talk that Douglas Adams gave in 1998: "Is There an Artificial God?" (p. 126) That talk relates to the theme of reality that I have blogged about here, and it deserves a post of its own.

Richard Dawkins gave the eulogy at the funeral for Douglas Adams. In the eulogy, Dr. Dawkins quoted liberally from Adams's talk "Is There an Artifical God?" Both the eulogy and the lament mentioned above are available online here.