The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the confusion surrounding exactly what it is, due to the haphazard way it was developed. The author was famously disorganised to the despair of his publishers and programme makers (a quote from him: "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."). My copy of the book, an omnibus edition by Heinemann, is subtitled A Trilogy in Four Parts, and as well as the title story includes: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. These are not long, each story taking 130-150 pages. Most usefully, the omnibus has an introduction by the author (A Guide to the Guide) explaining the sequence of events, briefly summarised as follows:

Adams had always been attracted by the idea of combining science fiction with comedy, but the only person he could find who was prepared to support him was a BBC radio producer, so a radio series was how it started; on BBC Radio 4 in March 1978. This consisted of six episodes, but one more appeared later that year. This generated enough of a response for Pan Books to commission a book version of the series, which emerged in September 1979 and was an instant hit. To quote Adams: "It was a substantially expanded version of the first four episodes of the radio series, in which some of the characters behaved in entirely different ways and others behaved in exactly the same ways but for entirely different reasons, which amounts to the same thing but saves rewriting the dialogue". In case you were wondering, the 1979 book covered only the first four episodes because Adams kept missing deadlines and Pan lost patience… At about the same time, a double record album was released which was an entirely fresh recording, and was a slightly contracted version of the first four episodes. In January 1980 five new episodes of THHGTTG were broadcast, giving a total of twelve. In autumn 1980 the second book was published with the title The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which was "a very substantially reworked, re-edited and contracted version of episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 5 and 6 (in that order)". At about the same time, a second record album was made featuring a heavily rewritten and expanded version of episodes 5 and 6 of the radio series, under the TRATEOTU title. Meanwhile, a six-episode TV version of THHGTTG was made by the BBC and broadcast in 1981. "It was based, more or less, on the first six episodes of the radio series". So it incorporated most of the book versions of THHGTTG and the second half of TRATEOTU.  "though it followed the basic structure of the radio series, it incorporated revisions from the books, which didn't". In summer 1982 a third novel was published with the title Life, the Universe, and Everything. "This was not based on anything that had already been heard or seen on radio or television. In fact it flatly contradicted episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the radio series". Adams then worked on a film screenplay "which was completely inconsistent with most of what had gone on so far" (a film version eventually emerged in 2005, four years after Adams died). Then he wrote a fourth book of the trilogy, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which was published in 1984 and "effectively contradicted everything to date, up to and including itself". I hope that everything is now absolutely clear…

Wikipedia points out that THHGTTG also spawned several stage plays, comics, and a computer game. Plus the naming of two asteroids: Douglasadams and Arthurdent (after the principal character). My own introduction to this alternate universe was the TV series, which I loved and saw twice, which meant that I judged everything else by it; as a result I wasn't that impressed by the film, although it had its moments. In reading the "trilogy" I realised that I only recognised the first two volumes – I must have bought the omnibus and forgotten to read the others, so I had the pleasure of reading a lot of it for the first time. So to the first volume:

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:  The story begins with Arthur Dent, a completely ordinary Englishman, an "everyman" who becomes the focus of the entire series. His friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien (an explanation of the joke to non-Brits: the alien had chosen his name on arrival since it appeared to be very common, but he didn't realise it was actually the name of a small and very ordinary British car). Ford warns Arthur that the Earth is about to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial express route – which duly happens, but Ford manages to hitch a ride for Arthur and himself on one of the Vogon ships which had carried out the destruction. Here, Arthur is introduced to The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book-sized machine which contains a vast amount of information of varying reliability which is more or less useful to those travelling around the galaxy; reassuringly, it has DON'T PANIC on the cover. He also has a babelfish inserted into his ear, which carries out the useful task of translating any language into English.

The adventures of Arthur and Ford include hitching another ride on a stolen spaceship in which they meet up with the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox and his girlfriend Trillian as well as Marvin the Paranoid Android. They find the long-lost planet Magrathea where new planets are made to order (including the Earth, made to order by Slartibartfast for a specific purpose, for a non-human race). They learn about the vast computer which was created to provide the answer to life, the universe and everything, and after seven million years of thought famously came up with the answer "42" (sorry if that's a spoiler!).

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: In this story, the real reason for the destruction of the Earth is revealed (but only to the reader). After further adventures during which the group are pursued by law enforcement officers over Zaphod's theft of the spaceship, they arrive at Milliways, a unique restaurant which has the ability to transcend time, so its meals are served while it is perched on a piece of rock just when the universe is about to end. It is during this meal that the famous talking cow episode takes place. The group decide to steal another spaceship, not realising that it is designed for one purpose – to crash into a star as part of a performance by Disaster Area, the loudest band in galactic history. Escaping once more, the group is separated, with Arthur and Ford finding themselves trapped on a huge spaceship which is conveying millions of carefully selected people (although with unusual selection criteria) to another world, where it crash-lands.

Life, the Universe, and Everything: At the start of this story, Arthur and Ford have been trapped for years on the world they crash-landed, but with the aid of a Chesterfield sofa and an eddy in space-time they are able to return to something like normality, only to encounter the existential threat of the Masters of Krikkit and their deadly robots. They eventually rejoin Slartibartfast (and later, Zaphod, Trillian and Marvin), and Arthur learns to defy gravity, while first Marvin and then Arthur both end up saving the Universe in unexpected ways.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish: Arthur returns to the Earth by himself, after discovering that it hadn't been destroyed after all (or, if it had, it had been replaced by an identical copy complete with identical people). Here, at last, he meets the girl of his dreams and together they discover God's Final Message to His Creation.

Adams had a peculiarly British sense of humour which doesn't necessarily travel well, but anyone who appreciates Monty Python will love Adams. These stories are packed with comic incidents and anecdotes from Adams' free-wheeling imagination and there is nothing else quite like them in SFF (although as I was recently reminded, Robert Sheckley's style is worth comparing). I thoroughly enjoyed reacquainting myself with Adams' work, and discovering the two later volumes was an unexpected treat.

TV – The City and the City

China Miéville's novel The City and the City currently gets my vote as the best SFF novel published this century. It is that rare and precious thing, a very well-written story with a totally original and fascinating plot (my review was published on this blog in March 2012). So I was both delighted that BBC TV decided to make a four-hour adaptation of it, and worried that they might mess it up. The fact that the author is named as a consultant in the TV credits was at least a promising sign. The serial was shown on BBC2 over four weeks in April this year, but I waited until I had recorded all of the episodes before watching them over two consecutive evenings. And I waited before writing this review until I had read the book again, so I could make a direct comparison.

This review will necessarily contain quite a lot of spoilers (although not the solution to the mystery at its heart) so if you don't want those, I'll just say that although the screen version differs quite significantly from the book in some respects, it remains true to the overall plot and powerful atmosphere of the written story. It is a commendable effort, and well worth seeing.

First the background to the story (valid for both book and screen), adapted from my previous review of the book:

The City and the City is set in the present day in an imaginary country (East European or Middle Eastern – the geography is somewhat vague), consisting mainly of one large city. It is a murder mystery, featuring and told by Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad of the city of Besźel. So far, so mundane - but this is no ordinary city. What is peculiar about the city, as the reader soon begins to realise, is that for reasons lost in history it is two organisationally, culturally and linguistically very different cities occupying the same physical fabric. They even have different names: Besźel and Ul Qoma. This doesn't mean the city is carved into sectors like Berlin during the Cold War; while some parts are purely Besźel and others Ul Qoma, these sections are scattered at random throughout the city and the remainder is mixed, with Besźel and Ul Qoma buildings intermingled. Stranger still, the inhabitants of each city are conditioned from childhood only to see the buildings and people of their own city. They can recognise the differences easily enough; the buildings are of different architectural styles and the people dress differently and have different gestures and body language, as well as speaking different languages. It is absolutely forbidden to interact with, acknowledge or even look directly at people or buildings in the "other" city (a crime known as "breach") and the inhabitants learn to "unsee" the other city, ignoring anyone or anything which is not theirs. This draconian rule is enforced by a shadowy and much feared organisation simply called "Breach"; enforcement officers who dress and behave in such a way that they are "unseen" by the inhabitants of both cities, until they suddenly emerge to carry off anyone guilty of breach. The two cities interact in only one place, Copula Hall, which is also the "virtual border" between them. Inhabitants of either city can obtain permission to visit the other, but they have to be trained first to "see" the city they are visiting; which means that for the duration of the visit, they "unsee" their own city.

This bizarre situation can make the life of a police officer like Borlú very complicated, so when a visiting American student, working on an archaeological dig in Ul Qoma, turns up murdered in Besźel, he knows he's in for trouble. Working with his Ul Qoman opposite number he tries to get to the bottom of a complex and murky case, complicated by the apparent involvement of Orciny, a legendary third city "unseen" by the other two, and with the threat of Breach constantly hanging over him.

Now you'd definitely better stop reading if you don't want the spoilers…

The most obvious difference between book and screen is that the screen Borlú (played by David Morrissey) is far more emotionally involved in the mystery, because his wife Katrynia (Lara Pulver), who was also fascinated by the Orciny legend which obsessed the murdered girl, disappeared several years before while researching it. She remains very much in his thoughts and we see her constantly in flashbacks and in his imagination. In the book, she does not exist at all – the only reference to Borlú's personal life being mention of a couple of women whom he sees occasionally, but who have no part in the story.

This difference carries through into Borlú's attitude to the case: in the book, he wants to pass it to Breach to deal with as they have far better resources to solve the crime, but on screen he is desperate to hang onto the case, hoping it might enable him to find out what happened to his wife. This leads to some odd touches, such as a traffic camera video which emerges to demonstrate that a vehicle carrying the girl's body passed legally between Besźel and Ul Qoma, so Breach would not be involved. Borlú receives this with dismay in the book, delight on screen. Similarly, he is reluctant to travel to Ul Qoma in the book, keen to do so on screen.

There are some other incidental differences in the detail: the focus of the mystery, the archaeological dig (Bol Ye'an in Ul Qoma, which dates back to before the two separate cities emerged), is a conventional open-air investigation in the book, a cavern with walls dramatically covered by undeciphered Dan Brown-like diagrams on screen. The Ul Qoma detective Borlú works with is a man in the book, a woman on screen. The young female cop (Corwi) who works for Borlú has a dual role on screen. David Bowden, the academic whose book "Between the City and the City" started the whole Orciny legend, is an elderly man in the book, a younger womaniser on screen. A final odd detail which caught my eye: in the book Borlú does not smoke, the only reference being that he used to, but was determined not to start again; on screen, he chain-smokes cigars. Despite these differences, the screen plot generally follows the book quite closely – occasionally, snatches of conversation are word-for-word the same. The dark and brooding atmosphere is emphasised on screen by the music, especially the theme tune.

Some neologisms crop up in the book but not on screen: "grosstopically" referring to actual physical relationships between buildings in Besźel and Ul Qoma, as opposed to the legal routes via Copula Hall which need to be taken to travel between them; "topolgangers" meaning the two aspects of the same street in areas shared between Besźel and Ul Qoma.

Some more general points: the screen emphasises the differences between Besźel and Ul Qoma more dramatically than the book can. The cities have different economic cycles, and at this time Besźel is a much poorer place, drab and tatty with crumbling infrastructure and old-fashioned brick-like phones, while Ul Qoma is in the middle of an economic boom with glass skyscrapers and smartphones (comparisons between East and West Germany pre-unification give the general idea, although in the book Ul Qoma is one-party police state). In the book there is the odd reference to make it clear that the rest of world is much as it is now: Ul Qoma's new airport terminal being designed by British architect Norman Foster; mention of a song previously popular in Germany, 99 Luftballons (which was also a hit in the UK in the 1980s, as 99 Red Balloons, by Nena); and, most convincingly, mention of Marmite!

I did wonder how the screen would cope with the whole "unseeing" idea, but for the most part it proves straightforward, with the things which Borlú is not supposed to see being blurred out. The one exception is Breach, which in the book have almost supernatural powers, being "unseen" by citizens of both cities (citizens in Besźel assume they are in Ul Qoma, and vice versa) until they choose to "manifest", altering their behaviour to make themselves visible – from seeming blurred to onlookers, they suddenly jump into focus. Although this could have been shown easily enough on screen, this does not happen: Breach agents are visible all of the time but just appear to be ordinary people until they declare themselves. As a result, they appear far less mysterious and formidable, which is disappointing.

So, how do the two versions compare? The screen is more dramatic as might be expected, with more action scenes, as well as being emotionally more fraught. Overall, those involved with the screen version made a good job of it, and I am keeping the recordings to see again sometime (I'll probably read the book first, next time). However, I do prefer the book – it provides a richer experience, allowing a deeper immersion into the strange world of the cities.

I have a rule of thumb that the success of a screen adaptation of a book is closely linked to the running time versus the reading time for the book: if the book takes 5+ hours for me to read (as this one does) then for an optimum adaptation the screen version should run for a similar length of time. The shorter the running time relative to the reading time, the more has to be chopped from the story or rushed through, and the less satisfactory it becomes (the 1984 film version of Dune being a disastrous example, at 2¼ hours to cover a 7+ hour book). Conversely, in those very rare cases when the running time is significantly greater than the reading time (certainly The Hobbit, probably Game of Thrones but I haven't read that) there tends to be a loss of focus and a lot of meandering side-plots. So by that criterion the screen version of The City and the City could have done with just a bit more time. Having said that, I would have liked the book to be longer too!

The Radio Times website contains an interesting article on the serial, here: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2018-04-06/the-city-and-the-city-bbc-david-morrissey/

Screen time - a catch-up

A batch of (moderately) recent films:

Solace (2015)

In this 2015 thriller, Anthony Hopkins stars as a psychic who has retired from assisting the FBI but is recalled by his old partner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to work with him and his new partner (Abbie Cornish) to track down a serial killer. It soon emerges that the killer is psychic too...

The plot sounds ordinary enough but this is a very good film, dealing successfully with some fundamental issues concerning good and evil, life and death. The acting is excellent, the dialogue thoughtful and intelligent, and unlike most "superpowers" movies, this one is firmly aimed at adults. Well worth watching.

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 Deadpool (2016)

This is a rather different contribution to the Marvel universe, featuring Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson, a terminally-ill former special forces soldier, who is given an offer he can't refuse – not only a cure, but boosted capabilities including the ability to heal from any injury almost immediately.  The treatment leaves him hideously scarred and too ashamed to return to his girlfriend (Morena Baccarin), so after escaping from the fate planned for him, he goes hunting the man who deliberately left him scarred. He adopts a costume to cover his appearance, along with the name Deadpool. What follows is the usual mayhem, with car chases (and crashes, of course) fights and explosions.

What makes this film different is that it is played with tongue firmly in cheek – the "hero" has a sardonic sense of humour and frequently comments to the camera. In fact, there is a classic superhero in the film – the X-Man Colossus – but he is shown as rather ponderous and slow-witted, and so prudish that he recoils in horror when Angel Dust (Gina Carano) suffers a "wardrobe malfunction" while fighting him. While this is accurately described as a comedy thriller, some of the content might not be regarded as suitable for family viewing. The rest of us can enjoy it, though – it's one to watch again sometime.

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

This is a real oddball of a movie based on a book of the same title: a version of Jane Austen's famous Regency novel about social life, transplanted into an alternative universe in which zombies have taken over central London and are a constant threat to humanity. So the young women who are centre stage in the story are no longer just hunting suitably eligible husbands, they are also highly trained in martial arts so they can deal with any outbreaks of zombieism. I must admit that it would not have occurred to me to cast Lily James as a lethally feisty Elizabeth Bennet, but she makes a remarkably convincing job of it. And as a bonus, the film also features Lena Headey, enjoying herself after the gloom and doom of Game of Thrones. It's rather difficult to identify the target audience for this story – it seems unlikely to appeal to fans of either Jane Austen or zombie films, but I rather enjoyed it just the same!

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

I still recall the enjoyment with which I watched the very first Star Wars movie on its release – I have even seen it twice, a rare accolade. I watched all of the rest of the series with varying degrees of enthusiasm, ranging from diminished to non-existent (I am a natural completist, and have had to learn the iron discipline of giving up on a declining series). The 2014 film Episode VII - The Force Awakens (reviewed on this blog in June 2016) showed a worthwhile return to form, so of course I had to see the next one in the franchise.

Rogue One, for those few who haven't been paying attention, is a stand-alone which slots into the Star Wars story just before the original film (which is now Star Wars IV following an intergalactic renumbering epic). Various familiar characters make cameo appearances, including Darth Vader, Princess Leia and, of course, the Death Star. The focus is on Jyn Erso (a rather curiously cast Felicity Jones), the daughter of the Death Star's unwilling designer, who has to retrieve the contruction plans to discover exactly how to get at the vulnerability created by her father.

There is a lot going on in this film. It starts by jumping around between several different locations, each with its own crop of characters, and continues at a breakneck pace thereafter. There is lots of action, lots of shouting and lots of the frantic loud music which characterise Star Wars films. There is therefore very little time for character development, or a strong story arc. As a result I found it rather unengaging, and didn't really care about what happened to the characters. Not as good as Episode VII, but just about worth it for a wet evening with popcorn. It is unusual in one respect: it thoroughly stomps all over Hollywood's normal preference for "see-you-in-the-sequel" or, at worst, "happily-ever-after" endings!

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Valerian (2017)

Luc Besson has had a prolific career as a director, producing a lot of interesting films which are well worth seeing. So when I settled down to watch Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets I expected a couple of hours of entertainment.

The bad news starts with a credibility problem concerning the hero, who is supposedly a major in a special police unit with nine years of experience, but is played by someone who looks, behaves, and sounds like a teenager – and a rather irritating one at that. The film is 95% action, with the usual good CGI which is routine nowadays, but for once I thought there wasn't enough action; because when the characters talked instead, their dialogue was amongst the most excruciating I've heard in years, and had me cringing in my seat.

I soon concluded that the target audience must have been 13 year old boys with a fondness for special effects and no interest in real people. Quite often, in films made for youngsters, there are elements that adults can appreciate – but not this time.

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Wonder Woman (2017)

I really don't have much to say about this one, because I can't find anything to criticise. Everything about it is at least good, and in the case of the two leads, excellent. The magnificent Gal Gadot was born to play this role, and does so with great conviction. She dominates every scene she appears in - around 80% of the film. More like this, please!