A sad day today, but not as sad as 25 years ago, when Douglas Adams died. Douglas Adams, the utterly funny author of the classic “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and the possibly even greater “Dirk Gently” books. I cannot emphasize how much I think every single person should read these books, preferably yesterday. When I read these, back in 1988, it changed my writing style forever – and I suppose I see it as a compliment if people think my writings are inspired by him, or even if I am a copycat or plagiarist. I’d like to think his novels even changed the way I function, which was further influenced by reading Terry Pratchett, Grant Naylor and Tom Sharpe books (and, to a lesser extent, those by Craig Shaw Gardner). I have, for example, this weird habit of noticing occurrences of the number “42” in real life, and keep track of them for a future issue of “ST NEWS“. Even my family has been conditioned to help me with this.

I very rarely read books twice, but I have read the four first “Hitchhiker” books 4 times and the two Dirk Gently books 6 times – numbers which are only likely to increase in the future (the only the book I read more than once was “Lord of the Rings”, and that was only two times).

Douglas was an atheist so I cannot say I hope he’s up there with his favourite deceased people, but I would like to think his energy will be swirling around some or other galaxy somewhere.