The Salmon of Doubt Read online

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  How should a prospective writer go about becoming an author?

  First of all, realise that it’s very hard, and that writing is a grueling and lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had better really, really, really want to do it. Next, you have to write something. Unless you are committed to novel writing exclusively, I suggest that you start out writing for radio. It’s still a relatively easy medium to get into because it pays so badly. But it is a great medium for writers because it relies so much on the imagination.

  Unfinished Business of the Century

  Just a few more days to go. I think it’s important not to leave a century, let alone a millennium, without cleaning up behind you, and there is clearly unfinished business to attend to. I suggest that the Net community try to identify this unfinished business and see if, between us, we can’t get it squared away so that we can all enjoy the New Year celebrations with the sense of a century well done.

  But first, a word to the pedants.

  Yes, I know you all think that the millennium doesn’t change till a year later, and very tedious you are about it, too. In fact, you are so keen to have something you can wag your fingers at the rest of the world about, that you are completely missing the point. IT HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE WHATSOEVER! It is merely an excuse to go “Whoa! Look at that! There they go!” as all the digits change.

  What other significance can it possibly have? Ten (along with its multiples) is an arbitrary number. January 1 is an arbitrary date. And if you happen to think that the birth of Jesus Christ is a significant moment, then all we can say with any certainty is that 1 A.D. isn’t when it happened. Or 0 A.D., if the previous year had been called that (which, as we all know because the pedants keep banging on about it, it wasn’t).

  Then, as the historians (a much more interesting bunch than the pedants) tell us, the calendar has been played around with so many times in the intervening years anyway that the whole thing is doubly meaningless.

  Consider this: we’ve only relatively recently got our time- and date-keeping precisely defined and standardised, with the aid of atomic clocks and suchlike. And on January 1, 2000 (if the doomsayers are to believed) all of our computer systems will go haywire and plunge us back in the stone age (or not, as the case may be). So it seems to me that midnight on December 31 is the only solid and reliable point we have in the entire sorry mess, and so perhaps we should be celebrating that just a little bit. And instead of saying that we have got the end of the millennium (or bi-millennium) wrong, we should say that our ancestors got the beginning of it wrong, and that we’ve only just sorted the mess out before starting a new mess of our own. What the hell does it matter anyway? It’s just an excuse for a party.

  But first, to unfinished business.

  One particularly niggling piece of Unfinished Business, it occurred to me the other day in the middle of a singing session with my five-year-old daughter, is the lyrics to “Do-Re-Mi,” from The Sound of Music. It doesn’t exactly rank as a global crisis, but nevertheless it brings me up short anytime I hear it, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to sort it out.

  But it is.

  Consider.

  Each line of the lyric takes the name of a note from the sol-fa scale, and gives its meaning: “Do (doe), a deer, a female deer; Re (ray), a drop of golden sun,” etc. All well and good so far. “Mi (me), a name I call myself; Fa (far), a long, long way to run.” Fine. I’m not saying this is Keats, exactly, but it’s a perfectly good conceit and it’s working consistently. And here we go into the home stretch. “So (sew), a needle pulling thread.” Yes, good. “La, a note to follow so . . .” What? Excuse me? “La, a note to follow so . . .” What kind of lame excuse for a line is that?

  Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is. It’s a placeholder. A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he can’t think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but he’d better put in something and come back and fix it later. So, I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in “a note to follow so” and thought he’d have another look at it in the morning.

  Only, when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn’t come up with anything better. Or the next morning. Come on, he must have thought, this is simple. Isn’t it? “La . . . a something, something . . . what?”

  One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it. And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on.

  How difficult can it be? How about this for a suggestion? “La, a . . . , a . . .”—well, I can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it. And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.

  What else? Well, what do you think? What are the things we really owe it to ourselves to sort out in the next few months, before the digits roll over and we all have a set of brand-new shiny twenty-first-century problems to deal with? World hunger? Lord Lucan? Jimmy Hoffa? Where to put old eight-track tapes so that no one in the twenty-first century will ever have to see one ever again? Suggestions, please, and answers, to www.h2g2.com.

  The Independent on Sunday,

  NOVEMBER 1999

  The Dream Team

  DREAM FILM CAST: Sean Connery as God, John Cleese as the Angel Gabriel, and Goldie Hawn as Mother Theresa’s younger sister, Trudie. With a guest appearance by Bob Hoskins as Detective Inspector Phil Makepiece.

  DREAM ROCK BAND: My absolute dream rock band no longer exists because their rhythm guitarist was shot. But I’d have their bass player because he is unquestionably the best. There may be more pyrotechnical players, but for sheer musicality, invention, and drive, there’s no one better than McCartney. He’d share vocals with Gary Brooker, the greatest soul voice of British rock and roll and a hell of a piano player. Two lead guitarists (they can take turns to play rhythm): Dave Gilmour, whom I’ve always wanted to hear play with Gary Brooker because they share a taste for huge drama and soaring melody lines; and Robbie McIntosh, who is both a great blues rocker and an exquisite acoustic guitar picker. Drummer—Steve Gadd (remember “50 Ways”?). By the time you’ve got a band this size, you more or less have to have maestro Ray Cooper in it as well, on percussion, though it would also be very tempting to include the incredible woman percussionist whose name I don’t know from Van Morrison’s band. Strings? Brass section? Royal Philharmonic? A New Orleans jazz band? For all that, you’d need synth wizard Paul “Wix” Wickens. And a large truck.

  DREAM LOVER: The Dagenham Girl Pipers. With all due respect and love to my dear wife, there are some things that, however loving or tender your wife may be, only a large pipe band can give you.

  DREAM PROJECT: Given unlimited financial resources, I would love to fund a major research project into human origins, the transition from ape to man. A couple of years ago I became fascinated by the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, the notion that our transitional ancestors spent a period in a semiaquatic environment. I’ve heard the idea ridiculed many times but never convincingly refuted, and I would love to discover the truth, one way or the other.

  DREAM ALTERNATIVE CAREERS: Zoologist, rock musician, system software designer.

  DREAM HOLIDAY: Intense scuba diving in Australia, out beyond the Great Barrier Reef to the wonderful clarity of the Coral Sea—Cod Hole, shark diving, wreck diving; then to Western Australia to dive with enormous whale sharks, and finally to Shark Bay to dive with dolphins. Then I’d stop off for dinner in Hong Kong on the way home.

  DREAM HOME: Something large and rambling on the beach somewhere, probably Far North Queensland, with lots of wildlife around and high-bandwidth computer connections to the rest of the world. Also a boat and a pickup truck.

  DREAM CUISINE: If I was told I had to ch
oose the cuisine of one country and eat only that for the rest of my life, I’d choose Japanese.

  DREAM DAY OUT: I’ve already had this, in fact. It was 1968—a friend of mine and I took a day off school, went up to London, and saw 2001 in Cinerama in the afternoon and Simon and Garfunkel live at the Albert Hall in the evening.

  The Observer, MARCH 10, 1995

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  Where do you get the inspiration for your books?

  I tell myself I can’t have another cup of coffee till I’ve thought of an idea.

  Intro for Comic Books #1

  People often ask me where I get my ideas from, sometimes as often as eighty-seven times a day. This is a well-known hazard for writers, and the correct response to the question is first to breathe deeply, steady your heartbeat, fill your mind with peaceful, calming images of birdsong and buttercups in spring meadows, and then try to say, “Well, it’s very interesting you ask that . . .” before breaking down and starting to whimper uncontrollably.

  The fact is that I don’t know where ideas come from, or even where to look for them. Nor does any writer. This is not quite true, in fact. If you were writing a book on the mating habits of pigs, you’d probably pick up a few goodish ideas by hanging around a barnyard in a plastic mac, but if fiction is your line, then the only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.

  I exaggerate, of course. That’s my job. There are some specific ideas for which I can remember exactly where they came from. At least, I think I can; I may just be making it up. That also is my job. When I’ve got a big writing job to do, I will often listen to the same piece of music over and over again. Not while I’m doing the actually writing, of course, you need things to be pretty quiet for that, but while I’m fetching another cup of coffee or making toast or polishing my spectacles or trying to find more toner for the printer or changing my guitar strings or clearing away the coffee cups and toast crumbs from my desk or retiring to the bathroom to sit and think for half an hour—in other words, most of the day. The result is that a lot of my ideas come from songs. Well, one or two at least. To be absolutely accurate, there is just one idea that came from a song, but I keep the habit up just in case it works again which it won’t, but never mind.

  So now you know how it’s done. Simple, isn’t it?

  —From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (collected edition), DC Comics, MAY 1997

  Interview with Virgin.net

  If there’s one man who should know a thing or two about travel, it has to be the guy who’s eaten burgers and fries in the restaurant at the end of the universe. We tracked down author Douglas Adams at his new home in the States, where he recently relocated for the filming of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  What’s your best childhood holiday memory?

  My childhood holidays were pretty modest—the highlight was a fortnight in the Isle of Wight when I was about six. I remember catching what I was convinced was a plaice, though it was only the size of a postage stamp and promptly died when I tried to keep it as a pet.

  Have you been back there since you were a child?

  I’ve been back to the Isle of Wight about once. I stayed at a hotel where the evening’s entertainment was to turn off the lights in the restaurant and watch as a family of badgers played on the lawn.

  Where did you go the first time you went on holiday without your parents?

  I hitchhiked round Europe when I was eighteen.

  What did you get up to?

  I went to Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, staying in youth hostels and campsites, and supplemented my diet by going on free tours’ round breweries. Istanbul was particularly wonderful, but I ended up with terrible food poisoning and had to return to England by train, sleeping in the corridor just next to the loo. Ah, magical times . . .

  Have you been back there since?

  I returned to Istanbul once. I was flying back from Australia and arbitrarily decided to stop off in Istanbul on the way back. But getting a taxi in from the airport and staying in a nice hotel instead of getting a ride on the back of a truck and sleeping in the back room of a cheap boardinghouse somehow robbed it of its magic. I wandered around for a couple of days trying to avoid carpet sellers and then gave up.

  Where is the most remote or bizarre place you have ended up?

  Easter Island is, of course, the most remote place on earth, famous for being farther from anywhere than anywhere else is. Which is why it is odd that I ended up there completely by accident and only for about an hour. I learned a very important lesson from this, which was—read your ticket.

  When were you there and why?

  I was flying from Santiago to Sydney and was a bit tired, having spent the previous two weeks looking for fur seals, and didn’t wake up to what the plane’s itinerary was until the pilot mentioned that we were just coming in for our one-hour stopover on Easter Island.

  There was a little fleet of minibuses at the airport, which whisk you away for a quick peek at the nearest statue while the plane refuels. It was incredibly frustrating because if I had been paying attention the day before, I could easily have changed my ticket and stayed over for a couple of days.

  What’s your favourite city? What fascinates you most about it?

  In my imagination, it’s Florence, but that’s only because of memories of traveling there as a student and spending days on end blissed out on sun, cheap wine, and art. Recent visits have overlaid those earlier memories with traffic jams and smog.

  Now I think I’d say that my favourite city is just a small town—Santa Fe, New Mexico. I love the high desert air, the margaritas and guacamole, the silver belt buckles and the sense that people sitting at the next table to you in the cafe are probably Nobel laureates.

  When was the last time you hitchhiked?

  About ten years ago, on the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean. Hitchhiking was the only method of getting around the island. There was no public transport, but a couple of people owned Land Rovers, so you just had to hope they’d be passing. I ended up in a forest at dusk wearing shorts, but having left my mosquito repellent behind. As a result I endured the most agonising night of my life.

  Where was your favourite place when you were on the road of Last Chance to See?

  Madagascar—though in fact that was a kind of prelude to Last Chance to See. I loved the forest and the lemurs and the warmth of the people.

  What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?

  The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps “baffling” would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can’t help but wonder why. I’m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.

  Have you ever been there?

  I haven’t been to the Yangtse since construction started. I never want to see the thing.

  And the most interesting natural structure?

  A giant, two-thousand-mile-long fish in orbit around Jupiter, according to a reliable report in the Weekly World News. The photograph was very convincing, and I’m only surprised that more-reputable journals like New Scientist, or even just The Sun, haven’t followed up with more details. We should be told.

  If you were to name a place that “looks like it’s just been dropped from outer space,” where would you think of?

  Fjordland in South Island, New Zealand. An impossible jumble of mountains, waterfalls, lakes, and ice—the most extraordinary place I think I’ve ever seen.

  If you could go anywhere in the universe right now, where would you go, how would you get there, and who and what would you take with you?

  Locally, I think Europa, one of the sixteen moons of Jupiter. It’s one of the most mysteriou
s bodies in the solar system, much beloved of science-fiction writers because it’s one of the few places that could possibly sustain life of some kind, and there are certain oddities in its structure which have led to wild speculations about its being artificial. Plus, on nights when the orbital alignments are right, you must get a great view of the fish.

  —Interview conducted by Claire Smith,

  Virgin Net Limited, SEPTEMBER 22, 1999

  Riding the Rays

  Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent thirty-five-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. In fact it’s not so much a country as such, more a sort of thin crust of semi-demented civilisation caked around the edge of a vast, raw wilderness, full of heat and dust and hopping things.

  Tell most Australians that you like their country and they will give a dry laugh and say, “Well, it’s the last place left now, isn’t it?” which is the sort of worrying thing that Australians say. You don’t quite know what they mean but it worries you in case they’re right.

  Just knowing that the place is lurking there on the other side of the world where we can’t see it is oddly unsettling, and I’m always looking for excuses to go even if only to keep an eye on it. I also happen to love it. Most of it I haven’t even seen yet, but there’s one place that I’ve long wanted to revisit, because I had some frustratingly unfinished business there.

  And just a few weeks ago I suddenly found the excuse I’d been looking for.

  I was in England at the time. I could tell I was in England because I was sitting in the rain under a wet blanket in a muddy field listening to some fucking orchestra in a kind of red tent playing hits from American movie soundtracks. Is there anywhere else in the world where people would do such a thing? Anywhere? Would they do it in Italy? Would they do it in Tierra del Fuego? Would they do it on Baffin Island? No. Even in Japan, where national pastimes include ripping out your own intestines with a knife, I think they would draw the line.