BOOK REVIEW: 42 – The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies

Shane | 6 August 2026 | Reply

BOOK REVIEW: 42 – The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams edited by Kevin Jon Davies
Unbound, 2023
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
84%

Kevin Jon Davies has trawled through Douglas Adams’ archives – “over 60 boxes full of notebooks, research, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do lists, hard drives and even poems” – for this strangely delightful and weighty tome, presenting a smattering of ideas and notes and sparks for future projects, many of which remained largely unexplored at the time of Adams’ untimely passing in 2001.

Page by page we see evidence of the Hitchhiker’s Guide author’s genius, from as early as his student days right through to trying to create complex computer-based games and systems as he approached his fiftieth birthday – a milestone he would sadly never reach.

It’s when we pan out and look at the interconnectedness of all these ideas that we get more of a holistic view of the workings of his mind: he may have had a difficult, fractious relationship with deadlines, but the ideas never stopped coming. As a writer and author myself it is illuminating to gain a small glimpse into his process – constantly throwing new ideas at the wall, so to speak, and refining them until the best ones stuck.

As is often the way with creatives, some of his best ideas came in collaboration with others, and he was certainly not shy to bounce ideas off trusted friends and colleagues.

It’s fair to say that casual fans of Adams may get little from this book – it’s too bitty, in some respects, they may think – but there are many obsessive fans of Hitchhiker’s, Dirk Gently, his work on Doctor Who, The Meaning of Liff with John Lloyd, his conservation work with Mark Carwardine, his Starship Titanic game (which was novelized by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame), all of whom will lap up every scrawled note in this book and dream: what if Adams had had the time to complete all of these projects.

Ahhh… if only…