Babel Clash

Speaking of world-building, I’d be in dereliction if I spent a week on this topic without mentioning Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series. It may fall more into the category of galaxy-building, but I’ll try to make it work.

A nice, thorough analysis of how Douglas Adams actually created the galaxy (with many, many worlds) of his story would go really well right about here. Unfortunately I have no idea how to do that. Apparently, hardly anyone else knows, either, or else we’d have seen some decent rip-offs of Mr. Adams’s style by now.

Here, then, is just a random rundown of some of the things I really like in that series:

-Rob McKenna, the truck driver who doesn’t know that he’s a Rain God. He’s miserable because every moment of his life, wherever he goes, it’s raining. He has no idea that it only happens because the clouds love him, and stay constantly with him, “…to cherish him and to water him.”

-The strange life-form that crawls out of the East River, tells Ford Prefect that it’s just been created, and asks for general advice about the universe. (This happens in a dream, but in this series that counts.)

-The “speechless T-shape” in Chapter 26 of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

-The massive battle fleet that travels across millions of light years to attack Earth, only to suffer a scaling problem and be eaten by a very small dog.

-Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, an immortal being that travels the universe on a mission to insult every living thing in existence… in alphabetical order.

Douglas Adams’s world-building happens in just about every paragraph and line of dialogue in the series, and manages to be hilarious at the same time. I can’t imagine pulling that off. There is at least one interesting glimpse into his writing process, by way of a posthumously-published book called The Salmon of Doubt. Douglas’s editor, Peter Guzzardi, assembled the book from material found on Douglas’s computers, including several chapters of what would have been his next novel. Reading the material offers a view of his work in mid-stride. It also leaves you only wondering how the story would have ended; it would be impossible to guess.

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  While it’s not a book, it really merits a mention given the week’s topic, and given that tens of millions of people have experienced it during this same week, myself included. It also serves as a great jumping-off point for discussing another means of world-building: forging parallels to familiar aspects...