The Salmon of Doubt

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The Salmon of Doubt  
The front cover of the UK first hardcover edition of The Salmon of Doubt.
Front cover from the first UK hardcover edition
Author Douglas Adams
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Series Dirk Gently
Genre(s) Humour
Science fiction novel
Publisher UK: William Heinemann Ltd., US: Pocket Books
Publication date 2002
Media type print (paperback and hardcover), audiobook (cassette and compact disc)
Pages 326 pp (paperback edition)
ISBN 0-330-32312-1
Preceded by The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time is a posthumous collection of previously unpublished material by Douglas Adams. It consists largely of essays about technology and life experiences, but its major selling point is the inclusion of the incomplete novel on which Adams was working at the time of his death, The Salmon of Doubt (from which the collection gets its title, a reference to the Celtic myth of the Salmon of Wisdom). English editions of the book were published in the USA and UK in May 2002, exactly one year after the author's death.

Contents

[edit] The Book

The original intention of The Salmon of Doubt was a Dirk Gently novel. Adams commented that some of the ideas he developed in Salmon of Doubt were not really working within a Dirk Gently framework. Those ideas would have been salvaged, undergoing necessary changes on the way, and put into a sixth Hitchhiker's book; as he thought that the last book in the series, Mostly Harmless, was a very bleak book and wanted to finish on a slightly more upbeat note.[1]

The plot, set a few weeks after the events in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, involves Dirk Gently refusing to help find the missing half of a cat, receiving large amounts of money from an unknown client, and then flying to the United States. Dirk pays a visit to Kate Schechter (who had first appeared in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul) and tells her that prior to the potential client, he had been so bored that he had started a habit of dialling his own phone number and discovered he'd answered his own calls. A faxed summary reprinted before the text mentions travelling "through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos."

The version in the published book is the strongest content from several unfinished drafts that were written.[2]

[edit] Versions

There are slight differences in varying editions of the book. The UK edition includes a foreword by Stephen Fry, and the US edition, instead, has an introduction by Christopher Cerf. The audiobook edition consists of 7 CDs, mostly read by Simon Jones, but also includes both of the introductions, read by their respective authors, as well as the tributes written and read by Richard Dawkins. US paperback editions have yet another introduction, written by Terry Jones, and omit some material due to issues with copyright.

[edit] Editions

[edit] Adaptation

BBC Radio 4 have commissioned a third Dirk Gently six-part radio series for broadcast in summer 2010, based on the uncompleted chapters of The Salmon of Doubt, and written by Spice World writer Kim Fuller.[3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Matt Newsome's 1998 interview with Douglas Adams
  2. ^ Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, p. 10, ISBN 0-330-32312-1
  3. ^ Final Dirk Gently novel to be adapted for Radio 4
Preceded by:
 Series:
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul Dirk Gently series

[edit] See also

Hitchhiker's portal

[edit] External links

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