The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Tertiary Phase

More than 25 years ago, Douglas Adams let loose on the world a new experience: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It started off as a radio serial, then became a book, a record album, an interactive computer game, a book series, another record album, another radio series, a television miniseries, and a movie project in eternal development hell.

Douglas Adams became very successful as a result of the huge and diverse fan following that ravenously snapped up every book, record, CD, and official towel, but in time he tried to move beyond the Infinite Improbability Drive and the number 42. His history is extensively detailed elsewhere.

In May 2001 Douglas Adams died at the age of 49, leaving many unfinished projects and millions of heartbroken fans and friends. One of the projects - the one which is most directly to blame for his death - is the semi-infinitely delayed movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which went into production shortly after his death and will finally be released next summer.

Another was the long talked-about "Tertiary Phase" radio series - a third radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, based on one (or more) of the later books in the Hitchhiker's series. This new radio series, like the movie, has actually come into being, and is now being broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As I write this, I am listening to the first episode at this site.

It is hard to explain to the young or the uninitiated how amazing this is. When I first listened to the original series on NPR back in the early 1980's I would wait eagerly for each week's broadcast, armed with a fancy AM-FM radio/cassette recorder. In the minutes before the start of the program I would tune in the station, cue up a 60-minute cassette tape (30 minutes on each side) to just before the end of the header, insert it in the deck, press the "Pause" button, and then the "Play" and "Record" button at the same time (while holding in the "Pause" button), and then, seconds before the start of the program, hit the "Pause" button, and then sit back and enjoy the "stereophonic" sound - through my radio's single speaker. It would be nearly 15 years before I would be able to purchase the entire radio series on cassette, and nearly 20 before I could get it on Compact Disc.

Now I sit at a Personal Computer (already obsolete at the ripe old age of 5, but still with more computing power than a lot of much larger computers 25 years ago, and armed with an array of peripheral devices not even on the drawing boards back then) working on an article for my own personal online magazine, using tools like Google and Wikipedia (both of which are, in structure, purpose, and function very similar to the titular Hitchhiker's Guide) to do instant research while at the same time listening to streaming audio coming to me from a point some 3000 miles away. Virtually every aspect of this experience would have fallen into the category of wishful futuristic thinking at the time of the original Hitchhiker's broadcast - or would have been written off as a science fiction fantasy.

And for the initiated - how is the program? Well, it does maintain the old Hitchhiker's Guide tradition that each new version of the story, wherever it overlaps with other elements of the story, must directly contradict some or all of the other versions. This series does that splendidly, even contradicting a good deal of the original radio series. The sound itself is great, gleefully blending the old and the new. Most of the surviving actors' voices have held up over the intervening years, although sadly Mark Wing-Davey's (Zaphod Beeblebrox) has not, at least not in the first installment. Each installment is available for a limited time only. You may only have until sometime on Thursday, September 30 to hear the first episode, although the entire Tertiary Phase series will be available on CD later this year.

It's fun living in the future. I only wish Douglas were here to enjoy it with us.