![]() ![]() The largest literary influence on the modern geek mind-only George Lucas can compete-had passed. Last weekend, as the mainstream press canonized greatest-generation crooner Perry Como, Web sites run by teens and Gen-Xers lit up with elegies, confessions and outraged litanies about the death of an idol. And maybe it should be: That one of our most original, daring and influential writers should die so young, and unknown to so many, is exactly the sort of cosmic injustice he’d send up in a chapter of wry, incisive satire. Just to be sure.Īdams, 49, who died suddenly May 11 of a heart attack in Santa Barbara, created a vast universe where his home was the butt of a giant, intergalactic joke. Four sequels later, in his last work of fiction, 1992’s “Mostly Harmless,” he annihilates all possible Earths, in all parallel universes and dimensions. After pegging the place as “an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet” orbiting “a small unregarded yellow sun,” Adams has an alien construction crew demolish it to make room for an interstellar highway. ![]() In the opening of his surreal parody of science fiction, the slim book for which he was best known and often pigeonholed, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” he destroys Earth. ![]() Douglas Adams held a grudge against his home planet. ![]()
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