I picked up The Salmon of Doubt to be completist. However, I was under the impression that it contained an unfinished Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy story. It doesn't. Not really.

What it does contain is a short biography of the late Douglas Adams, a number of essays on a variety of topics, interviews, a couple of short stories, and the unfinished pieces of "Salmon of Doubt". This last being, at least in this form, a Dirk Gently story.

Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is a series of radio plays, a five book trilogy, a BBC television series, a video game, and a major motion picture. He also wrote two books about a strange detective, Dirk Gently. But you probably knew all that. What you may or may not know is that he was also an activist for endangered species and co-wrote Last Chance to See with Mark Carwardine. They traveled around the world seeing a whole lot of endangered species, and then wrote a book about it. He died in 2001 when he was still quite young.

What's in the Book

Friends of Douglas Adams took the contents of his hard drive and culled pieces of writing from it. Additionally there are official interviews and published articles and stories.

Introductions - Humorous and by Terry Jones.

Biography - By Nicholas Wroe and originally published in The Guardian in 2000.

Interviews - A few interviews with Adams by various people and groups. There's even what I believe is a blog meme.

Essays and Speeches - In particular there's one about atheism and religion.

Articles - Articles written for various publications. These are mostly about world experiences with animals, such as climbing a mountain in a rhino costume or riding (or not-riding) a manta ray.

Stories - There's a story about Ghengis Khan. Amusing, of course. And of note to Hitchhiker's fans, there's one starring Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Salmon of Doubt - Originally Adams started out writing this as a Dirk Gently book, but he had plans to change it into a Hitchhiker's book. The form it is here is most definitely Dirk Gently.

Sadness - The final pieces in the book are a lament written by a friend and a program of his memorial service.

The majority of this book is short pieces, with the actual "Salmon of Doubt" only taking up about 80 pages or so. My list above may give a false sense of organization to the whole thing. The type of writing is all mixed together in some logical order known only to the guy putting this book together.

Almost everything in it written by Adams is humorous, even when he's talking about serious subjects. The real sadness is in the parts written by others.

My Thoughts

I enjoyed getting a glimpse of Adams and the large sampling of his work. I'd really only read the Hitchhiker's books. Though I did read at least one of the Dirk Gently books, I didn't enjoy it as much. Almost all of the pieces were interesting, and amusing. However, there was something just a bit uncomfortable about reading things Adams probably never expected to see published. In knowing that what's in this book of "Salmon of Doubt" is really a working draft. Then the entire book ends on a sad note, which I don't think is really fair.

Bottom Line

If you enjoy any of Adams's work, then you'll find something you like in here. If you're looking for Hitchhiker's stuff, there's the one story about Zaphod and some mention here and there of various aspects of Hitchhiker's in its many forms. However, I do think the subtitle of this book "Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time" and the fish in space on the cover are misleading.

Details

I read a paperback version, ISBN 0345455290, with a retail price of 7.99$. Were there British or American spellings of things? I really don't know. I've stopped noticing that sort of thing. Probably the latter, since what I have is from an American publisher.

Have your towel with you when you read this.

My Other Douglas Adams-Related Review

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The movie

Recommended: Yes