He's also been dead for quite a few years, so his level of compassion would obviously have dropped. (edit: the name is Hyperland, and it is still on youtube) Watch his bbc documentary from the 1980s, I forget the name, and see that he used to be a lot more passionate about social progress in technology. Great, he used his literary inspiration to make one more windoze game to throw on the burning pile of bargain bin games, while the platform that he holds dear to him gets a kick in the balls, because they don't get a chance to try it on their home computers. Why do the right thing, when the financially rational thing to do is the wrong thing? Well, because you are a caring human being, not a calculating machine. There are no current plans for a CD or downloads.Originally posted by tuxdelux:This rationale is what makes everything wrong with the world. Starship Titanic will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, at 3pm (UK) Sunday and available for a month afterwards on the BBC Sounds app. …That’s as maybe Douglas, but your creations live on, in many forms. Wearing some less than convincing old-age make-up, he delivered a now rather poignant final message: "My life's work is done and I've gone fishing. There are clearly recognisable traits in the story of the Grebulons who observed the Earth before approaching Tricia Macmillan in the fifth Hitchhiker book “Mostly Harmless”…Īlthough Douglas clearly drew the line at some of his sillier ideas…īy the mid-90s Douglas was finally working with the title, “Starship Titanic”.Īnd, finally, in videos for the original CD-Rom game Douglas Adams himself played the character Leovinus, creator of the ship. Here, from the files, is the germ of a film idea called “The Too Slow Starship” also noted elsewhere as a “The Too Slow Warship”. Clearly the Golgafrinchams and their ‘B’ Ark in Hitchhiker were a prototype, but some pages from around 1990 suggest the notion continued percolating through Douglas’ remarkable mind for years. John’s Library, Cambridge, I came across some early jottings by the author concerning ‘generation starships’. Series composer Philip Pope (as the journalist) with Nicholas Boulton (as the Starship’s creator Leovinus). These photos show Dirk with some of the cast at work recently, in Studio 2 at that facility, on the 2021 “Starship Titanic” radio drama.ĭirk Maggs directing and posing with Rebecca Yeo (as Lucy). The Soundhouse in West London became the recording studio of choice for all of Dirk Magg’s radio adaptations of the later Hitchhiker and Dirk Gently novels. It also brought Douglas and I back together as he recorded the voices at The Soundhouse studios, where I was regularly making ‘audio movies’ for BBC Radio, and it re-stoked the idea of bringing Hitchhikers back to its original home.” Teaching computer language is the best way to learn more about it ourselves."ĭirk Maggs comments, “Douglas’s venture into video games with Robbie Stamp and the Digital Village team was typically genre-busting, ambitious and funny. They have the power to talk to us in any way that our intelligence can instruct them. "It isn't a question of people becoming more computer literate, it's a question of computers becoming more human literate. A handwritten note in Douglas’ personal archive confirms his ideas about getting computers to really talk to us… It's a pity Douglas didn’t live to see how computers are now used every day for translations and speech recognition. I remember the beauty of the artwork and given where we are now with AI and language parsing, just how crazily beautiful and ambitious our ‘Spookitalk’ engine was!”ĭouglas Adams working at The Digital Village, picture courtesy of Robbie Stamp All these years later, I still just marvel at what an extraordinary team of people worked with Douglas to make it happen. In the late 1990s Douglas’ business partner and CEO of The Digital Village was Robbie Stamp, who says, “Creating Starship Titanic was one of the most exciting (and scary!) projects I have ever worked on. Michael Palin, photo courtesy of Dave Morley. The title has now evolved once more, into a new BBC Radio 4 full-cast drama directed by Dirk Maggs and starring another Python, Michael Palin. The job of adapting that game into the 1997 novel (and audiobook) fell to Douglas’ friend and former Python, Terry Jones. The ship came into its own some 16 years later as the title of an elaborate 3-disc CD Rom game from his short-lived multi-media company, The Digital Village. The legend of the Starship Titanic barely merited a passing paragraph in Douglas Adams’ 1982 novel “Life, The Universe and Everything”, the third in the Hitchhiker saga.
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