Douglas Adams will forever be known for his work of genius, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. And rightly so. But Adams
was much more than the creator of some bizarre comic science fiction. The Salmon of Doubt is his last work, and as such gives a marvellous insight into the way his mind worked, and the broad base of his talent.
The book opens with an introduction and then two prologues, one being an article on the writer before he died, the other a tribute by Stephen Fry. The introduction explains how the book came about, a motley collection of articles, interviews and writing by Adams that was contained on his beloved Apple Mac before he died, together with the reconstructed elements of the Dirk Gently novel he had been working on - until he got a bit stuck with it and the ideas in it about ten years before his untimely demise.
It seems from this book that Adams could be entertaining in any form of the written word. I have no idea about the inner workings of Apple Mac computers, but I read his technical articles with interest; I knew nothing of his atheism, but was entertained hugely by his interview with an American atheist group that tried to get him to tell them his atheism had given him problems in his professional career; and I had not realised how fervently he cared about the plight of endangered species around the world as he recounted a story wandering to Kilimanjaro with a group of like-minded people and one rhino costume. And there is one mainstay of all of these works, Adams humour, or rather his highly developed wit, shines throughout and makes everything intensely readable.
If you're an Adams fan, or have yet to discover the ultimate hitchhiker, this is most definitely a book you have to buy.